EP: 218 Alyssa Briggs w/ Any Hour Group - Building the Ultimate Call Center Workforce

Live from the Any Hour Group, we were joined by Alyssa Briggs, one of the many key players that make Any Hour a success. Tune in to hear Alyssa's journey from CSR to CCR Manager and the transformative role of specialized roles in customer service. 

Here are 3 key takeaways:

1. Embrace Technology and Specialization: As your business grows, leveraging technology and creating specialized roles play pivotal roles in enhancing efficiency and customer service.

2. Invest in Training: Committing to regular and diverse training modes boosts team confidence and competence, paving the way for innovative problem-solving and growth.

3. Focus on People: Prioritizing employee morale and interdepartmental support improves workplace culture and drives profitability through enhanced service delivery.

This was a great conversation about your customer’s first point of contact, so you don’t want to miss it.

Find Alyssa
Website: https://anyhourservices.com/



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Transcript

Alyssa Briggs: 0:01

That's honestly one of the most exciting parts about growth is because when you're really small you think about, if I just have the people, or if I just have the staffing, or yeah, that's great that you have coverage to call these people back. I only have one CCR or CSR taking calls as you grow, there's more opportunity to become specialized and when you can specialize in things, it just gets, it gets really fun.

Evan Hoffman: 0:24

Hey, what's going on? We are back in Any Hour and we have Alyssa Briggs here. She is the CCR manager. She started 10 years ago. Working as a CSR, or CCR as you call it here then got into dispatch and now was the dispatch manager for a little while. Now you're back in the CCR department working as the manager here. 60, 000 calls have come through their call center so far this year. Not a small number.

Alyssa Briggs: 0:50

No.

Evan Hoffman: 0:51

Obviously things have evolved and things have changed and I'm excited to dive in a little bit into like the KPIs, what it is that you guys measure, how you're measuring it, and how that's evolved over time. Because for a lot of our viewers, they're not 100 million dollar companies and so being able to bring some of that information down to their level and kind of point out some of the things that y'all have learned over time but first, how'd you get here? What was it that attracted you to Any Hour? How'd you get the job? Why the trades? Why was this the place for you?

Alyssa Briggs: 1:18

It's a long weird story because before I started I thought I wanted to be an accountant.

Evan Hoffman: 1:23

Nice. So you're not dealing with people at all.

Alyssa Briggs: 1:27

Come to find out I like working with people and I'm pretty good at it but my uncle is an electrician here. He's not technically in the field for electrical anymore, but he is he does still work here and he was like Come work at any hour as one of our CCRs and I was like, okay, I'd never worked in an office before and I was like, I'm going to be an accountant but maybe I should figure out if I like to sit at a desk. Yeah, it was never intended to be a long term thing unless I could have been in accounting here after I got my bachelor's degree.

Evan Hoffman: 1:55

So you still went to school, finished that, and then came to work here?

Alyssa Briggs: 1:57

I am an Any Hour College dropout. That's for sure. I'm not the only one but yeah, I started into my bachelor's degree. I finished my associates and started taking some bachelor's degree classes for accounting and my manager at the time was like, Hey, I support college. He's brilliant, Lincoln and he's but I just want to tell you, you don't need your. degree to be successful here and I was like, okay cool don't gotta tell me twice yeah I for honestly, I think I went to school because I liked, I just liked to learn and it was becoming really expensive for me and I got to the point here where at any hour we do so many trainings every single week and I was learning about different types of communication tools and leadership and business development tools and we were just reading so many fun books and I had the opportunity to get certified through different programs here that I'm like, I'm getting paid to go to school by working at any hour. I don't have to pay to go to school otherwise. So I quit and I cried, but it was the right decision.

Evan Hoffman: 3:04

Seems to have worked out not so bad. Yeah working in the call center now that's where we are in case everyone doesn't know and this is just like one portion of it here. It goes all the way down over there as well we'll show you a clip afterwards one of the things you mentioned is you've got six steps to booking a call and the reason I want to get into this is because I feel like the call center is one of those things that gets overlooked a lot of times when it comes to home service companies, even though it's that first point of contact, and arguably one of the most important into establishing the relationship and what it's going to be like working with that company, everyone focuses on we got to make sure we're repairing the equipment. We've got to make sure that we're running the call. We've got to make sure that we're selling on those calls. The call center is something that needs so much attention in my opinion, because it is that, front facing point of the company it's the first thing that's going to diffuse a customer who's probably a little bit agitated because it's incredibly important. So what are your six steps to, to making sure happen on every single call?

