This week a client of mine ‘phoned. They’re a big client and my contact there could easily win the award for the busiest person in the world. She runs a very large multi site operation and sometimes has to react to opportunities quickly. This was one of those times and she needed my help.
She needed a service that I don’t offer but I have associates who do. More to the point, she needed it sorted out very quickly, and I have a reputation with this company for doing just that. I have more than one associate who offers the service so put in a call to both.
The first person I called didn’t answer and I was put through to their answerphone. The answerphone, politely, invited me to leave a message so I did.
The second person I called also didn’t answer, but the call was diverted to a call answering service. They explained that my associate wasn’t available, but would be approximately an hour later.
This was much more helpful. I was able to call my client back and tell them that I couldn’t get hold of either of my best choices for the job, but knew that one of them would be available in about an hour and would sort it then.
But the second person had received a text message from their answering service asking them to ‘phone me as I had an opportunity for them. They knew that if I had an opportunity it would be worthwhile so they made the time to call immediately from their mobile. Twenty minutes later and we had a deal sorted. My associate had a piece of work referred to them, my client had a problem removed from her desk and my reputation with the client was further reinforced.
Four hours later the person with the answerphone returned to their office and called me, sadly by which time it was too late and the deal had been done. This has no reflection on the quality of their service at all, in fact they were the first person I called.
Because, with the second associate their telephone answering service had been able to manage my expectations and let me know when they were likely to be free, I was able to keep the client informed with confidence. If I just get an answerphone I may have to tell the client that I have just left a message, not confident in when it will be returned.
The answering service gave me confidence not only by letting me know when my associate might be available but, because it was a call answering service, I knew the message would have been passed immediately, by text message or E-mail – allowing them to choose if it was urgent enough to return the call straight away.
For £1 a call, I reckon it would have been worth it. The job was worth about 500 times that amount.
Have you read “The 4 Hour Work Week”? Do you believe in the concept of a completely outsourced business that you just manage?
Do you love your website business but hate the actual nuts and bolts, processing orders, packing and posting, handling returns?
We don’t pretend that any of our clients run their business from a yacht in the Mediterranean yet, but we do offer a complete package to many of our clients – including handling calls, processing incoming orders, fulfilling (actually packing and posting orders) and handling returns.
You get to have the ideas, handle the marketing, driving traffic to the website, all without distractions. We handle the infrastructure for you.
And you can start planning how you’ll run the business from that yacht……
Below I will try and explain why we run two different pricing models for our clients.
PAYG is hardly a new concept with Virgin making the concept really famous when they entered the mobile phone market. For the telephone answering service industry it is though something relatively new, and is threatening to the traditional method of pricing.
During the 70s,80s and to a lesser extent the 90s, there was only a handful of established services in the country. We would charge a monthly fee regardless of requirement and the majority of time the prospect would accept. In those days the management associated with an account was considerably more than it is today from the setting process, the ongoing changes, and the manual billing process.
The set-up and monthly management fee were justified for the amount of time spent on an account. Fast forward to 2008 and the release of our inhouse built software which took away all of the above processes. A client could go online, set up their greeting, call instructions, method of message delivery, make payment, and finally select their number.
Gone was the necessity to even consider charging a set-up fee! Factor in the majority of changes can then be made by the client online and there goes the need tohave a monthly management fee. Consider we limit the PAYG service to a basic message and the amount of queries will now come down to quality of service provided – something at JAM we are very passionate about.
The end result is yes we receive the odd customer service query but certainly not enough to be warranting a monthly management charge! And as anyone who has ever sent a message to their account manager will confirm we respond very fast!
So when is a monthly management fee charge is justified? If a client requires something more than a basic message, such as additional questions or call patching then our experience tells us that the nature of the account will result in more customer service queries and as such need to spend a bit more time with the client.
Also built into our management charge are more features not available to the PAYG customers.
