HAVE YOU CALLED YOURSELF LATELY?
It’s an eye-opener. As a director of Personal Training for six+ years I used to call regularly or have an intern do this. We’d schedule calls around the clock so we hit the part time openers, the part time closers and the full time or part time day staff.
I’d suggest the questions to ask. I needed to know if questions about personal training were being fielded correctly. If they were helping or hurting us.
I do the same thing with coaching clients and fitness centers I work with.
Here’s the kind of stats we found:
- 20% of the time the call was dropped during transfer or went to the WRONG voice mail box
- 10% of the time the caller was told that the person they needed to talk to was in another building/couldn’t be transferred and they would have to call back at a time more convenient for US.
- Only 30% of the time when a call was transferred did the front desk staff ever take the name and number of the individual and relay it to the right person – as they were instructed to do – in case during transfer the customer just hung up or was lost.
That’s 30% of the time..you lose the chance to help someone. They aren’t going to be coming back if this is how you treat them before you even get their money and business.
Up to 60% of the time you could be losing. So for every potential $1000 you could make (that’s not a big package by any means) you lose $600?
Can you afford it? I’d say:
Do an audit on your customer service and do it now.
Call, email, and stop in with a secret shopper.
Call yourself. What does your message sound like? Does it even make sense? Some systems are so complicated, push 1 for x, push 2 for y…. your customer hung up befor z even comes up.
Plan on doing this regularly.
Never put someone behind a phone or front desk who doesn’t understand the value – or the cost – of customer service.
Don’t lose the very traffic you just spent time, money and energy driving to you.
~Debra