Alyssa Briggs: 3:57

They're the same as our technicians, and there's a reason why they're congruent with the technicians is because we're telling the customers what they can expect from their technician when the technician comes out and so we intentionally try to mirror that flow with the customers to help them already be prepared for when the technicians get out to their house with their six steps and let the customer re know, reset expectations again with the customer on what they're here to help them with. Prepare, of course and then greet, and explore, present, execute, wrap up yeah, so if you can hit something in all of those points, then the customer is going to have a consistent experience when they call, and when the technician comes out yeah.

Evan Hoffman: 4:37

Makes sense. Obviously the department has grown quite a bit in the ten years since you first started here. Yeah you were working as a CCR with a team of, I think you said five to seven and that was CCR and dispatch all in one, to now being 50 plus between the two departments now. Fielding, what was it, 700 calls a day? Is that what it was?

Alyssa Briggs: 4:56

Yeah we take anywhere between six to eight hundred calls a day on average right now.

Evan Hoffman: 5:02

If you could go back to that CCR that you were 10 years ago and look at what it is that was happening then, what changes, what adaptations needed to happen so that the department could become as efficient as it is today?

Alyssa Briggs: 5:16

Technology. Technology, yeah we have a whole subset of our department now that revolves around texting and just different notifications and dashboards and reports to make sure that if things are falling through the cracks, that we're just there to pick them up and make sure there's no lost opportunities, no customers left behind. When I first started, we had a sheet of paper printed out that we'd have to go through and highlight that we called this VIP member to remind them of their service and now things are just so automated and we really manage the exceptions. If I would have known. how much technology would have, could have helped me as a CCR. I would have leaned into it a lot more, we're there now and there'll be plenty of more to look forward to, but technology has really helped our department take care of our customers and enhance their customer experience quite tremendously yeah.

Evan Hoffman: 6:03

Have y'all started to use AI at all in any of your the tech stack that you're putting together now? Not so much yet?

Alyssa Briggs: 6:09

No, we have some things that are automated. We have some automations, but not as far as the human interaction, but there's people talking to everyone yeah.

Evan Hoffman: 6:16

So one of the things that I know we've heard before on the show and not specific to the call center, we interview some people like, Wyatt or Dustin or any of the other big companies across the U. S and for some of the smaller guys, they feel like this doesn't apply to me because I'm not at that level yet. Yeah. But when you think of managing a call center of 50 plus people, there's a lot of different moving parts that are orchestrating there and as a business owner of a million dollar shop. Yeah, you're not taking as many calls, but you have so many responsibilities that are there. So if you were to look at how you're measuring the performance of your people now, What are the most important things that you're looking at on the dashboards that you've built out that an owner would need to see in order to be able to make improvements at a glance as to what's going on in his call center?

Alyssa Briggs: 7:08

Booking percentage, of course, and I think no matter how big or small you are, booking percentage is one of the most important things. if you're a really small company, booking percentage is even more important because that one call carries so much more weight as far as the growth of your company than if you're a big company. So booking percentage is one phone availability is another one, making sure that people, for the hours that they're getting paid the weight that they're carrying on the phones is with, is in line with that.

Evan Hoffman: 7:34

So if you only have one CSR, how do you manage those breaks to make sure that they're available to answer the call?

Alyssa Briggs: 7:40

We actually do have some subsets of our department where there's only a need for one person. So when they go on break, or they go to their one on one, or they go to training, we have to cover that person and we throw someone in for an hour to make sure that they're covered we were small, I'll tell you that person was service manager. Okay so when dispatch and CCRs needed to go to training for their one hour of the week and we were not going to skip that training, service managers would come in and they'd help dispatch for an hour and they'd cover the phones for an hour even if we came back and it was all on a sticky note that this person needed a call back, there was somebody that was there to help cover.

Evan Hoffman: 8:13

To help the customer no matter what I love that and that's exactly what I wanted to hear and I think is really helpful is that there's no one that is in the company to be able to step in and answer a phone call and make sure that the customer is getting taken care of. I love that.

Alyssa Briggs: 8:28

Yeah, they'll tell you. They'll tell you about it and that they're happy that we're not there anymore, but that they have some perspective in doing that helps unify the different departments by helping each other out like that.

Evan Hoffman: 8:39

Absolutely. When you look at booking percentage, do you base it off of the total volume of calls, or do you base it off of the actual potential customers that you could have had?

Alyssa Briggs: 8:48

Lead booking percentage so we're not going to show that it's a lost opportunity for someone that was calling, looking for an invoice to be sent for services that they already had performed which a lot of our calls aren't leads. There's a lot of people that have questions about things that is not necessarily booking an appointment. So we field all of those in our department. But the booking percentage is based off the leads and how you classify the call as a lead or not a lead and if we lost a lead.

Evan Hoffman: 9:14

Got it. How do you classify your leads?

Alyssa Briggs: 9:16

Is it a service that we offer?

Evan Hoffman: 9:17

Yeah.

