Kill the Auto-Attendant! - Thought Leadership Leverage

Peter Winick here today, and my guest is Andy Paul, who is the founder and author of Zero Time Selling, which is a 2011 top 3 sales and marketing book. Andy, a lot of what you talk about— you come out of the high-tech world— is how do you use systems and processes to get to this ideal state of being in zero time selling?

Mm-hmm.

Yet you also talk about the importance of the human touch, and I thought I read a book that might have been written in 1981 where it said, have a human answer the phone. Like, wow, I can't even get my kids to answer the cell phone when I call them.

Well, that's a whole different problem. Yeah, I don't think you can solve that one.

If you can, let me know. But human beings answering telephones? It's 2012. What's— tell me about that.

Well, I mean, every time that you interact with a customer, you're sending a message to them, right? And so that message should be, geez, we're really interested in your business, as opposed to, we're not really interested in your business. You calling us is kind of a bother and we'll get back to you when we can.

Right?

Press 5, press 7, press 9. Press 5, press 7, hunt and peck. And I like to talk to clients about this. Actually, I did this in a talk I gave. I did a little raise your hand question. I said, who likes talking to auto attendants? Right? When you call into— who thinks that's good customer service when you call into a company and you get that? And no one raises their hand. Maybe one guy thought it was great, but hands stayed down. And I said, okay, well, who uses it in their business as their primary way of answering their phones?

Right, everybody's hands go up.

Everybody's hands go up. So it's really devastating for sales because a lot of small and mid-sized companies have a sales voicemail box, right? Sorry, no one from sales can answer your phone calls. I don't know what the heck they're doing they can't answer the phone, but no one in sales can answer your phone calls. Leave a message. Well, those messages go into a voicemail box and they never get answered, right? It's, it's, they go away. And I had a client where I joined them and they checked once a week.

Once a week?

Once a week. And it was always overflowing after the first several days. So I said, that's ridiculous.

We're too busy to answer the leads. We've got other things to do.

We're too busy answering the leads, right? And so, you know, we got that turned around. We got that. What you need to do really simply is Is you know give the message to the customer that you're interested, especially for sales. They should always have a live person they can talk to because it gets back to the point we talked about before once in our earlier sessions is you know customers come in pre-educated. They're trying to make decisions in sort of the least period of time possible. They have just a few questions left to answer before they can make their decision, and if they call you and you aren't there to answer it, then chances are they may go somewhere else to get an answer for their questions, right? And so it's really simple. Just have a process set up so that a schedule with your salespeople is that someone's always available to answer the phones. And if they're not available, then there's somebody that's there as a backup. I mean, one client, we went through this trouble making sure that the phone was always covered during lunch hours, right? Because they were on the West Coast and, you know, people calling in from the East Coast and overseas at the end of the day in Europe and so on. They picked up all these calls. And so customers just love that because they think, Gosh, they're here to serve me. And the impression you create on the presale of service—

Is awesome.

Is awesome. But the customer says, well, geez, if they're this good selling, then they're going to be there for me afterwards. You know, if they can answer— this responsive, answer my questions before the sale, that's the way they're going to be after. So this is the first impression, the first perception the customer has of what it's like to work with you as a company.

Love it. So in today's world, in Web 2.0 and all the technology, going back to some basics and having a human being on the phone can really make a difference.

Right. I'll give you 2 other points. We can extend this just a little bit. One is, you know, there are companies now that are coming up, like a company called Fast Customer and some others, where there's services you can subscribe to. Big companies employ their service so that I have Fast Customer on my iPhone. If I wanted to talk to Microsoft, you know, I say I just want to talk to Microsoft, it calls me back when an operator is available to talk to me.

Right.

So I don't have to sit on hold. So even big companies are recognizing the importance So that's the importance of having this facility available to be able to interact with live people so people aren't talking to machines. And the second one is, I give an example in the book of a company that— I had a bug problem in my house. I came home from vacation, a stream of ants running across my floor. I wanted to get it taken care of. And so I go online, I search for exterminators. The first one to show in the returns was a big name brand. I call them and I get a voicemail. Or the auto attendant. Your call is really important to us, and so important to us that we have a company policy that we're going to call you back within 24 hours. I'm thinking, first of all, they need to have a policy to get somebody to call me back. Secondly, it's going to take 24 hours. These are exterminators, right? People don't call to have a casual chat. They call because they got a problem, right? They need it fixed. I went to the next name on the list. They lost my business. They clearly— they're sending this message to customers, we just don't care. And so you don't— you get rid of that with a person. And the cost of having a person, it's easy to calculate how many orders you've lost because you didn't have the person there. Or inversely, how many orders do you need to win because you have a person on the phone? And believe me, not very many, right?

Great.

Not a lot at all. Great.

Thanks so much. Andy Paul, Zero Time Selling, author and founder. Thank you so much.