The ability to timetable your status where call instructions change depending on time of day is cutting edge. An inbuilt messageboard for our clients to discuss their activities can add so much to a company – we know this because before our new services were implemented, we tested the software internally resulting in a huge improvement in the flow of communication within JAM.
For those who have seen our JAM prices page you will see that for our main JAM service the monthly management fee is higher. Again this is because of the type of clients we attract expect and require a more bespoke service and therefore greater input from us.
It’s a simple summary of your call data and looks a bit like this:
It hopefully doesn’t need any explanation. To see your message analytics, click on Messages on the left hand menu and you’ll see the option in there.
It should be of some use, and I’d love to get any feedback though please don’t be offended if I don’t implement every feature! If you want any help etc you can find me on twitter here: http://twitter.com/briandrought
I was recently speaking with Matthew Purser who is renowned in networking circles as a bit of web stuff guru. I have to admit I never get bored hearing his thoughts on the Answer.co.uk service – checkout the video testimonial below Matthew kindly gave us a while back.
Anyway back to our conversation and it was mentioned he gets a bank of receptionists to take calls for him, he never misses a call, callers think his company is extremely professional, and all for a £1/message – bargain! Any business would be crazy not to utilise the service!
It was though questioned how we can possibly achieve such good value?
It is actually a question I am regularly asked on Sales calls where I will often hear the statement – this sounds too good to be true. At this point I will explain the reason we don’t have a set-up fee is because the client does all the setting up themselves.
Normally it will take about 20-30 minutes to set a message taking account up, decide how you want your calls answered, what excuse you want the operators to provide, choose your message delivery, chuck in a few pounds, select your number, and you are live!
There is no need to charge a monthly management fee because honestly we don’t have that many customer service enquiries. This is down to our staff maintaining a very high level of service, which is just as important as the fancy award winning software. There is also a whole bunch of video tutorials to help our clients make any necessary changes to their account.
And if there is a query, dam we like to reply quick! Finally as our Answer.co.uk service is specifically for clients who actually only want a name/company/number/message captured then we know from our experience these types of calls won’t last too long and can therefore price accordingly.
If you like what Matthew says below then feel free to make use of his referral link here.
A marketing strategy for our company over the past few months has been our referral links automatically provided for anyone who signs up to answer or pureJAM.
The idea is to give those clients the opportunity to earn 5% of all payments made whoever they have referred. It’s proved very effective so far for both us and our clients. The short video below shows how it works in more details.
Today we have opened up the referral links for all our staff. With the majority already on facebook and other social networking sites it seems a no brainer to give everyone the opportunity to share their links online.
If anyone does show an interest and has a question, who better than the very people who take the calls to provide the answers. It should prove very interesting over the coming weeks and months to see whether this proves successful.
This is what a referral link looks like – a slight variation from the in the partnership with client name shown in the video.
So a few months ago I was sitting in Nandos, Borehamwood discussing www.answer.co.uk, with Brian – and mulling over a few ideas, including taking the PAYG concept which has proved popular since launching two years ago abroad – in particular America.
The question was would there be a chance to launch the service totally on our own using remote operators, or perhaps looking to partner up with someone already established. Top of the list was already a good friend of JAM – Gary Pudles who is the president of Answernet – home to 50+ call centres.
I’ve known Gary since 2005 when I had the great pleasure to spend an entire evening at a bar in Kananaskis, Canada. The fact there is only one bar in Kananaskis is another story and not for this blog post.
Anyway, for those who follow me on Twitter and have read this blog will know I recently attended the ATSI conference in San Diego, which had a major focus on social media – something as a company JAM has really thrown itself into.
There was also the small matter of finding out during the trip JAM had won a best ebusiness award, which I was able to announce in front of the entire conference during the social media session – of course purely to demonstrate the power of twitter and how fast a message can spread.
I spent much of the week talking with Gary and his team about Answer.co.uk and how we have approached the telephone answering service industry over the last couple of years. Something must have appealed as the trip was finished with a 5 hour meeting at Answernet headquarters near Philadelphia.
