The Home Service Expert Podcast - Getting Your Booking Rates To As High As 90%

Episode Date: May 8, 2018

Susy is a Major Accounts Manager at Callcap, a platform that empowers businesses to improve their marketing effectiveness and customer service through call tracking and monitoring. Susy has years of experience in analytics and telephony, and has helped plenty of businesses, including several in the home service industry, get their booking rates up and grow their business. In this episode, we talked about booking rates, sales, customer service...

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. All right, here we go with the home service expert. I'm so glad you tuned in because today

we're going to be talking to one of my most favorite people in the universe. She's helped me so much in every one of my businesses adventures. Her name is Susie Boyder. She's a major account representative at CallCap, and it just so happens that I got to meet her through one of the largest call centers in Arizona. He told me, you got to talk to Susie because I got to tell you, without Susie, my company would not be where it is today. CallCap is an amazing company that Susie works for, and she's located in Florida. And I can tell you that she answers her phone 24-7.

She's one of the hardest workers I know. And she's really, really all about the success of her customers. Call Cap does everything from tracking marketing to a lot more than that. They also have a thing called call assurance, which makes sure to keep track of your call center and keep track of it to such a degree that you know who booked the call. They've integrated some cool features like calling the customer right away when a form gets filled out,

because we all know a lot of times CSRs do not call those customers back right away and they book with another company. She's got some home advisor integrations and it's downright the best voice recording software I've ever used. I'm so excited for everyone to meet Susie Boyder. Susie, I know you just got done with the hurricane. Tell me a little bit about that. The hurricane. Well, the hurricane, thankfully, was not affected damage-wise, but this is where you realize how much you need communication.

Not just power, communication, internet, phone service, like cell phone service, like any phone service. So it was tough. It was tough for about a week. So yeah, you are the most responsive person I've ever met. Everybody that I talk to says you get a hold of Susie all the time because you answer your phone 24-7. But it must have been tough for you not being able to do that. Yes. Yes. Yes, it was driving me crazy. Yeah, you know, it's such a small world.

You know, I talk to so many people that know you it's just amazing that you guys are such a big company and everybody you're the main contact for all these huge companies you know we just actually started working with direct energy and i know dave shots obviously you probably know him oh very, very well. So Dave Schatz, I know. Matt, what's his last name? Matt. Hodge. Matt Hodge. Matt Hodge.

And then recently, I just got introduced to Brian. Those guys are so busy. It's a billion-dollar company. But it's fun stuff. We're getting going with them. Everybody loves Call Cap. Tell me a little bit about Call Cap. I've been with you now probably seven years.

I don't even know exactly, but we've worked closely. We've met in person, a couple of wines, a couple of beers. A couple of stumbles. A couple of stumbles, yeah. Tell me a little bit about how you got involved with Call Cap, how you became the number one basically representative representative for them and what the software does? Because I talk about Call Cap probably on every podcast, and I really want to get it from an insider view. So I've actually been with Call Cap 10 years. Prior to that, I was in the marketing world. And it was all about accountability. I've been in marketing for a long time.

I can give you a long history of the steps of how everybody, how, you know, call tracking has evolved. It's no longer just a phone number. There's a lot more to it, a lot more sophisticated. But I got involved with Call Cap because the agency for which I was the sales director, we were selling a lot of direct response material and direct

response requires accountability a lot. So I was introduced to Call Cap actually accidentally. And at the time, while we had a lot of other call tracking companies that were available to that agency, we could use them. The only one that was recording the phone call was Call Cap. So that's how I said, whoa, now this is accountability, not just this caller ID called you and this name called you. Here's the call recording, and you could prove that. And from there, we evolved into more analytics and evolved into the listening of calls is no one should be grading your calls other than an outsider outside of your office if you want to be successful. So let me just tell you this. We've got a lot of people listening on this. So the reason I met you is because I know a guy named Chris Watson who knows a guy named who was Matt and Dusty Matt and Dusty yeah and

then I went and met Matt and then Matt said yeah well you got to meet Susie if you want so I walked into this huge call center hundreds and hundreds and hundreds three levels and I said man if I want to play with the big boys I got to find out more about this so I called you up and I said Susie I'm a garage door owner and I said, Susie, I'm a garage door owner and I'm going to be the biggest garage door company in the world. And you said, okay, well, that sounds great. What's your booking rate? I said, it's good. Don't worry. And I had no idea. And she goes, I go, it's probably 80 or 90%. And Susie said no and uh I said no I think it is I I hear them booking calls and she said well why don't we just get you set up and you can put your money where your mouth is and we'll see so I said okay I want to try this out well I think at the time we were at like 52

percent and uh Susie what's the average booking rate of a company that doesn't monitor their CSRs? I mean, what would you say in the home service niche? Because that's who the listeners are out there. On average, the median is 46%. So 46%, less than half of the calls actually get booked. Yes. Yes. So that is... But you don't know.

