You and your answering service have been in summer mode for a few months now. Exactly what that means depends on your management style, operation, and geographic location. Regardless of what summer mode looks like for you, there’s a different vibe in your answering service during the summer months than the rest of the year.

Though technically summer lasts for another month, effectively it ends soon, marked by Labor Day in the United States. Plan now to make the next season a good one.

Adjust Staffing Levels

Most answering services staff differently in the summer than they do in the spring and fall. Usually summer requires a higher level of staffing to make up for clients who are on vacation. This means you’ll need to scale back your schedule in a few weeks.

Cutting back on your schedule too soon or too much will result in being understaffed and not serving your clients to the best of your ability. This hurts your service level. However, not scaling back soon enough will result in being overstaffed and a bloated payroll. This hurts your bottom line. You want to avoid both scenarios.

If you’re not sure how soon to adjust and how much to adjust, look at last year’s numbers to get started.

Say Goodbye to Vacation Mode

Just as clients tend to take vacations in the summer, so does your management team and answering service staff. It seems like someone’s always on vacation, getting ready for vacation, or just coming back. This creates a vacation atmosphere in your office, and though the needed work gets done, extra work faces delays despite your best efforts to avoid holdups.

Once your office gets past a vacation mindset, attention to special projects and important initiatives can resume. Strive to make this mental switch as quickly as possible to capitalize on the opportunities before you.

Establish Key Goals

Because of summer mode and a vacation atmosphere, many leaders scale back on summertime goals and others don’t even pursue them. Whether this is acceptable or not, it usually occurs. But don’t let this mindset languish. Establish key goals for the fall now. Then embrace them with renewed energy right away. Don’t wait until September to consider setting fall goals. Do it now.

Seek A Big Win

Just because you’re in summer mode doesn’t mean you can coast for another couple of weeks. What big project or important initiative can you accomplish now, before summer’s over? Seek a big win to end summer and ride that momentum into the fall. It will make a huge difference.

Conclusion

Most people like summer, and though they continue to work, their work is usually a bit different. It’s not so deliberate or quite as intense. Plan now to slip out of summer mode and re-claim a more intentional focus for the fall. This will set you up well for the upcoming fall season and help move you successfully into the new year.

In our earlier post about evaluating your ATSI Award of Excellence results, we talked about the importance of consistency. Although the average of your total scores and the averages of each component of the calls is important, be sure to balance this with consistency.

Why Consistency Matters

Here’s what we said about consistency, “Your clients will subconsciously judge you based on consistency. When you’re consistent they know what to expect, and you meet their expectations every time.

“However, if you’re inconsistent, they have no idea what to expect, and you’ll fall short. Tomorrow’s poor call will negate today’s great one.”

An Example of Inconsistency

Let’s look at how fast your staff answers calls. We’ll consider this category because it’s easy to quantify and therefore easy to see why consistency is critical.

Let’s assume your goal is to answer all calls by the third ring. That’s a good and admirable goal. (Though your actual target maybe a bit faster or not quite as fast, we’re using this, not as a standard to shoot for but, as an example for our illustration.)

Next, let’s assume you achieve your goal. Congratulations! Your average speed to answer is three rings, exactly what your staff strives for and precisely what you promised your clients.

But before we get too excited, let’s look at the consistency element. (If you’re into math, this is called standard deviation. And if you’re not into math, forget we mentioned it.) Again, for the sake of illustration, let’s assume you answered five calls on the first ring and five calls on the fifth. This averages out to three rings, exactly aligned with your goal.

However, your clients’ callers will never experience you answering on the third ring. Half of the time you’ll answer really fast, which will delight them. The other half of the time you’ll take way too long, which will really frustrate them. They won’t know what to expect when they call. Will you answer quickly or slowly? What they will remember, however, is each time you took five rings to answer.

This becomes their perception of your work. Never mind that your average is three rings, which you far exceed half the time by answering in one. All they remember is five rings. And when that happens too often, they’re likely to cancel service because they don’t perceive you as answering quickly enough.

An Example of Consistency

Let’s make up another example. This answering service has a goal to answer every call within four rings. This isn’t as lofty as the first answering service, but their clients may perceive their quality as being better. Here’s why.

Let’s assume they hit their four-rings-per-call goal precisely. But, in addition, when looking at each individual call, let’s say they answered everyone on four rings. Whenever a client or their customers call, this service answers their call on the fourth ring, not sooner and not later. Four rings. Every time.

In this way, everyone expects a four-ring answer. And the answering service meets this expectation every single time. No one’s ever disappointed by a call ringing longer. Because of this consistency, clients perceive the quality to be higher than they would for the first answering service, even though the first service has a better average speed to answer.