During that period it was decided we would work together and relaunch the www.answeramerica.com website to provide a PAYG (prepaid to the Americans) telephone answering service. It took a little longer than expected as some really clever alterations had to be made with the software to cope with the million and one time zones.
That now completed, and several Skype conference meetings later and we are ready to hit America with this tremendously exciting venture. The fact the longest established UK telephone answering service is teaming up with the largest telephone answering outfit in the world makes this all the more thrilling.
One of the biggest challenges facing any telephone answering service will be to know exactly how the client wants their calls handled and what their current movements are.
In today’s fast paced world it can be difficult to remember to call your answering service, tell them how they want calls answered and if necessary what you are up to if callers ask.
It can be even trickier for the answering service to then pass on this information real time to the entire team.
So this is where the use of our award winning software truly comes into its own. Any client who uses our Answer or pureJAM service has the ability to communication real-time with us.
This can be done via the online panel, a simple text message or even through the power of twitter. In a matter of seconds a client can state how they want their calls handled and what they are doing.
By looking at this twitter stream you will gain a great feel for how this feature is being utilised.
If you aren’t comfortable sharing this information in the public domain, you always have the SMS and online methods to fall back on.
Please check out the video below which demonstrates the above in action.
So I just stumbled upon (again) a really neat feature in our system – okay it was designed in 2008 – and just like all the main television series, latest phones , it can take me a few years to catch up with the rest of the world.
Its really simple but anyone who has entered their twitter username into their contact details for either the answer.co.uk or pureJAM.co.uk telephone answering service can make use of this feature.
The most popular use of #messagebot is to update your call instructions, and you can watch this video to gain a better understanding of this, and how to update your twitter username.
What I have just rediscovered thanks to @neil_pie_PHP (worth following) is you can send a jot which will send yourself a message via our system.
So if you are out and about and want to remind yourself of something just simply write #messagebot jot and whatever you want to tell youself.
JAM have teamed up with SupercarExperiences.com to run a fantastic competition between now and the end of August with a top prize of free rental of an Aston Martin V8 Vantage for three days.
Anyone can enter but to do so you will need your unique referral links. If you are not a client of answer or pureJAM then please sign-up here and within one minute you will now have your unique referral links available.
Every time someone signs-up to one of the above services using your referral link and deposits* you will be entered into the competition. The more sign-ups you gain the better chance you have of winning.
Even if fast flash cars aren’t your thing, then it is still worth taking part as in addition to 5% of all deposits made by your referrals for life, we will be paying a £10 bounty payment into your referral balance for each sign-up that deposits* for the duration of the competition.
To declare your participation in the competition and be eligible for the £10 bounty payment,please login to yourAdmin userand send a U2U to the account manager with Aston Martin Competition in the subject line. You’ll only then be eligible for entry and £10 bounty payments.
You will see your referral balance in value each time a deposit is made. Those who use twitter can enter their name into their contact details to be notified of a sign-up. We will notify everyone when a winner has been selected on our facebook fan page.
Please do check out another blog post for some ideas about promoting your referral links. If you do tweet about the competition or our service please do include the hashtag #AstonMartinComp
Aston Martin V8 Vantage Competition Terms and Conditions
3 day Fri to Mon Weekend Hire – available from September 1st for 6 month period, 300 inclusive miles, then £2 per mile, Full Comprehensive Insurance which requires a £4000 excess / security deposit, Pick up only – St Albans. The Experience cannot be transferred. Competition is not open to any JAM or SupercarExperience Staff.
Driver age 28-70, Max 6 points, No Bans, No Claims, Driving +5 years
Subject to acceptance on Insurance Proposal Form, Min ID: Driving Licence, Passport and 2 x proof of address
To declare your participation in the competition and be eligible for the £10 bounty payment, please login to your Admin user and send a U2U to the account manager with Aston Martin Competition as message. Only entries and £10 bounty payments will be eligible after this is done.
*deposits must be via google checkout and not subsequently cancelled. New accounts must also become active and not stay dormant for the duration of the competition.