But they don't know that because they only listen to one side, which is the book call. Right. And the problem is with somebody internally, what I found is there's a gray, a big gray area to where they go, well, that really wasn't a lead. And, well, that person really was a hard customer and you get this you're right you can't have somebody internally doing it and we've talked so much about this but the people that do internal mostly go back to external they come back to you i mean they they literally they get off because they say we're gonna bring it in, and then they come back to you. And there's so many cool things about CallCap.

I'm going to show everybody, if they're watching, what the user interface looks like. But basically, the most amazing thing about CallCap, well, there's three things. Number one is Suzy. Number two is the API integration. They can do anything. We actually integrated it for one of my lead gen companies into a system called Chargeify.

And then the third thing is they got Call Assurance. Tell me a little bit about what Call Assurance is because I think that's what makes you guys different and puts you over CallSource and all these other companies that do a little bit what you do, but they're not the full shebang. Right. Well, I'll tell you what CallSurance does, and then I'll tell you what makes CallSurance different and successful. However,

what CallSurance does is that we do have analysts that work 24-7. They're onshore, nearshore, and offshore, depending on how we need to, you know, settle, you know, get the volume and the times. And we evaluate currently over a million calls a month. These analysts are, they have an interface. They don't know who you are. They just know that this that they have an interface. They have notes that come up with your call.

They listen to your call, and they analyze the call to say this call was an opportunity and it was booked. This call was not an opportunity, which we'll get to that. And then this call was an opportunity, but you did not book that call. So this call that is presented to this analyst, oh, they'll have that grading within 15, 20 minutes of the call completing. Okay. Now, as soon as they know that this call was not booked, you get either an email or you get access to our call saver queue which the most the people that are successful with this assign agents to the call saver queue if you met brian sloan in the direct energy yeah that's who i was talking to yep b. Brian Sloan handles the call-saving queue, and today, around the last six months,

they have saved over a million dollars in revenue. And you can confirm that with him. Because you will lose calls. A call comes in. You know, sometimes the agent is not thinking. Who knows? Bad day, right? comes in you know sometimes the agent is not thinking who knows bad day right you or excessive amount of calls you can't get to all of them whatever it is you have somebody else following up immediately calling the customer and booking and saving that opportunity and so the most successful

people that do you know are the ones that use the call saver queue. However, not everybody has that kind of, you know, that kind of resource to put one person or two people and three just dedicated to that. So we do have a resolution center and an email notification that can be for those types of home service companies. And as long as they are addressed immediately, then they will be successful. Well, I also get a text message. Yes, I can send you a text message. Which is huge for a business owner on the road. And let me just go beyond that because I just think this is some of the best software I've ever seen because, number one, you see your CSR's booking rate.

And you could say somebody's at 90%, somebody's at 60%, somebody's at 40%, somebody's at 80%. Well, IVR's and VOIP, Voice Over Internet Protocol, allows us to dictate where the call goes. And what I mean by that is if I got somebody booking 90%, I'm going to make their phone ring no matter what first. So they're going to get every opportunity to book the call. Now, if they're on the line, it goes to the second highest person. So you get on call cap for two months. You get the analytics. And then you study the top CSR.

You listen to them. And then it also has a profit center. So you can put each job in to that call and it'll tell you the crazy thing. What I found is CSRs could actually make your company more money. Let's say everything's fair and they book 90%. What you'll find is month after month after month is one CSR's revenue will be more than the other ones because they set up the call. You know, Susie, I interviewed Brigham with Power Selling Pros,

and it's so important how we book the call and how we set up the technician for success. And he's actually coaching some of our CSRs, but I'm a big believer that the CSR is the first impression of your company. And they could drive revenue exponentially, they can set you up for service, a one service agreements and different things like that. And, you know, they compliment the technician, they tell them they love working here, they tell how great we are. We're five stars on Yelp. We're A plus the BBB.

