No one ever wants to feel abandoned. This goes for all walks of life – and even the inner workings of your home service company. That’s why Leadhub has launched our Abandoned Calls Playbook – a guide to monitoring calls that somehow fell through the cracks.
In short, an abandoned call is a call that ServiceTitan cannot associate with a job or customer. It’s a call that is, basically, not connected to the platform – and floating in the ether.
If you are struggling with understanding ServiceTitan, Leadhub is a ServiceTitan Certified Marketing Provider that can help your home service company to implement the tool how it should be used.
What Are Abandoned Calls?
Abandoned calls are calls that have not been assigned inside of ServiceTitan. These calls have the potential to make a call center look bad and like they’re not doing their job. That could be the case, but it might also be a situation where a business owner or technician is answering the phones – especially in smaller companies.
Either way, it means the person who answered the call isn’t clicking the green speech bubble when a call populates inside of ServiceTitan. That green bubble is what connects the call in the backend of the software. It brings in information like caller ID, how that call was acquired and any details of previous jobs.
The Problems Caused By Abandoned Calls
You can probably imagine any number of problems that come along with abandoned calls. The biggest issue is it makes it hard for business owners and marketing partners to have a full picture of their marketing efforts.
“The issue we’re trying to solve is we want to give credit to the right medium,” said Aaron Watters, Leadhub’s CEO. “If you get a call in the morning about a water heater replacement from a pay-per-click lead and it’s not associated to the customer or the job, the customer may call back later – but call direct. Then it gets marked as a direct call in the system. It strips the attribution out from the first call being a pay-per-click call.”
Another major issue with abandoned calls is they can often be leads that aren’t properly listed as leads. This means, inside of ServiceTitan, it might look like you’re getting a bunch of bad calls. The reality is the calls aren’t being properly organized, so we’re not getting an accurate picture of how the call center is actually performing.
The Abandoned Calls Playbook also helps clean up customer service issues. For instance, a husband and wife might be calling from different phone numbers. Following the Abandoned Calls Playbook means all those phone numbers will be connected to the same job and the same call log to deliver a full, customer service picture.
The Abandoned Calls Playbook
You might be asking yourself, what is the Abandonded Calls Playbook and how will it help my company?
- It starts with someone running the abandoned call log every, single day. It’s much more manageable to review 10 calls a day than 100 or 500 once a week.
- That person will then dive through each call and associate them to the proper CSR and give the proper call attribution.
- Finally, after it’s tagged properly, that person will figure out if there are any calls that need to be followed up with. A successful CSR will go in and hear that someone said they will call back but never did – so they can be marked as someone to call first thing the next morning.
“This sets up the outbound side,” Watters said. “We know this would put them ahead. A lot of times, especially if it’s an underperforming call center, they’re just looking for inbound. They rarely do outbound follow-up.”
It’s not just short-term outbound efforts, either. If taking the age of the AC unit is part of your company’s script, that caller can be marketed to with an email newsletter when their AC unit reaches replacement age. Marketing partners can’t do this without accurate data on the front end.
The Abandoned Call Playbook also helps with coaching. If a CSR manager is handling the duties, it’s a perfect opportunity to grade the call center on some of the key things every call center should be doing.
Things like:
- Opening the conversation by introducing themselves with a script from the company.
- Watching tone.
- Getting the caller’s information into the system before diagnosing the problem.
“What a lot of call centers do, especially if it’s an owner answering the phone, is they’re already solving the problem before getting the caller’s email address in the system,” Watters said. “It’s all about getting that caller into the database so we can remarket to them later.”
If your home service business is going to invest in an amazing software like ServiceTitan for your CRM, you definitely want to make sure it has the most accurate data possible.
“Whatever CSRs take in from the customer will result in future marketing decisions by the company or on behalf of the company,” Watters said. “This playbook ensures the data is accurate and set up with fail-safes to make sure companies can make good marketing decisions in the future.”