The Next Step

Look again at the individual scores on each element of your calls from the ATSI Award of Excellence program. Look for categories where the rating deviates. This signals inconsistency. The higher the variation—such as half ones and half fives—signal highly inconsistent service. This hurts your clients’ perception of your quality. This is what you need to address to improve your quality in their minds.

When you do this, don’t simply look at improving your average. Instead strive to make your scores more consistent. In our example of ring counts, don’t work to move your average from three rings to 2.5. Instead look to eliminate all the five-ring-count calls. When you do this your average speed answer will decrease, but more importantly your consistency will increase.

Apply this example to whatever category has the most inconsistency on your ATSI Award of Excellence scoresheet. Then, once you’ve made that element more consistent, turn your attention to the next most inconsistent category.

Doing this will improve the quality of your service from the perspective of your clients and their callers. It will increase client satisfaction and decrease cancellations.

Spring is that time of year we usually associate with doing a thorough cleaning of our house, called spring cleaning. Whether we actually get around to doing it, of course, is another story. Let’s move the concept of spring cleaning from our home to our business. Here are some spring-cleaning projects we might want to consider for our answering service.

Get Rid of What We Don’t Need

Most businesses, including answering services, have items they don’t need and will never use. Get rid of them. Sell, recycle, or donate. Don’t overlook things that are broken or obsolete. Ditch them too. The point is to get rid of clutter. This will have a freeing, empowering impact.

Reorganize What We Keep

With a little extra space to work with by getting rid of things we don’t need, we now have the capacity to reorganize what we have left. This includes our equipment room, storage areas, and files—both the paper kind and the electronic kind. And as we go through our reorganization, we’ll probably stumble on more things we don’t need. We can get rid of them too. Bonus!

Make Room for More

We’ve cleaned up and reorganized, what do we do with the extra space? Make room for more. Not more stuff, but more revenue-generating, efficiency-enhancing resources. Perhaps the net result of this effort is opening up an office or at least providing space for an employee who needs a better place to work. Or maybe this effort will produce a work area for that new employee you want to hire but don’t know where to put.

Update What’s Outdated

There seems to be a never-ending supply of things that are outdated. Update them so they can actually be useful. The areas to consider are numerous. Look at paperwork and forms. Most answering services thrive on these, but outdated paperwork will hamper productivity.

What about policies and procedures? These things evolve over time and existing staff tends to adjust with them, but what about a new employee or person new to a position? These outdated resources will cause them to take the wrong action or make ill-informed decisions.

Next look at sales and marketing collateral. Does it promote services you no longer offer? Does it not include new services that you do offer? Make sure pricing and feature information is current.

And don’t forget your website. Does it look old and tired? Many answering service websites do. Does it still meet your needs or is it a bit clunky to use? Perhaps a few strategic tweaks will fix it, or maybe it needs a complete overhaul.

Make Staffing Changes

When it comes to spring cleaning, the most challenging consideration is often staffing. Most answering services have at least one less-than-ideal staffing situation. It might be someone who’s in the wrong position, a once-valued employee who is now dragging down the company, or a person who never should have been hired in the first place.

It’s easy to put off making needed staffing changes until next week. We hope things will get better. We want to believe the situation will fix itself. It seldom does. Take a deep breath and resolve to make the staffing changes necessary for your answering service to thrive. It might result in short-term pain, but when done right it will produce long-term gain.

Next Step

In reviewing this list, there’s a lot to do. But don’t let the number of options paralyze you into taking no action. Instead pick the one spring cleaning project that will accomplish the most and do it. When it’s done pick the next significant one and do it too. Keep going until you’ve checked off every item on your list, even if it takes all year.

Hopefully you had the opportunity to attend this year’s ATSI conference.

At the ATSI convention, we attended sessions, networked, and met with vendors. Brimming with ideas and inspiration, we left feeling energized, reinvigorated, and ready to make our answering service even better. Then we arrived at our office and had a hundred things confront us, urgent things that distracted us from doing what we wanted to do.

But don’t let that dissuade you from what’s important. Before you file and forget everything you learned, be intentional and take time to pursue a strategic approach to make things happen.

Here’s a four-step process to help you turn good intentions into valuable results.

Review Your Notes and the Information You Collected

Block out time to look at your notes and the business cards and literature you picked up at the convention. Divide them into two categories: things that will make a difference for your answering service and things you’ll never get around to. Set aside those things you’ll never get around to and focus on the rest.

Prioritize Activities

Look at the items that will make a difference in your answering service and are realistic to do. Prioritize them.

