The Home Service Expert Podcast - Delivering Top-Notch Customer Service No Matter What

Episode Date: July 18, 2018

Parker is the CEO of Answer 1, a virtual receptionist and business answering service that caters to businesses from various industries. Among many of Answer 1’s achievements include maintaining a 0.01% complaint rate of number of calls answered, and making it to the Inc 5000 List of 2012. In this episode, we talked about customer service, marketing, hiring...

This is the Home Service Expert podcast with Tommy Mello. Let's talk about bringing in some more money for your home service business. Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week, Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields, like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership, to find out what's really behind their success in business. Now, your host, the home service millionaire, Tommy Mello. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to the Home Service Expert. I'm here with Parker Davis.

Parker owns, he's the CEO of AnswerOne. He took it over in 2015. It's been around for decades. Parker, how's your day going? It's going well, thanks. Yeah, I'm excited to have you on. You know, a lot of things are very important to a business, but I don't think there's anything more important than answering and booking the phones that come through. Tell us a little bit about your company and where you come from and what you guys do today. Sure, happy to. Our purpose as a

business is to help our clients grow their business. And we believe that by providing great customer experiences, answering the phone, being professional, scheduling appointments, et cetera, creates a very value add for our clients and helps them grow their businesses. So we have thousands of clients across the country in many different end markets. And one of those end markets that we specialize in is helping home services companies answer their phones 24-7 and schedule appointments for their technicians. And so from HVAC to roofing companies to local plumbers, we're answering their calls and creating customer experiences for their customers. Okay, perfect.

So some of the questions I always start with is the challenges you face. I mean, when I started my business, I was working 80 hours a week. I was getting rid of, you know, making so many sacrifices. And there's so much going on. Tell me a little bit about some of the challenges you face because it's tough to answer phones for that many companies. I mean, I don't even know where to begin. Yeah, it all starts with finding and attracting the best people. And we are believers that if you can find great people and train them, keep them, and support them, that that type of environment will then create a great experience for our clients. And we spend a tremendous amount of time making sure we have the right people at our company because ultimately we're a services business.

And by making sure we have the right people, we deliver what we believe to be industry-leading service. And that's hard. It's hard to find, you know, 100, 150 great, friendly, smart folks that, you know, can answer quite a number of calls, you know, per day and score a 10 out of 10 on each call. But we do our best, and we think we have some great folks here, and that is one of the keys to our secret sauce yeah i'm excited to dive into this because i believe i really do believe that answering the phones is an art and and it can be taught it's a skill as well well what do you think the hardest part about finding these people is do you think the people are the hardest part or do you think the systems behind it are i think finding the people is the hardest part because you can teach good people,

you know, the systems and how to do this. I mean, our view is if it's the right person to be with us here at AnswerOne, we will support them and train them and get them in a position to be successful. Yeah. So what would you say? And look, I'm not veering people away from your service, but we have the same problem finding technicians. What do you find is a good way to attract really good candidates and help mold them into the right people? Sure. I think it's creating a culture, first and foremost, that rewards what we're looking for. And so what does that mean? What are we looking for? We're looking for loyal people that come to work with a smile on their face every day and that have a predisposition

for wanting to help people. And you can figure that out pretty quickly in the way that we interview and over the course of a training period, that if somebody is really, you know, focused on, you know, delivering a great experience and helping the caller, that will shine through. And, you know, that to us is the most important thing we look for. Yeah, that's huge. I think that the first experience that the customers have, other than your advertising, is the people answering the phones. And as a technician out in the field myself back in the day, it's amazing how some of the people would actually say, wow, who is that person? They were absolutely delightful. We knew we wanted to use

your company the minute that we heard them talk. What do you think the secret to that is? I mean, that's a great question. I think one is timeliness, right? You got to pick up the phone. Nobody wants to be on hold. Somebody wants to talk to an individual quickly. Two is they want that experience to be pleasant yet efficient, pleasant yet efficient, you know, careful of customers' time. And, you know, in many respects, there are calls that we get where people are experiencing real issues, you know, their toilets flooded, right? Their basements flooded, they have a leak in their roof, et cetera. And these are tough situations for these people that they're going to, and you need to be able to show empathy around these situations and show that you care.

