Your best people are on a roof, under a sink or inside a crawlspace. That is exactly when a homeowner with a real problem and a credit card decides to start calling companies. We take that call.
The research on this has been consistent for years, and it is worth reading before you decide the phone is handled.
Fewer than four in ten calls to small businesses were answered by a live person.
Waiting 30 minutes instead of 5 to call a web lead back cuts your odds of reaching them by roughly 100 times.
Firms that respond within an hour are close to seven times more likely to qualify the lead.
Most people sent to voicemail hang up without leaving one. You never learn they called.
No heat in February, water coming through a ceiling. This is the highest-margin work you do and the caller will ring three companies in ten minutes. Whoever picks up gets it, and it is rarely a question of who is better.
We triage against your rules, and if it is genuinely urgent we reach whoever is on call the way you told us to. If it can wait until morning, it is booked for morning and nobody's evening is ruined.
Your tech is elbow-deep in somebody's furnace. The phone rings. Either they stop and do a bad job of both, or they let it go and you never find out who called.
Overflow answering solves this outright, and it is usually the version we suggest people start with.
You went out, you measured, you sent the number, and then everybody got busy. A quiet quote is not a no, but it turns into one after about a week.
We work the open-quote list on a schedule you set, and a straightforward call asking whether they had questions closes more of these than anybody expects.
Annual service, filter changes, tune-ups before the season turns. The cheapest revenue in the business, sitting in a customer list nobody has time to call through.
This is straightforward outbound work and it fills the quiet weeks that would otherwise have your crews standing around.
Describing a fault you cannot see, understanding a quote with labour and materials broken out, agreeing to let a stranger into your house on Thursday — these are hard conversations in a second language.
If a meaningful share of your service area speaks Spanish at home, an English-only line is a decision to compete for part of your market and concede the rest. Check the census data for the towns you actually cover rather than your state as a whole; the variation between neighbouring towns is often large. Then check whether any of your competitors advertise bilingual service. In most markets, none of them do.
The large outsourcers are built to sell seats by the thousand. That model works for enterprises and it is miserable for everybody else. We built Summit for the companies those firms will not take a meeting with.
Your callers reach people in the United States, in your time zone, who understand the reference when a customer mentions the storm last week. Nothing about your customer data leaves the country.
Bilingual on the same line, not a menu tree that dead-ends. If a share of your market speaks Spanish at home, that is revenue most of your competitors are handing back.
No account manager three layers down who has never heard a recording. When something needs fixing you talk to the person who can change it, and it changes that week.
Fifteen minutes. Bring your call volume and your average job value and we will work through the arithmetic with you. If the numbers do not justify hiring us, we will tell you that on the call.
Summit Call Solutions