 Thank you for calling Lawrence Systems, and we hope you're having a fantastic day. If you know your party's extension, you can dial it at any time. If your day is less than fantastic, press 1 for our support team or 5 for ours and directions. If you're looking to help make your technical project fantastic, press 2 for sales, or if you just want to learn more about us, head over to LawrenceSystems.com. That is my current greeting right here in August of 2019. I wrote that script a while ago, it's been a greeting for a little while. When people call you, that's the first impression they have of your company. Now, everyone thinks that websites are, you know, it's a digital age, it's 2019. It is, and I think a website's important, I'm not discounting that, but a lot of people have nice websites, and that doesn't give that human level of interaction. We try, we have some videos on there and things like that, we've worked on that part of it, but that's not the only component. Still, a lot of people pick up the phone and call you. You don't get this magic amount of inbound leads. They do come in from email and things like that, but people want to talk to people, especially when you're in the service business. And this is one of the things I want to talk about is answer the phone. And what I mean by that is you, as the company, answer the phone. I have gone through and called places when I needed service, like plumbing, for example. I called around and I went through places that had answering service and I skipped right over them. So as I realized it went to voicemail or an answering service, called the next person until I was actually talking to someone that worked there. This is typical of a lot of people. I'm not alone in this. I know because we still get calls all the time. We've landed some really big deals because people are like, wow, you actually are a person who works there? Yeah. And my staff starts answering technical questions for them, you know, kind of the finding out what they need, talking about what help they might need. And that is huge because we hear all the time from clients, man, I called three other places and yeah, they all don't answer the phone or they have an answering service and they didn't get back with me right away. And once you start becoming more disconnected by putting a layer in between like an answering service, well, now you may not feel that same push or incentive to interact with the client. And the client feels it too that they've just been delegated out to an answering service that their call was not as important as you thought it was. I know there's people screaming, but I like answering services and I see all the time this question come up in the IT forums of, you know, should we get an answering service? Not really. My personal opinion is no, I've never had one. I've never even thought about using one. That personal connection we start building with clients starts with, you know, that phone call, that being personal. That's why we have kind of enthusiastic first impression when they call us. I want them to have a fantastic day. If they're not having a fantastic day, press one for support. By the way, I'm a service company. That's why it's not one for sales. Two, sales and secondary. I say that because we are a service first. There's an entire, you know, thought process I had in putting that together. It wasn't arbitrarily, I don't know, just use the one button for this. It's, I want people to have that immediate not go through some long drawn out menu that if you're calling me for help, I am here to help. And I would like that impression when other companies do it as well. I, the company I've used for plumbing, contracting, for fixing the house or anything is because they are easy to get a hold of. I didn't have to go through layers. I didn't have to listen to long drawn out menus to get somewhere. And this is just a really important aspect that I think people sometimes overlook. They focus really heavily on the website and then they try to find the best answering service who has the best voice, but you really need to answer yourself because I pick up clients all the time. Like I said, they call us and go, wow, you're the first people to answer the phone. Yeah, we are. I have always prided myself on that. And yes, I did it when I was a one-man operation. When I first started out before I had employees, my phone number forwarded to my cell phone. Now, that's an important aspect too. Don't just give out your cell phone. It's really hard to ever take that back or then you have to port your cell phone to become your business number. That's a different issue. I bought a phone number, set it up, answered it when I was in my office. When I was out of the office, I had a forward system that forwarded to my cell phone. That way I knew at some point in time I was going to relinquish that to someone else to answer the phone, which I have as I've grown as a company. Now, the other thing that comes up is whether or not you should even have an IVR. I was hesitant for a long time before I had the voice recording before they pressed one. I used to just want it to land right on the phone. I've changed my mind about that over time. And it also dramatically cuts down on all those stupid spam calls so you're not picking up the phone for all those advertisements because the advertisements, they detect like an IVR and they don't go any further at all. But I just want to throw that out there that this question comes up. This is my opinion on it, but I will tell you it. My opinion is based on being in business for 16 years and getting a lot of calls that we got another one the other day, which prompted this video of someone says, yeah, we're just so happy you guys answered the phone, right? Yeah. Wow. I didn't think answering a phone would be the bar by which you were judged. I mean, obviously it's a pretty low one, but I'm like, well, I answered the phone and they called the other companies and it just goes to voicemail or the one that had answering service and the person didn't call back. And it's just like, wow, well, that's why I'm kind of feeling vindicated that we do it this way. Yes, there's an expense with it. Yes, I do have a person I end up paying that is supposed to be doing some technical work that sometimes get caught up in phone calls. But it has led to so many more sales that it has paid for that person's salary to be answering the phone. And they do other things too. It's not like the phone rings absolutely nonstop. Now we do, and this is partly because of YouTube. Hi, guys. We get a lot of phone calls and we decided the after hours does go to a voicemail box, but we have a process and procedure where we all see the box. If there's a voicemail in it alerts all of my technicians and we do evaluate that message immediately. It becomes as an attachment to all of our emails and we figure out who's going to address it and we make sure it gets addressed very quickly. We have a process for that internally. And I say that because I was getting a lot of random after-hours phone calls, sometimes at two in the morning from people that just they got used to the fact that we answered the phone even at two in the morning because it went through calling all of our cell phones and we decided, OK, enough of that. We'll let it go to a voicemail box. That way we can evaluate the callback because ideally the after-hours service is for emergency service or businesses, not people who just, I have a question about this thing I've seen on YouTube. That happened a whole lot when people found out we had after-hours service. I tried changing the system to say this is not for, I have a question about a video on YouTube and it didn't work at all. So now they have to leave a voicemail. We do have other ways clients can contact us directly that are managed clients. We just don't have it in our IVR anymore for that. But we do after-hours emergency for non-contract companies as well. That happens sometimes. They call us at odd hours because they're in a situation that requires immediate attention. And we do, that's another way we've picked up new clients is by calling back right away. They left a voicemail on emergency services. There's someone we don't even know, but we'll call them back even at odd hours, like one in the morning. I've called clients going, what's up? It sounds like you're having a problem. And when you're that person who can help solve that problem, either quickly or by going out there or scheduling time, it puts a little bit more confidence in them because we do respond. And that's the whole point of all this is managing that first impressions and being responsive to clients because that is huge. And just because it's 2019, just don't assume they're going to email you, message you or look at your fancy website and then pick up the phone and say, hey, oh, wow, call service and not drop you. That's a frequent where it's hard to track, but you will realize people, once they find out you're an answering service, they will drop off. I know I do it for other service-based companies. So just some food for thought. And my opinion on this, you can hammer down in the comments and reply to me and tell me I'm wrong. My opinion is I'm right. Fight me. OK, maybe that's a bit pushing it. But I just wanted to share this and get this out there. Thanks. Thanks for watching. If you liked this video, give it a thumbs up. 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