We do drug tests and background checks. And then the technician walks out there and they're like putty in their hands because they're already in love with the company. So tell me, you know, I obviously love Call Cap. We got a special offer coming at the end of the podcast for our listeners here. But tell me a little bit more, I mean, about the tool and how powerful it is and how important it is because I spend $300,000 a month in advertising. Tell me exactly what you've seen with me.

And, you know, we use it for several different companies within my portfolio. But tell me a little bit about some other things it does and why, you know, people should take advantage of it. Well, for the most part, I think most of the biggest challenge with home service companies is that they want to grow and they feel that they need more calls. So they spend money on advertising and they don't make the advertising as accountable as it should. So it's not really, the first thing you need to understand is do you really need more calls? If you take 10 calls a month, what did you do with them? Did you maximize those 10 calls?

Because if you didn't, getting you 20 calls is not going to work either. So that's very small numbers, I get that. But you get the idea. It's not, you know, so the first thing you need to do is you need to say, okay, this is the call volume that I have that I own. What am I doing with it? Am I maximizing this? Because before I start throwing money out there, and now my cost to acquire gets a lot higher, okay, you know, what am I doing?

Am I booking? am i not booking and which one of these marketing pieces is working the best for me now not every marketing piece is going to book the same you know it used to be that everybody looked in the yellow pages you know i call it the original search engine everybody looked in the yellow pages and they would just flip over and call five people well they're doing the same thing on the yellow pages and they would just flip over and call five people. Well, they're doing the same thing on the internet right now. They just don't flip through a page, through a printed page. So, you know, and that usually, you know, has a lower booking percent simply because customers want to shop. So how do you keep them from shopping? You need to be sure that you have the best agents out there. So instead of

just spending money because you need more calls, what are you doing with your current calls? That's the most important thing. And that's what Call Cap will do for you. Well, the fact is you hit it on the head. Forty six or forty seven percent is the average. I mean, can you imagine if you could increase by 20 percent? But I asked you a long time ago, I said, I don't really want to be like everybody else. I said, what's the best? What's the best we could do as a company? And you said, Tommy, it's not easy, but there's such thing.

And I've seen companies do it. It's 90%. And I think people that use your tool, the majority of the people underutilize it. Correct me if I'm wrong. That is correct. That is correct. The tool is there. They love it.

The first 30 days, it's all about the excitement of the tool. And then, you know, the owners kind of just, you know, and I understand delegating, but they delegate it to the internal agents or office manager or, you know, call center manager, and then they start receiving this, they start feeling this pressure that if they lose a call, it's their fault. So they start saying, no, it's Call Cap's fault. I could have never booked that. So that's where, you know, so you don't start, you don't use it. You're not, and that's the biggest thing.

They're not using the tool. The data, we've hired a data analyst so that we can give a, you know, slice and dice data the way other people. We have a lot of tools on Call Cap for analysis. But how do you slice and dice it to you personally and where your weaknesses are? You have to understand that somebody picked up the phone, dialed your number, and they called you for a reason, not because they don't want to book with you. It just doesn't happen. People call home services for a reason. And the reason is that they want to do business with you.

If you didn't get it there, then you need to find out why. And making excuses doesn't, that's why 75% is about as best as some people get because they make excuses. Well, there's so many excuses. They say it's a parts call. Like, for example, somebody calls me looking for a gear and sprocket or they're looking to buy a spring or lubrication. And they say, well, that shouldn't count. And I say, that's a bunch of BS because I talk to these people. I go, tell me a little bit about what's going on, how you diagnosed it. And I said, okay, wow, you must really know what you're talking about.

You've done some research, I can see. And then I get them talking about it, and then I say, you know, I could get you that part if you'd like, or I could find out why that part went bad. And I'll tell you what. Why don't I get a guy out there? He's in your area today between 12 and 2. He'll come out.

He'll check it out. He'll sell you the part if you'd like, or if you like what he has to say and you think it's affordable, leave it to the pros and get a warranty on everything, then we can take care of it right there. And people say, absolutely, well, why would I buy the part if I don't really know what cost it? And that's why you're absolutely right.

Everybody has what I call creative justification. They justify why they're failing. and they justify why, you know, the other day we were slow on Monday. And guess what? Three people told me it was because it was because of the Vegas shooting. And I said, it's because it because it was cold outside, because the economy is bad, because taxes are due, because I'm in a bad area. Well, I drive too much. And the people that are going to do well in business don't have excuses. They look in the mirror and they say, how could I get better? And the fact is, if you're not going to embrace technology, you're going to fail.