And, you know, you care about the situation that they're in. And we're going to do everything we can to get you scheduled as soon as possible. Yeah. So how do you rate your calls? Do you have a third party or, you know, someone maybe that's just grading each single call? How do you perform that to make sure that all of your call takers are really performing to the level you want them to? Sure. Well, definitely not a third party is quality controlling our calls. We do that internally. We believe that that's

so core to what we do that we certainly would not outsource that. Okay. And so we have a quality control team that listens to calls kind of all day, every day, and scores our receptionists under a quality matrix that we put together. In addition to that, when new clients come on, they come on in what we call kind of our new client affinity. And those calls in the first 30 days are monitored at a much higher rate than others. It's a service that we provide to our new clients to make sure that the onboarding is really great. And, you know, we're listening to calls constantly, you know, to make sure that it meets, you know, our internal quality standards and the standards of our client. Okay.

You know, I have a CRM called Service Titan. I've used a dozen of them, power selling pros. I've just used Google Calendar for a lot of stuff. How important is it for a home service business, do you think, to have a good CRM? I think it's important for any business to have a quality CRM. And I think a home services business is no exception to that at all. By tracking data over time, you can see trends in your business, and you can better execute the tasks that you have in any given week. And so it's helpful

in a myriad of ways and crucial, I think, for everybody to find one that they're comfortable with. At the same time, I think it's hard for people to make the leap. If you're a small business owner and you haven't seen it work well, and you haven't seen a peer and or a situation where a company has gotten value out of it, it's very tough for you to kind of make that leap of that time and investment, et cetera, in order to do it. But I've never run into somebody that has really bought into the right CRM, made the investment, and then executes on it and be disappointed with the results. Yeah, I think that that's crucial is there's not a one size fits all. And there's so many options out there that it could be mind boggling to some people to pick one.

And I do believe that you really just need to do your own research and not buy the first one you see. Really get some testimonials, sit down with the business owners. Before I picked mine, I visited five different owners that were using the same CRM and they absolutely were in love with it. So I think the proof was out there that it was a good CRM. But I wanted to ask you, and I know you've been involved with this business several years now. Obviously, we make a lot of mistakes in business and we learn from them. What's the biggest mistake that you would say catches most entrepreneurs off guard when setting up their customer service process? They see it as a cost center as opposed to,

you know, a critical function in their business. And I think that that reflects kind of where we have come from. And so what do I mean by that? I think that 10, 20 years ago, before the evolution of social media, Facebook, Yelp, et cetera, it was easier to provide okay client and customer service and get away with it. Now, it's really hard to be a small business. And every interaction is extremely crucial, because you never know what interaction is going to turn up either positively or negatively in very widespread reviews that are easily trackable, you know, by your clients or potential clients. And so, you know, my view is that a very professional and focused customer service organization is critical to the ultimate growth of your business. Because by creating those

positive experiences, it creates, you know, a very good brand, you know, message out in the marketplace and these social media sites. And that, you know, accelerates prospects and lead flow over time. Yeah, yeah, that's so true. Reviews are so readily available. And I think that that's a huge undertaking that people don't really realize. So you were answer one achieved record revenues, while also being one of the top companies to work for in Arizona. How did you do that? Because I think those are two hard things to have at the same time. What kind of information about that can you give our listeners? Sure. Well, I mean, it certainly was not easy and something that we are very proud of. And, you know, number one, I think everybody has to be aligned with what the goal is. And our goal is to take care of our