Ask, what is my answering service’s biggest need? This could be generating more revenue, decreasing expenses, or improving processes. Other things may relate to staffing, billing, or technical initiatives. Now with this greatest need in mind, which item—or items—on your list will best address it?

Now identify the second greatest need your answering service faces. What item—or items—will best correct that need? Continue in this way until you identified your top needs and assigned activities to help you fix them.

And for those activities that don’t align with your answering service’s top needs, set them aside. No matter how good those ideas are, they’re not going to address your big picture issues.

Make an Action Plan

Next, develop in action plan to address each one of these top needs your answering service faces, using the ideas that the convention spawned. Resist the urge to tackle all your top needs at once. Spread them out so you can focus on one thing at a time. Only when the first item is under way and moving towards completion should you consider the second initiative.

Get Staff Involved

Just because you attended the conference and have all these great ideas for improvement, doesn’t mean you need to do them alone. Get your staff involved, but resist the urge to dump the whole project on them. Instead, work with them, delegating some items and taking the lead on others. If you don’t take part in making things happen, little will happen.

Conclusion

Attending a telephone answering service industry conference or convention is a great way to connect with people and spawn ideas. But what you do with these ideas when you get home is what matters most. Follow this four-step process to turn your ideas into results:

1. Review your notes and information.
2. Prioritize activities.
3. Make an action plan.
4. Get staff involved.

If you do this, you’ll return to next year’s convention with a more profitable and better-run answering service to your credit. Then you can come up with new initiatives to make it even better.

Most everyone talks about quality service, but too often they can’t back it up

Telephone answering services typically compete in one of two ways. One is by the quality of their service and the other is by price. Let’s set aside competing on price, because there will always be an answering service out there willing to charge less. Besides, competing on price is a race to the bottom, which no one can win for the long-term.

Quality is Key

Instead let’s focus on competing on quality. When it comes to providing quality service, there are no limits as to how far an answering service can go. When you compete on quality it’s a race to the top, the exact opposite of competing on price.

However, quality is subjective. Most answering services claim to offer quality communication, but most of the time such assertions come without proof. So, the question becomes, how can an answering service prove to prospects they provide quality service?

The best way to do this is to present verification from an independent third-party. The ATSI Award of Excellence and the ATSI Call Center Award of Distinction programs are two ways an answering service or call center can provide verified, third-party validation that they do indeed offer quality service to their clients. Here’s how it works.

The Evaluation Process

The concept of testing and evaluating answering service quality is simple. However, just because the procedure is simple, doesn’t mean it’s easy. This process is time-consuming and labor-intensive, but the results are worth it.

Place Test Calls: The first step of the quality evaluation process is to place test calls. This requires a trained communicator who knows how to effectively pose as a prospective caller to contact an answering service’s clients. They pose as a mystery shopper over the telephone.

The first goal when placing evaluation calls is to be prepared and not let the person at the answering service who answers the phone know it’s a test. The second requirement is to know how to act to elicit the responses that are required to do a thorough evaluation. The third item is to avoid making the transaction too simple or unreasonably complex. Skill in placing test calls is essential to producing effective results.

Record Test Calls: In addition to meeting all the above objectives, the mystery shopper will also record the phone call. This is critical because the initial shopper is not the one who will evaluate the call. Someone else will. In fact, two other people will, maybe three.

The recordings are accumulated and saved for the next phase of the quality evaluation process. This step has the added benefit of creating a permanent record of the transaction for additional verification and subsequent follow-up by the answering service. This allows them to make additional quality improvements.

Score the Calls: The third step is to rate the calls. Again, this requires extensive training to ensure calls are consistently evaluated from one call to the next, and by one evaluator to the next. It takes practice and requires time to converge on this level of consistency, but it’s essential for the success of the program.

Two people will separately listen to and evaluate each recorded call against a 20-point quality checklist. These address the key issues that relate to answering service quality.

Compile the Results:Yet another person will take the quality valuations and compile a summary for each answering service being tested. The result is a numeric score that quantifiably indicates quality.

The Outcome

Some answering services, while good, may fall short of the quality threshold established by the testing agency. However, these answering services will still benefit, for they will now know the areas they fall short in. Then they can work to improve their quality and do better in next year’s evaluation. These answering services are to be commended for striving to improve the quality of their work.

Answering services that surpass the quality expectations of the testing agency are highly commended. They win official confirmation of providing quality service. They earn the ATSI Award of Excellence or the ATSI Call Center Award of Distinction.

Telephone answering services that earn the ATSI Award of Excellence, as well as call centers that achieve the ATSI Call Center Award of Distinction, are now armed with a valuable credential, the most valuable in the industry. They can verify to their prospects that they provide quality service. They can prove that they are among the best of the best.