And if you don't have the KPIs, key performance indicators within your business, you're not going to do what other companies can do. And, you know, I'm probably now more obsessed with data than I've ever been. Tell me a little bit about what data means to you is, you know, what, first of all, if I lost this call, if I booked this call, I booked this call. And what did I, you know, that's all good. And we'll go, we'll stop right there. Just hold that thought. But if I lost the call, I want to know why.

So it's not like call not book. It says why you didn't book the call. Now, if I have somebody else following up on that call and they save it, now I want to know what they did to save it. So I can correlate this data and then actually bring this data back to the original agent. Because what we want to do really is to get that agent to book at 85 to 90%. That means less opportunities to have to go out there and say, you know, because the initial call was booked. So that type of data is important. How do I do that by agent? How do I do that by result code?

Not just by a phone call. You know, I want to analyze all of that. And then I want to know if that call was saved, what happened? What did that call save agent or what did the agent that saved the call do that the initial agent did not do? As far as marketing back to your current base, and if you are in a multi-brand or multi-service home type of home service company, make sure that that cross branding has been spoken about on the call. That's another way to get

additional business. If you have any type of annuity and maintenance type program, make sure it's at least mentioned on the call so people know about it. And that's how you can get more money out of your positive or your book calls. Yeah. You know, one of the things I sat down with direct energy and I basically learned this by talking to him is I say this on every podcast. There's three ways to make money. Number one, you get more customers, right? You market, you spend more money marketing. Number two, you keep those customers coming back more often. So that's through a service plan. And if you got the right call center rep, they could set the people up for a service plan.

They could call the people back and even sell a service plan. And number three is you sell them more products. So what does that mean? Direct Energy does three things, four things. They do electric, they do plumbing, they do HVAC, right? And then they do home warranties. So their acquisition costs, they could pay way more for a customer because they're going to sell them four different services for their home.

So the trick is, is take all three of those. Yeah, you need to do marketing. Then you need to keep those customers coming back for more. And then you need to figure out how to sell them more product. I can't tell you how many times I've been in a garage and they say, what else do you guys do? We really like your company. And they're almost looking for me to sell them other things. But so many business owners, they close themselves off the things.

And I say, listen, we sell garage to storage solutions. We do epoxy floors. I can sub out 10 different things and take a huge cut of it and make sure they're great companies with great reviews, great ratings, a lot of experience, drug test background checks. And then I can take a cut of it and say they're our partners. And that's what's so beautiful about the home service industry. And that's why I'm in love with it. And that's why I love customers like Direct Energy and the bigger companies, because I learned so much just by interviewing

someone like you. I come out of this interview and I just, I go to work. I start saying, oh my God, I'm under utilizing. And listen, hindsight is 20-20. I wish I would have done more with the tool when I first got it. But let's say I'm underutilizing. And listen, hindsight is 20-20. I wish I would have done more with the tool when I first got it. But, you know, let's say I'm convinced. All right, we're going to focus on converting more callers into customers. If I only had the resources to on one thing, and listen, you've done this with so many small businesses. I just, what is the biggest breakthrough that makes it change? What makes them go from 46%, 47% and jump to 70%? The ones that use the tool effectively and understand.

And, you know, the biggest, so the biggest challenge here is never to make your agents feel that they're being punished. So it's because at the end of the day, they're not being punished. You never had any, you didn't have a goal for them. So if you didn't have a goal for them, don't punish them if they are at 47. You know, here's the goal. they don't know any better yeah exactly so give them incentive to get to a goal but not make it a not make it punitive those the small businesses that do that are successful and that by the way includes includes the sister, the brother, the wife, the cousin. Okay.

That's another thing I hear from the smaller businesses. Well, that's my wife that answers the phone, which is fantastic. But she also needs to convert for you. Okay. You know. Absolutely. That's my brother-in-law. Okay. Or that's my best friend since high school.

You know, you don't have to break up these relationships. You just have to design a plan internally to, you know, give them, give them something for helping you grow and helping you grow means they're going to be open to trying different things to book that call. Okay? So let's not make it punitive. That's the most important thing there. Make sure that you assess your positive environment, not a negative one within that group of agents that you have, whoever it might be that's answering the phone. Okay? And so once you do that, okay, and you start analyzing how many calls am i really getting and am i maximizing now my calls and i mean i'm and where am i am i at least booking 70

of the call volume that comes in here if you are now you're ready to expand in marketing you're ready to put some money out everybody listen to that 70 is the time to expand in marketing now listen okay people do what you inspect not what you expect okay that's my number one rule in life you don't lock your doors at night to keep the bad people out you lock the doors to keep the good people out the fact is this is just a tool to know what's going on within your business. Now, I've used this tool. If you don't have a fancy CRM, listen, I've got one of the most advanced CRMs out there. I'm not even going to go into that right now, but you use the tool, you enter the data. Now, I want to get into one important thing about this.