clients. And if we take care of our clients, we're going to keep them and we're going to get more. And goal number two is to take care of our employees because we believe that by taking care of employees, it allows us to take care of our clients, right? And in my view, you can't, you know, to use the expression, be penny wise and pound foolish. You can't cut either of those pieces short. And so, you know, we need to invest in our people. We need to pay them fair wages. We need to give them paths to promotion. We need to give them, you know, an exciting, you know, demanding and rewarding place to work. And by doing that and focusing on the client, you know, we were able to have some great results in 2016

and 2017. Yeah. You know, I teach a lot about answering the phones is where it all starts. And I think that a good booking rate, I mean, it's very rare that you'll find this, but it goes from 80 to 90%. And I think what people judge as a real opportunity sways those numbers, because a lot of people have a gray area. And a lot of people don't even measure this stuff. Tell me a little bit about what your whole philosophy is about answering phones and what's a good booking rate and what are some of the objections that you see a lot of small businesses can't get over? I mean, one of them is price, obviously. So can you talk a little bit about that? I guess I'd just like to give a little bit of an overview more about what we do, because we don't see ourselves as simply answering phones. We view ourselves as being kind of an integral part of handling all channels that clients talk to small businesses. And what do I mean by

that? We'll answer emails, we'll answer form submissions, we'll answer text messages, we'll answer calls, et cetera. And so we view ourselves as kind of standing in the middle between all of these channels of communication and organizing that and creating good experiences and then delivering that to our client. So I guess that's one thing. Two, what do we define as success and how do we of people to see the value? You know, in many respects, it's an industry by industry calculation. And in home service, we do our best to understand, okay, how much is a new client for you, right? If this is a new client that needs help with the plumbing situation, how much is that worth?

How much do you spend in marketing to get that lead? So if your cost per lead is $100 and you close, you know, one out of every two, you know, there's a cost to that. And then there's a value to the service. And if we can increase your bookings by, you know, 5% to us, we view ourselves as almost paying, right? Like there's really no cash outflow to our clients. And we try to go into these situations and try to really understand kind of their economics of their business. And 90 plus percent of the time, it then becomes pretty easy for us to explain that if we can make incremental improvement into your statistics,

it will pay for itself and will make you more money. Yeah, I think it's hard for small businesses to all get, they don't get to some of those form fills. They don't respond to texts fast enough. And there's something to be said about answering that phone call. So many people think they could just call people back and get good results. And I think that's changed over time

with voiceover and internet protocol, with a lot of the ways that we could actually have it go to multiple different people to answer it. And that whole 10 years ago, 20 years ago, mentality has changed. Tell me a little bit about how technology has changed the game and why some of the businesses that have been doing things the same way need to change as soon as possible. Technology development is only accelerating and, you know, becoming harder for small businesses to keep up with.

And, you know, their prospects and their clients want to choose whichever one they like to communicate. You know, some people are going to use the phone. Some people are going to use form fill. Some people are going to use text. Some people are going to use an app, you know, et cetera. Some people are going to go to a third party site and enter information that gets sent to, you know, et cetera. So people are going to go to a third-party site and enter information that gets sent to the prospect. Companies shouldn't be funneling people into either phone or email,

et cetera. They should be willing to accept communication however it exists. And that's going to maximize your leads and your prospects. And it's the small businesses and the home services businesses' role to be able to digest and make sense out of that. At the same time, I would add, I think we as consumers, not as business owners, but when we leave our businesses, we become consumers. Consumers are much more picky today and much more demanding today than they were 10 years ago or 20 years ago. And their ability to voice that displeasure has increased as well. And so you have a pickier slash, you know, harder to please consumer with a higher

ability to voice, you know, disapproval of a business interaction. And, you know, small businesses need to learn how to deal with that. And if they can take advantage of it, it can be a very big positive for them. I couldn't agree more with that. You know, in one of your articles, you discuss a lot to do with what you just talked about. You said customer service is changing. And instead of hiring sales personnel, companies are starting to hire experts to educate and guide consumers to making informed decisions. As far as the home service business, how can they educate consumers to make informed decisions and benefit from that? Sure. I think, you know, point one is you need to create, you know, a genuine experience, right? You know, in the home service business,

