Missed Calls = Missed Opportunities
It’s the hottest day of the year. Your AC goes out and you can’t get it back on. You call the best HVAC business in your area. It rings and rings and rings and rings then… voicemail.
What would you do?
Most people move on to the next business. They call your competition.
Customer expectations have increased massively in recent years. We’re all used to a world where we can get next-day delivery, message businesses 24 hours a day, and have everything at our fingertips. So how do you make sure your HVAC business always answers and you don’t give your competition jobs for free?
Only got a minute? Here are three actionable takeaways:
- Think from your customer’s point of view – when are they likely to call?
- What is your customer journey – how do you get from inquiry to sale?
- Put systems in place to manage seasonal call volume.
When do HVAC businesses miss calls?
There are some obvious and surprising answers to this. We looked at when our customers send the most calls to our receptionists. These are the calls they can’t answer, which gives you a great idea of when calls can slip through the net. In an emergency, people will call immediately, but when they’re just inquiring it’s less time-sensitive on their end, but doesn’t mean they want to wait for an answer.
Evenings and weekends
This is the most obvious one, and also the biggest. When your office is closed, people still call. Lots of HVAC businesses have someone on call for emergencies but are missing the leads for services or new installs. Evenings and weekends are when people have the most free time. It’s when they will research new AC units they want to put in or how to upgrade their aging equipment. Likely they’re looking at your website and reviews while watching TV once the kids are in bed, so make the answers easy to find and answer when they call. These are big projects and leads you need to capture quickly.
Lunchtime
Lunchtime is the one that lots of people miss. Your customers have a break in their day and time to quickly get an estimate for that new install or to schedule a service. The downside is that your team also wants a lunch break at lunchtime. These are key leads that you can get working on straight away.
End of the working day
The next time people have time to call or inquire is at the end of their working day or when they get home. Between 5 and 7 pm is the next big set of missed calls. They walk into their home to find an emergency or quickly call to catch someone before you close. But even if you as a business owner are still working, your office team has gone home and that call goes to voicemail.
How to stop missing calls
Now that you know when you’re missing calls, how do you stop missing them and start capturing those leads?
Step one is to make a plan. Who is answering calls after hours? Who is answering calls at lunchtime? Who is answering calls at the end of the work day?
It might not be their whole job, but it’s important that someone is always there to answer within a few rings or call out to new website inquiries within the first five minutes if you want to win the job. You might not be popular for changing your office team or CSR’s schedules, but your business needs to answer. After hours is much harder – and where it’s easiest to say you’ll get to the voicemails later. But when 80% of people won’t leave a voicemail (and will go and call your competition), you’re not going to win more jobs if you don’t answer.
More: 24/7 HVAC Answering Services (after-hours, weekends and holidays included free)
Manage your customer journey
Answering every call is the first step of the journey. You need to know how to get them from inquiry to sale with as little friction as possible. This is where understanding your customer journey comes in. By mapping out the common inquiry types you get and what steps your business needs to make the sale, you can make it as easy as possible for the caller to convert.
Inquiry and call types
What are the most common types of calls you get? For a simple example let’s go with three types: emergency repair, service, and new install.
Each of these is a very different type of conversation and needs a different next step.
- Emergency repair: You need the key details, the location of the job, and to dispatch a technician as soon as possible.
- Service call: You need details of what equipment needs serviced, the location, when they’re looking to complete the service, and then schedule the job.
- New install: You need to know what they’re looking for, how far into their search they are, and a range of questions they likely haven’t yet thought about, and then get an estimate scheduled and the information over to your sales rep (if you haven’t already transferred the call to them).
For each major call type you get, write out the information you need and the journey to get from the first call to final sale. If you’re not sure, call the number on your website and find out!
Bonus tip: If it’s a hot lead, set up big-ticket inquiry call types so you can transfer the call to your salesperson immediately.
Set up call scripts
Even if you have an established and experienced team, building out call scripts and information checklists is necessary to create a great customer experience and also get the core details you need. The first call is the only time you can guarantee you’ve got the person, and the more times you have to call back for details the more likely it is they’ll not become a customer.
Mapping out the user journey for each major type of lead you get, and what information you need to get from them up front will make everything else much simpler to win the job.
Your team might not need to follow the call script word for word if they’re experienced, but a checklist so they don’t accidentally miss a question is a good idea. If surgeons, pilots, and the military use checklists to make sure they’ve done everything they need to, your team can too.
Schedule the next step
How many great leads have you had that never replied to getting their estimate scheduled? The best time to get the next step confirmed is to do it right there on that first call. With the bonus that it stops a lot of people from reaching out to another HVAC business.
For emergency repairs, it’s a straight dispatch, but include when the customer will next hear from you: “I’ll dispatch a technician to your address right after this call and you’ll get an SMS in the next ten minutes with their arrival time.”
When they’re calling about scheduling a service, set up your system so they can schedule a slot. Most HVAC software will have options for how you do this. Even if the customer is not quite sure, schedule the appointment and let them know there’s a link in the confirmation email if they get home later and realize they need to reschedule.
Need to send someone out to do an estimate and talk the owner through their options? Get that set up straight away. Have an ‘estimate’ job type ready in your HVAC scheduling software so whoever answers the call can schedule the estimate.
Plan for seasonal call volume increases
Preparation is the key to making the most of the summer call volume increases. You need to have a plan in place so you don’t miss calls and know exactly what to do with them when you answer. You might manage at other times of the year without a plan, but when the number of calls goes up, any gaps in your process will cause much bigger problems.
Summer is also the time with the most holidays and team members take vacation days. With people away and more calls, less experienced CSRs will need to take more calls. All of these create the perfect storm for missing calls, not capturing leads, and forgetting to schedule the next stage.
Here are our five key steps for managing seasonal call volume increases:
- Look at when you get the most calls (use last year if you’re unsure and remember to map those call numbers against when you had temperature spikes).
- Look at how many calls you can manage at any one time.
- Look at when your team takes vacations and dates of observed holidays (and how many of the team take extra days around them).
- Use all of this information to predict the dates you’ll likely see lots of calls, and what kind of temperature spike will lead to a call surge.
- Put plans in place for who will answer calls, how they answer them, what they need to ask, and how the next step gets scheduled.
Why HVAC businesses miss calls and how to answer every call in three simple steps:
- People call you on their schedule – you need to understand when they have time to call you.
- You need to have a plan in place so you always know who is answering calls and following up on new leads
- Know the customer journey for each type of call you get, and how to get a new lead from the first call to scheduled job in as few steps as possible.
How AnswerForce can help
You can do all of these steps on your own. But it will be hard and often unpopular (no one wants to answer at 11 pm unless it’s an emergency or eat lunch late every day). This is why HVAC businesses miss calls and often rely on voicemail.
AnswerForce has your back and can make sure you answer calls in seconds 24 hours a day.
- Your calls are answered 24/7 – including evenings, weekends, and holidays.
- Your script is fully customizable, you can easily ask the right question for each type of call you get.
- Scheduling is included in every plan, so you can get the next step organized on the call.
- AnswerForce is built to scale quickly and reliably, whether it’s seasonal call increases or a call surge your quality remains high.
- It’s always a real person answering the call, never a bot or voicemail.
See how it works and what plan will work best for you – schedule a demo today.