If you enter the sales on every call, number one, you know your booking rate. Number two, you know how much money you're bringing in from that call source. So what that means is I have a number in call cap for my ValPak in Phoenix. I also have one for my Google. I also have one for my Craigslist, my Yelp, and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds, as many campaigns as you have. The more as you have, the more granular you get, the more results you get. But what happens is you could actually see what kind of money you're making from these sources. And then you can go back and negotiate. And now you start cutting marketing. So a lot of these small businesses are going, wait a minute,

you're talking way over my head. Now this is just getting complicated. And I go back to five main principles. You know what your marketing dollars are doing for you. You get your booking rate up. You get your technician average sales up. You get the conversion rate up and then you make sure you're getting great customer satisfaction. You do those five things. Then you can jump into a deeper level

and say, what's wrong? Why am I not converting these? I'm only, the calls that I do book, I'm only closing 60% of them. Okay, what's wrong? Why am I not converting these? The calls that I do book, I'm only closing 60% of them. Okay, let's dive into that. How much time is my guy, Chen, spending on that sale? Maybe he's there for seven minutes and he's in and out. And then you find out there's a problem with the technician. Maybe I have a CSR that's coming in smoking weed every day and they sound like they're baked on the phone. I can listen to that phone call. Maybe my marketing dollars aren't doing what I thought they were.

But without these tools, you're definitely at a huge disadvantage from the guys and the women out there, the business owners that are using these tools. So, you know, I'm just such a huge advocate because the coolest thing about Call Cap is when when a third party person listens to it they say i gotta say who i am okay so i say hello this is tom with a1 garage or a service well the third party listens to that and that's how they know to put tom mellow the owner and then i can look at my own booking rate so they actually listen to the name And if you've got two of the same names, you can say, this is Tom Mello at extension 143. Now the third party,

what do you call them again, Susie? The analysts? The analysts, yeah. The analysts will know 143 is me. So that's how they're able to know who the CSR is. And I think we might've left that out earlier, but it's really powerful stuff. And I got to tell you, you know how many calls you book that day. I mean, I use this for Legion. I use this for so many different things.

And, you know, different people use it for different things. I know that some huge call centers, some of them have internal analysts, but they do all the neutral calls. They send the call cap. Tell me a little bit about the process and why they would want to do the neutral calls and call cap. Well, actually, that was something that Direct Energy did for a while, but now they have every call coming through. So basically, the only time that we knew it was neutral is that the agent said it was neutral. So there's one thing for sure when when an agent books a call, you have an appointment time and an in a you know, in a date.

So yeah, that's pretty set in stone that you have a book call when they do not book that initial call. That's when they start deciding neutral. I couldn't book it. That was not an opportunity. Let me mark this one neutral. So that's why they were sending all their neutral calls and that was self disposition neutral not call cap analyst neutrals okay so then we would we would go back and validate that neutral but here's another thing that here's another problem with that if a customer books with if you book 10 customers today and say you book or you get 10 out of 10 you now have 100 nine of those customers call you back and cancel do you still have 100 no you don't so there's in life the problem most people think

that appointment cancellations are neutral no No. Because you can save them. Talk about call saver. I love that, Susie. I love where you're going with it. Go ahead. So not only can you save it because, you know, sometimes you cannot save an appointment cancel if somebody had an emergency, a death in the family. Okay, so you can't save it on that call. Can you call them back later?

Of course you can. So you can just delay this in Call Saver. Maybe you want to delay it a week, let the customer, you know, calm down from whatever the emergency was and call them back. Do they still have the same problem? Yes, they probably do. The other part of it is that if you booked that call and it canceled, it has to offset each other or your booking percent is not going to be correct. Okay? You're making an appointment canceled neutral. Also, why did the appointment cancel?