when you're at someone's home, et cetera, you know, the question sometimes becomes, okay, should I fix this or buy a new one? You know, that's one situation that technicians run into all the time. And by creating kind of a genuine discussion, right, and being knowledgeable about that, you can build trust. And with that, you know, the client is going to listen to you, right? And so, you know, for us, it's less about the knowledge, right? That comes to play, right? Just if you can formulate in a formulaic way, just, just spout out knowledge. It's how do you use knowledge of a situation to build trust and create a genuine experience? And if you can do that, you're going to sell more and you're going to do right by your client more often than not. Yeah. I think that's so important is on

the phone. A lot of times you talked about this earlier, but it's not about having all the answers per se, but it's about showing empathy and explaining to them that the best thing to do able to book the phone call. What's your philosophy on how much you think maybe a CSR or a CCR should know about that? Two things. I mean, they're never going to know as much as our client does, right? If they know, you know, 5% as much as our client does, that would be fantastic, but they need to know enough. And we take great pains to educate, you know, our receptionists on industry vertical fantastic. But they need to know enough. And we take great pains to educate our receptionists on industry verticals. So they're familiar with the caller issues that they're dealing with. And they're familiar with a lot of the key terminology and phrasing that our clients are dealing with. And in home service, for example, and I mentioned this before, we will coach our receptionists and trainer receptionist that in many circumstances, something bad has happened, right? Something with the roof,

something with the toilet, something with the dishwasher, something with the air conditioner, et cetera. Something bad has happened and they know it's probably going to cost a lot of money. And in that circumstance, it is very, very, very critical to be empathetic and have an understanding perspective with these calls. And if you can get there, you're 80% of the way there. And then the little specifics of the industry can kind of fill that out. Yeah. Yeah, that's so true. I mean, the empathy is so important.

So at answer one, you've got a complaint rate of less than point oh one percent on the number of calls you answer, which is significant. Obviously, you guys have customer service down to a T. What's your secret? I mean, I know that's not easy because I've been in this industry a long time. How do you guys manage that? And what are your KPIs that you track to keep that? Sure. The way that we track the metric is we, of course, know how many calls come into our queue in a particular month. And we can track the number of what we call complaints that are handled by our client services team. And we track that very carefully because we think that that is a very strong indicator

of the quality of our service. And, you know, KPIs that kind of go into that, right? So that's the output. What are we looking into that? We're looking into, you know, how quickly we answer the call. We're looking at hold times, if there are any hold times. We're looking at, you know, booking rates for particular clients and are we improving over what they had before. And we know that if, you know, we do those things right, as well as, you know, have good quality scores through our quality department, we know that we're doing a pretty good job for our clients.

But that being said, I mean, we like any services business is sometimes stuff works out, right? We sometimes make a mistake. And, you know, in those situations that we think it's best to be palms up, be honest, you know, give the client a plan for how we're going to fix it and then go about and do that. And, you know, we don't try to hide anything. And by kind of looping and wrapping all of that together, you know, we end up with what I believe is to be to be industry leading service. Yeah, I can't tell you enough how important I believe the phone center is. You mentioned on your company say that 50% of all sales go to the business that responds first. It's all about getting back to the customer the quickest. How do you guys incorporate that within your responders or your your call takers? We talk all the time about

helping our clients and that that is our job. And we wake up every day to help our clients. And we know that quick responses and great experiences helps our clients close more business. And so we, in a very transparent manner, and everybody knows that the faster we get to these prospects, the better experience we give, the higher likelihood they're going to close with our client. And if we can help our client grow, this client's going to be a client for life. And that's good for everybody.