Don't just say it canceled. It canceled because the caller had an emergency. It canceled because the caller might have found somebody sooner. Do you know how much that happens? It canceled because, oh might have found somebody sooner. Do you know how much that happens? It canceled because, oh, they found somebody cheaper or it canceled because their relative or friend or somebody else, you know, helped them fix the problem. Okay. So now you have reasons why you want to follow up on those and maybe not necessarily in 10 minutes, but the next day or two days later. In the call saver queue, you can put those in there so that they come back and remind you that you should call this customer to see how that went.

Well, that tells you so much. Listen, if you get cancellations, you can dig in deep and you can say, maybe it's getting canceled because my dispatchers don't understand priority number one. What's a priority number one? It's 120 degrees and my air conditioning is broke. It's not calling me out for a coil cleanup on my air conditioning. It's not calling me out. If there's urgency, it teaches your dispatchers. You've got to learn why people are canceling.

And the analytics are just amazing. And the fact is you got recorded phone calls. So what is recorded phone calls mean to me? It means training. It means I can listen to a perfect call and then I can listen to a call that maybe didn't go so well. And there's an old rule, Susie, I'm sure you heard of it. For every two compliments, you could give one basically reprimand or whatever you want to call it. So say, what I like about this call is your tone of voice and the way that you introduce the company. One of the things I found a little bit frustrating was when they asked for a price, you went right into price rather than telling them about our company and value. So like you said, keep it positive positive but and have have what i found is even dave shots he used

to have huge incentive programs right where he'd give thousands of dollars away a week to his csrs and they could win and they played this little spin game and everybody loves working for dave i don't do that because it would cost me too much money. But the thing is, he always makes it positive. And what's cool about that and what I've heard is people go out of their way to work for him. If he finds out, they find out he went to another company, they go find out where he's at because they know it's a fun atmosphere. It's a great culture. They can make money, but they know they're going to have to do their job. But they know they're going to get rewarded for it.

And sometimes people just want to get acknowledged. And call kept, you know, listen, I'm not trying to sell anybody this. I'm just saying it works for me and it works for the biggest companies in the world. I'm trying to say that Susie's a delightful person to work with. And you're going to get great results. Now, you might have something else, a CRM, but the fact that I'm trying to point out here is you've got to have analytics and key performance indicators about your business. And if you don't have these, you're at a huge disadvantage as a company like me, companies like Direct Energy, companies that

are actually scaling. I mean, we went, you know, we're growing tens of millions of dollars a year because of tools like call caps. So I just, I really can't say enough about it. There's, there's, I just, I want to show you guys what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you the user interface. If you're watching this, we're going to go through some different things. I'm going to show you how to navigate through there and how I use it. And it's just amazing because there's a human being listening to the phone call that cares nothing about Michael and my call center. They care about giving the right results. And trust me, does an analyst make a mistake every now and then?

Yes, they're human. But trust me, Susie fires them. She suspends them and then she fires them. So there's mistakes made every now and then. But I use Call Cat for my lead generation business. And basically what they say, was it a real potential lead? And it'll say solicitor call. It'll say parts call because I do not, when I sell leads,

I don't consider someone calling for lubrication a lead. Now, if they call A1 garage doors, I consider that a lead. But if they call, I don't want to charge people for stuff that maybe I internally think is a lead because most people don't. And then they'll discontinue my service. But it's beautiful because I don't touch anything. I literally let Susie and her team take care of everything. And then it goes and it charges them once a week. And it's got to be a real lead.

I mean, I didn't even get into how cool they have all these integrations. Tell me a little bit about HomeAdvisor because a lot of people listening to this go, HomeAdvisor is a crock of shit and you can't make money. You're just bidding to be the cheapest. Well, I got news for you. I booked nine out of 10 calls yesterday. I have a CSR that's dedicated. She gets five bucks for every home advisor. She's got the app on her phone. The second it comes in, she wants to make five bucks. So she calls them. Tell me a little bit about the integration with home advisor. So basically our integration is, it's, and it's a little different than home advisors. It's called rapid response. And I believe there's got another name, but it's different.

We, as soon as the homeowner hits the submit button, submitting their contact form, we call your office. We say you have an incoming HomeAdvisor, we press 1 to accept. The moment you press 1, we make an outbound call to the homeowner. And all this normally happens within 35 seconds or so, depending on how fast you answer your phone, or if we have to go through automation. So if we have to go through, you know, an auto attendant, you know, that says, please wait for the next available agent, if we have to go through that, that's going to take a little longer. But if it's an agent picking up the phone right away, within 35, 40 seconds, we do that.

So the home advisor continues to send you their email leads, text leads, whatever. We never interrupt with that. But the idea here is that if you're getting an email lead or a text lead, you know, no matter how good you are to be on top of them, there's a time delay. And what I find is that after a minute, a minute and a half, if you haven't called that caller back, they've already received two phone calls. So we try, we integrate that and we make. That's what kills me, Susie, is people don't believe in this stuff because they're too lazy. Do you know how many small businesses I talk to and I got to call them 10 times to get them the answer and then they call me and then they say I just a lot of them don't know how to hire the right help and I understand that because I was a one-man soldier myself and their phone rings and it almost gets annoying but don't use home advisor if you can't call people back that's a huge problem

and I just I'm sorry to interrupt but I just frustrates me. Don't say HomeAdvisor doesn't work. Don't say Yelp doesn't work unless you answer your phone every single time and you do whatever you can and you use tools like CallCap to book the damn call. Sorry, that's a little just, I got off topic. Well, HomeAdvisor has a different product that counts a lot. It's called Instant Connect. But the difference between Instant Connect and Rapid Response is if the homeowner is on the site and they say, yeah, go ahead and have them call me now, then they hit that button, call me now. But if the homeowner doesn't hit call me now, which, you know, most of them don't, then we track both of them.

So we know how many instant connect versus rapid responses are coming in. Most homeowners just fill out the form and wait. You know, if they need somebody to call them right this minute, they probably aren't going to use HomeAdvisor. Well, here's the deal deal why do people go to home advisor let's go ahead and talk about this they want three estimates most of the time if you're the quickest they're already impressed they're going this one this company has initiative they've got great reviews and then you call them and guess what they go you're too late i already the fact that you responded first and you're on top of it.

I do that on Yelp. I've got, it says service within an hour or fast responder. But you'd be surprised how much I care about this fast response. Because what you're saying is basically someone fills out a form, your system automatically connects versus the other system that's internally with there basically connects you with it. So it's almost like they fill out a form expecting three different people to call them. But the minute that it's filled out, the second Susie's software is connecting you to the owner and you're already the most impressive people out there. And that's, it's huge. And I got to tell you, I make, I'm going to use a word. It's kind of a difficult word. It's called a

buttload. I make a buttload of money using HomeAdvisor. I mean, and all these people I hear all the time, they say it doesn't work. Well, I'll tell you what HomeAdvisor has learned a lot. It used to be called service magic. They got a bad name. They've learned how to do business. They've learned to give better results and they give good customers. We make so much money. It's one of our lowest acquisition costs because a little secret about HomeAdvisor is they have what's called affiliates. Affiliates is just somebody who knows how to get leads that doesn't know how to sell them to the business. So they recruit the top affiliates in the world to do internet optimization, long-tail PPC, social media.

They do all these different things to get the calls in. And then now they're doing a lot of TV. And I don't know if you know this, Susie, I'm 90% sure you do, but they just bought Angie's List. Yes. So right now they're in the midst of integrating Angie's List within HomeAdvisor. And it's a powerhouse. I mean, if you're not going to be part of that, if you're not going to do Porch, if you're not going to do Google and pay-per-click and have a website, you might as well consider slowly closing down your business because you're going to lose revenue.

And you can tell I'm passionate about this stuff. I want the listeners out there to do the right thing. I want them to make money. And I'm not trying to sit here and sound like a broken record, but it just it bothers me when I hear owners that aren't taking advantage of things like this, because it's the unfair advantage. And if you're not going to be part of it, why are you in business? You know what I mean? What's your take on that, Susie? Well, no, if you have to, you know, you already know going in that you're going to have multiple people going

after one lead. You might as well be at least the first one to give it a try. You know, you might not like the lead, but nobody says you have to keep the lead, okay? Rapid response has nothing to do with your lead charge. The only thing is, is that what it does do is it does help you because the call is recorded. Theirs is not, ours is. And if that caller says, I have no idea, I never did this, I've been spammed, I've been this, you can send that call recording to HomeAdvisor customer service for a credit. So there are a lot of, you know, neat things about that wrap, attaching that rapid response to your HomeAdvisor. product and it is not limited it is not limited to home advisor i've got people using it on their

website where they sell product you know they sell out of form for an appointment and hit it and hope somebody gets back to them right away i have people using it on their website because they're they're interested in buying a certain product that e-commerce. So explain to me how it works on your website. Give me the dumb down. I don't know what the heck you're talking about. Explain it to me. I've never heard of it. So someone fills out a form on my website.