And we take a tremendous amount of pride in that. Yeah, you know, I've literally seen this happen where you'll have a business that has their own call-taking employees, and then they switch to a company like yours, and it goes back and forth. Some of the time, it's because maybe they didn't use your company, and they might have not had a great experience. Some of the time, they realize that having the $13, $14, $17 an hour person around is actually tougher to manage. A lot of things go into that. Tell me a little bit about your perfect client,

your avatar, and how you would benefit them by engaging in your service? Sure. You know, our perfect client is, you know, provides a great service and has an okay understanding of his marketing and prospecting metrics and is open to us, you know, helping him kind of understand what success means, right? And really valuing, you know, that piece of his business. And then, you know, allowing us to execute it on his behalf. I won't say that, you know, a plumber is better than a roofer is better than a, you know, an HVAC provider. They all can be fantastic clients if they come at this with a perspective of, you know, I've, I may have tried a service or two before, and I hear you guys are different. And so let's be partners and create opportunities for both of us.

If a client is looking for a very inexpensive service and sees the answering service as a place to reduce costs as much as possible, we're not the right partner for that client. Okay. When I'm coaching somebody, is what's your call booking rate? Because most people aren't tracking that and they think because they have their mother-in-law and their daughter or their son answering most of the calls, that most of the answers I hear is,

yeah, we're booking 80, 90%. And it's this rough number that they have no clue exactly how much they're booking. They don't know what's opportunities. They don't know. Some of the time they don't realize that most of their calls are not even for new opportunities. It's because they don't have the systems in place to let the customer know when the technician's arriving. So there's so many inbound calls. They have 10 more people than they need, but they shouldn't do that. Their systems are broken. Talk a little bit about how important the systems are to getting them right to reduce the amount of calls to only having it so that inbound real prospective customers are calling in.

Sure, I guess a couple points. One, we found that in many circumstances, our clients don't even know how many calls they're getting. They'll come to us, they'll sign up for a particular plan and expect, call it, I don't know, 150 calls a month. And they ended up getting 600. And then they'll say, well, I never got 600 calls before. And our response is, you probably have, but the person or service or people that you have answering these calls just are only answering 150 or they're only trying to answer 200, but you've always had these calls. And so at the most basic level, it's taking, it's having a really detailed understanding of this is how many calls I get. This is the time of day those calls come in. And, you know, from there we can talk about, you know, the best process and the best way to And, you know, from there we can talk about, you know, the best

process and the best way to then, you know, answer and handle those calls. Other things that we run into is, you know, depending on how the company is marketing, they might be marketing, you know, too broadly and or inefficiently, and they might be driving the wrong call into answer one. And so in some instances, you know, our clients will say, hey, you know, we ran some new marketing programs, our booking is less than we expected, etc. You know, can you take a look at this? And can you take a look at the calls and try to understand why our quality prospects have gone down? And then we'll help our clients do that as well. You know, I wrote an article in Forbes recently.

It's called Quality Over Quantity, How to Focus on Your Most Valuable Customers. And one thing that I found in my garage door company was that all customers are not created equal. And you could actually, it's sometimes it's cheaper to get a customer on Craigslist or looking for a cheap repair or maybe just looking for a remote for their garage door. But it's good to go after the customers that, I mean, are in a severe need, like they're trapped in their garage and they need our help. Well, we're able to monetize that more, not because we're bad at what we do or we take advantage of people, but because they need a lot more than just a remote. Obviously, their garage is off track. So I think that's what you were just trying to explain to some of the listeners out there is that all customers are not created equal.