Explain to me basically what it does. It captures that phone number. It connects with one of my CSRs. Correct. So basically you guys have an api application process interface that takes the number and hooks it up with my phone right so yes we have to we do have to have an integration with your website webmaster whoever's hosting your site so that you know it's only as good an an API is only as good as it's a send receipt, right?

It's a push and pull. So I have to have somebody push that to us so that we can pull it out and get it going. But you have contact forms on your website. I see a lot of home service companies that said, do you want an appointment? I want somebody to call you, fill out this form. You know, and then they do and nobody gets back to them. Nobody gets back to them. Oh, my God.

Listen, if you had, listen, I do lead gen and this is driving me crazy because this is crazy. Listen, even I learn new things. And Susie, I'm going to give you a call later because I think this is this stuff. Listen, at the end of the day, Susie just doesn't do call monitoring. She's going to help those surveys turn into booked appointments. She's going to help home advisor. Tell me a little bit about the surveys you guys offer.

I just love talking to you about this stuff because it's so powerful. So tell me a little bit about the surveys you guys send out. So it's a pre-recorded message, which is completely legal to start out a survey after you've completed a job. You ask them some questions and some responses. It's automated. It's automated, right? And then, you know, based based on that if you get a bad response we'll send you an alert so that you can call that customer and the idea really is to be as fast as you can before they can get on the internet and start posting all kinds of negative reviews you get to the unhappy customers quick unhappy customers are more than likely to tell 22 other people with social media yelp angeles the bbb they're going to go out of their way to bash the crap out of you.

So get in front of those bullets and then use the survey to contact the happy customers to get them to spread the good word. They call it the gospel and send it out everywhere you can. So tell me a little bit how I can learn more a little bit. Well, first of all, let me just go into one more thing. Go to thehomeserviceexpert.com forward slash call cap. Susie decided with the owner and the business that they're going to give you a free month trial. She's going to talk with you, find out your business needs.

This is only available on the Home Service Expert. Homeserviceexpert.com forward slash call cap. C-A-L-L-c-a-p suzy i i don't we discuss a lot of stuff i want to talk about a few books you like and then i want to let you close it out with uh maybe something we didn't talk about that you think is important to the listeners okay um heart and cell is one of my favorite books you mentioned michael gulliero and that was really one of my favorite books that he put out. And I just can't seem to put my hands on it. And I guess I'm getting old. But he is from CEO Warriors. He puts out an excellent book as well. And then the other one is, you know, The Ultimate Sales Machine. Yes, I love that book. It's by Chet Holmes.

Yep, yep, Chet Holmes, right? So, you know, you can, what I like about, what I say about book reading is that obviously in sales, you're going to want to read a lot about sales. As an entrepreneur, you're going to read a lot about entrepreneur sales, but also read other types of books that, you know, can can also, you know, because there's there's a book that's called I think it's called The Human, The Human. To sell is human. And we always think that the extroverts are going to be the best at selling. to you know kind of read about that because some of your introverts or your your better sales people on the phone in in the home service industry because it's just so analytical that they want

to keep asking next thing you know they have a sale well i'm going to get you back on here suzy because this is one of the main five things i discuss everything in the home service expert dives in deep into the five main elements and booking the phone call. But you don't just book the phone call, do you? You hook us up with customers. You tell us about CSRs. You tell us the customer satisfaction rate about our technicians. You have API integration to CRMs, to Chargify, to billing systems. I mean, it's amazing. I'm just happy that I talked to the biggest call center I know, and they gave me your number because, quite honestly,

you guys are some of the biggest reasons I've been able to grow my business. And Susie's an amazing lady. She's sweet. She's always ready to help, and she's on it. And that's why, correct me if I'm wrong, but you're number one sales in the company, right? Yes. See that?

Yep, yep, she is. So, Susie, it's been a pleasure having you on. I am going to call you later because I need to talk to you about integrating a few more things. Obviously, you guys are always doing new stuff. I love doing this podcast because it helps out my business and it helps me learn so much.

So listen, homeserviceexpert.com forward slash call cap. And Susie, I appreciate you being on. I'll give you a buzz later, okay? All right, no problem. I just want to say one thing real quick. Those surveys can also be sent out via text message now. Surveys via text message.

Incredible. All right, Susie, I'll call you soon. Thanks. All right, 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. I will repeat that. Homeserviceexpert.com forward slash discovery and book your free call today.