And some of the times you're getting inundated with opportunities that may not really be opportunities. And that's such an important thing that Parker brought up that I'm a big fan of. So Parker, what is a good booking rate for a home service company? I mean, realistically, when everything comes into play, and I don't know if they're the homeowner, they are the decision maker. They're obviously looking for your services and you get rid of all the other stuff, you know, the solicitors, the previous customers, what is a real booking rate that that's something that you think some of the listeners out there may be able to obtain or could come to your company and

maybe get that. And I know you can't make just a generality question here. You know, I'd hesitate to offer that up. I believe a lot of people have different situations and hesitate to say anything. And I know that probably doesn't help you. No, no, no. I think that's fair. I think that's fair because I'm fine with that because don't get that wrong. I do believe that different businesses are different. Look, if someone's calling from a complete TV campaign and they got Joe Montana in their TV commercial, they're calling up saying, I want to book the call.

All you got to do is take their information. Whereas there's a lot of companies that don't do branding that you need to really convince to use the service. And it's hard to compare to, it's like apples and oranges. So what we encourage our clients to look at is we really encourage them to, you know, and it doesn't have to be that sophisticated. We call cost per lead and cost doesn't have to be that sophisticated.

We call it cost per lead and cost per acquisition and cost per client value. And so these businesses, you know, of course, are marketing in, you know, in print. They're marketing in TV. They're marketing in radio, et cetera. And while there can't be direct attribution for everything, you can get pretty close and you can know, okay, well, I can get a lead for every $150 I spend in print. I can get a lead for $225 for every lead that I have, you know, digital marketing and so on and so forth. And then you can apply those same metrics to, well, even if digital leads are more expensive than print leads, but they convert it twice the rate. You know, the cost per acquisition is better, right? And so, you know, we encourage people

to really look in a detailed manner into their marketing spend. And so then they can understand the metrics of what does a new client cost? What does a lead cost? And, you know, perhaps this is likely not the case, but, you know but perhaps there's a trend where those new clients that come through digital at these type of metrics, we find that our clients can allocate marketing spend to more efficient channels. And that allows us to do a better job for them in converting great clients. Yeah, the CPA is so important. Your cost per lead is really not that important if you're not acquiring that customer. And I think that's something that a lot of people forget about. I'd rather pay $500 for a $10,000 lead than a hundred bucks for a thousand dollar lead.

I mean, it's just the numbers, you really got to pay attention to those. And I think having the right CRM is the fundamentals. That's how you get started with that is really having call tracking numbers per lead source and understanding. You know, I talked to a guy the other day in the air conditioning industry. He does $12 million a year.

He's a buddy of mine. And I said, what's your call booking rate? He goes, well, we're over 90%. And I said, no, what's your booking rate? Is it like 90.2%? You should, you know, what is it last year? He's like, I just know we're over 90. And I find that hard to believe personally, because I know

the best call centers in the world are barely getting to 90%. And the question I have, is that really obtainable? Is that something that anybody should shoot for 90%? Or does that seem kind of like it might be over the top? I mean, I think anybody with 90% should be really proud about what they have accomplished. I think that that is a great North Star for people to go after. And once you get there, you might not stay there every year, but I think that that's a good target. At the same time, if you're a little less than that, I wouldn't feel like you're doing a bad job. Yep.

So, Parker, you guys have this service and you guys actually help book phone calls for companies. Tell me a little bit about your service, about what's your perfect client? I mean, is it somebody that just can't get to the phone all the time? Is it just do a lot of rollover for certain companies? Where would my clients or the people that are listening, I should say, where would they really find a lot of success with your company? Sure. Two types. To the extent that you have, call it less than five employees, we would love to handle everything for you. 24 hours a day, we believe that you probably would not need to hire a receptionist and we'll most likely save you money and improve your call statistics and closing statistics.

If you are a much larger home services company, we help with overflow and after-hours and before-hours support. You'll most likely have a call center of 5, 10, 15, 20, perhaps even more, that you run internally. But yet, given call spikes, et cetera, and probably an unwillingness to have people working 24-7, that's where we can come in and help you as well. And then finally, for those clients, we work within the CRMs of our clients. And so if you use Service Titan, if you use a CRM that is pretty readily available, we will work in that for you. So you just don't have a message and then have to have your administrative help, you know, put in the information.

We can do that directly for you. That's amazing. I love that service. And I love the fact that you guys are so responsive because putting people on hold is not the way to do business. Obviously, all of us, including every call center, every single business out there has had issues with getting to every single phone call. But I think you're absolutely right. Getting to that phone call quicker because unlike most

companies out there, like Cox Communications for your cable, they set up an IVR because you're guaranteed to be their customer or Verizon. You're going to wait for them no matter what. But having an IVR for your home service business, I don't think is a good idea because you're sitting there dialing into an IVR going, I've got other choices. I'm just going to go next in line on the next company in Google. What is your thought about – I know IVRs create a lot of efficiencies, but do you think they're the best thing to do with a home service company? I just want to hear your take since you're the pro. I don't think it's the best thing to do, though I understand the realities of creating kind of a cost-efficient solution, right? I believe that it should be a part of the toolkit that, you know, answer one thing and then the client can decide upon. What my experience suggests and

what our data suggests is that as long as you pick up the phone first within, you know, three, four, maybe five rings, somebody doesn't mind then being on hold for 30 seconds. However, if you put that person on hold first with an IVR and get to them, you know, in the same amount of time, that second experience that I just outlined is much, much worse for the client. So for those that are asking us, hey, you know, I want to save a little bit of cost, right? I'm thinking about an IVR and then you guys picking up the call. What we tell them is if you want to save a little bit of cost, let us pick up the call first. Let's pick up the call in the first three, four, five seconds, create a good experience. And then a client will hang on there for 30 seconds if they need to. You know, that's such an amazing piece of advice.

And you reminded me of another great question because you just got a wealth of knowledge on this. When we talk about dispatching, a lot of companies are switching to this kind of this process. You know, we used to do, hey, we've got five slots. We've got eight to ten, ten to twelve, twelve to two, two to four, 4 to 6, whatever. Now they're switching to this process to where, you know, you're actually listening for urgency and you're keeping a more open board. And I want to hear your take on dispatching because I think there's so much money that home service companies lose by improper dispatching. Give us a few tips on proper dispatching and what's changing over the last year or two. I think that there's being money left on the table by not pricing effectively for small windows that expedite service.

I think you have customers that have a range of price insensitivities or sensitivity. And you can be probably charging somebody probably like 2x what you would charge them otherwise if you could tell them somebody's going to be there tomorrow in between 930 and 945. And I think the clients will pay for that. And then on the flip side, if you want to create big bands, I think the clients will then accept a lower price, right? So my view is that there are some firms out there that are getting creative with pricing on a very small scale that to me is very interesting. It may be harder to replicate on a larger scale, but that's where I see money being left on the table. You know, Parker, I've been doing this a long time and I got to tell you that

if it's a remote call versus a broken spring, I'm trapped in my door. One of the things that I found, and you can correct me if you disagree, because I'd love to hear your take on this. But if they say, look, I can't get in or out of my garage, I want someone out right now. Typically speaking, the urgency is through the roof. Whereas I've had people in, we're in 10 states. So I've had people, let's say in an area where it's not as like Prescott, Arizona, where they're not used to having same day service, where they're like, I can't get out of my garage, but my car's outside. If you guys can get here by Monday, I'd be happy.

Whereas that customer in Phoenix is saying, I can't get in or out of my garage. I want you guys out here. I'm going to call the next company. And I think leaving a slot available for the urgency actually could create a higher value. And also knowing who you're dispatching, who's your top close ratio technicians, because if you got a guy closing nine out of 10 clients versus your six out of 10, get that guy closing more with a higher ticket average out to more homes, book him up first with better opportunities. Do you have any take on that stuff or is that going way too deep for what you guys handle? No, I mean, that is the level down to what we certainly handle, but that's exactly right.

You know, you have different, you know, I use the word price sensitive, price insensitive, et cetera. You know, you use the word urgency for the receptionist, either at answer one or at a particular company to understand how to effectively like put that client prospect in the funnel, right? And where that prospect is going to create the maximum value for the home service business. That's a skill. And if it can be done correctly, certainly something that's going to create value for the business. So I know we've got to kind of wrap things up here.

I'm going to ask you a few quick questions. One of them is just a super important one that I'm sure you hear all the time. The biggest thing that I think people make a mistake of is they go, our industry, you got to give pricing. Everybody else gives pricing. You got to give pricing. I give them the price right on the phone. And I listen to hundreds of calls a day. I do lead generation for other companies. And I hear them. The first thing they say is, how much is this? They go, it's going to cost $180 plus labor. And it's like, OK, I'll call you back.

Now they go to the next company. This company costs us. Oh, no, we can be. I think that's the biggest mistake is jumping straight into price. And I think you undervalue what you're doing because we don't know, unless you're an expert, which you obviously aren't, you're calling us. We don't know what it's going to cost till we get out there. What is your take on getting over a price objection? Yeah, I think two things. One, I think that businesses can effectively test both scenarios and what they're better at, right? I

mean, you get hundreds and hundreds of prospects. And so, you know, as businesses think through, should I offer price or should I not offer price? You know, you can do a test where, you know, one month in or one week you don't, and you can compare the results and figure out what's best for you. For us, you know, we are not a price-based competitor, right, in the receptionist market, right? So we never lead with price. And, you know, it takes a while to kind of get comfortable with that. And I think that that's the same thing, you know, with home services companies or any company for that matter, where you need to train your people to sell off of value. And if they're trained and they're capable of doing it, I think you can sell just as much at higher prices. Yeah. You know, most clients that call us up, they want the best

price, they want the best product, and they also want the best time frame available. But very rarely can a company hit all those accommodations because the best price guys with the best products, usually they're so busy, they're out for months in most home service businesses. So I think that if you are the best price and you're also the best product, your time is very valuable and you're booked out. If you're the best price and you're the quickest, your product probably isn't the same caliber. So I think it's hard to get all three of those things. So anyways, what I like to do, Parker, I just like to ask every person I have on the podcast, if there's a book or two that they could share that they really liked that they got a lot out of that might help them book more calls or a book that you got a lot out of as far as business.

Sure. I would recommend Conversion Code by Chris Smith. Okay. Tell me a little bit about that book. Sure. I mean, it's a book with respect to finding great prospects and closing those prospects. And I actually read it probably a year or so ago. I just remember it being very good, and that's what I would recommend.

Lastly, tell us if somebody wants to find out more about your services, they want to get more involved with your company, tell me a little bit about what they can do to get involved with AnswerOne. Sure. tell me a little bit about what they can do to get involved with answer one sure i think the best resource is www.answer1thenumeric1.com and you can learn more about us on our website and then also we are reviewed by a third party independent site called consumeraffairs.com where you'll find you know over, almost 200 reviews from our clients about us that, again, was taken by a third party, was not taken by us. Well, Parker, I got a lot out of this. I learned a few things that I didn't know before.

There was a lot of great insights. I think you offer a great service. Again, you offer a couple services really to the small guy that has five or less guys you could take on the full chalant. And for the bigger companies, you're more of an overflow slash nights and weekends, which is amazing and holidays. So I think those of you out there looking for some different results, answer ones obviously sounds like a good solution.

And I really appreciate you being on the podcast today, Parker. Thank you. All right. You have a great day. Okay. You as well. All right. Thank you. All right. You have a great day, okay? You as well. All right. Thank you.

Bye-bye. This was the Home Service Expert podcast. Now listen up. Do you want to dominate your market, triple the profit you make without working those long 12-hour days, seven days a week? If the answer is yes, my team and I are opening up some new time slots to help you solve your biggest business challenge. Just go to homeserviceexpert.com forward slash discovery and book a free 30-minute call with our team today.

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