Alyssa Briggs: 9:18

Then it's a lead.

Evan Hoffman: 9:19

Perfect.

Alyssa Briggs: 9:19

Yeah. It's very black and white. Could we have done that job? Yeah.

Evan Hoffman: 9:24

Yeah, service we offer, area we provide it, done. It's a lead. Perfect. Because that's something that I know from a marketing company is incredibly frustrating when we're looking at excused calls and the CSR booked it or marked it as an excused call simply because they couldn't book it because they weren't available to book it.

Alyssa Briggs: 9:42

Yes. Yeah. No, we're very, I have a lot of questions from CCRs like, is this a lost call? I'm like, Try back in a week if they needed a week to book the appointment or call them at the end of the day after they talked to their husband or whatever, but those are leads yeah.

Evan Hoffman: 9:55

Yeah and so you do have them call back and how do you manage that?

Alyssa Briggs: 9:59

Outbound calling is done in our downtime, but I had mentioned that we have a lot of different subsets of our department and so we've got our tech day our texting, we have our inbound and then we have some outbound and so people have different scheduling to help cover. Making sure that the inbound call is always taken, but that the things that are falling through the cracks still get picked up.

Evan Hoffman: 10:20

Because that's yeah, how can we take advantage of every opportunity?

Alyssa Briggs: 10:22

That's honestly one of the most exciting parts about growth is because when you're really small you think about if I just have the people or if I just have the staffing or yeah, that's great that you have coverage to call these people back. I only have one CCR or CSR taking calls as you grow, there's more opportunity to become specialized and when you can specialize in things, it just gets, it gets really fun. Yeah.

Evan Hoffman: 10:43

How does the personality type differ when it comes to outbounding versus inbounding? Do you hire specific people or does everyone cover it?

Alyssa Briggs: 10:49

That's a good question, and I would say it's not so much outbound versus inbound, but we do have a lot of different preferences for texting versus calls yeah, so we do have some CCRs that are, that very much would prefer to talk to someone on text, and they're very eloquent with their words, and they love to spend the time to phrase a very well thought out response, where some people are better on the fly, just talking to customers in real time, and so there are different personalities that prefer different things, which allows us to set our people up for more success, too, where if I were to just force somebody that's better at texting to take calls or to outbound cold call people, I might be putting them in a position where they're gonna be set up for failure more than, Now that we've grown to into more specialized positions, I can put people in different roles knowing that I'm setting them up for success.

Evan Hoffman: 11:40

I love that.

Intro: 11:41

Yep.

Evan Hoffman: 11:41

One of the things that I've always been fascinated about with any hour is your training cause it seems like it's almost an obsession in every department. What does the training look like for your CCRs? How much time is invested into it? Why is it that you put so much emphasis on it?

Alyssa Briggs: 11:56

Because people are important and if the only thing that they have to look forward to when they come to work is just picking up and hanging up phone calls, then they're not going to want to come and invest any energy into growing the business. If they feel like their ideas and their insight and suggestions are valued and being applied, then we're going to get more ideas and more insight and more suggestions, which, you can't do something the same way that you've always done it if you're looking to grow, and so getting people bought into the business is really important. You can't do that by saying, just answer the phone, pick up the call, hang up the call. You have to have human interaction, you have to have relationships that are built with the people that you work with and so we do that through training and coaching and one on ones and people like it because they feel like they've got a say in, in where they're going here and what they do each day.

Evan Hoffman: 12:49

And so what is the cadence of the training that you run? Because I know you do some group, you do some one on one, you've got the personal coach as well. So what is that cadence? What does it look like?

Alyssa Briggs: 12:59

Yeah, so weekly one on ones, 15 20 minutes with their manager that's me, I have an assistant manager and a supervisor. We all help take care of all the 30 in our department and then we do weekly trainings, which are with your department. We have to split ours into two because we can't pull everybody off the phones all at one time. So we do two weekly trainings that half the team, those are an hour and then we've got, bi weekly coaching sessions, which is on their actual calls, feedback on the call flow, the scorecard of the call, different roadblocks that they run into for objections customers might present to them and that's bi weekly one on one yeah and then every four to six weeks or so we'll do a ride along where we'll actually sit with them real time in while they're taking a call live on the call floor, not their coaching sessions are where they go back and listen to call recordings and so a ride along is in real time where we're just like, hey, I'm just gonna sit with you. Will you take a few calls? Yeah and that's not as often, but they've get, they get a lot of interaction with leadership and coaching and opportunities to, to throw whatever out on the table that they've got going on.

Evan Hoffman: 14:02

And that's one of the things that I'm really excited for with AI is that ability to have something that's listening to the calls and being able to provide real time feedback. We see that already with RILA, with CXC in the field where technicians have it and it's giving that real time feedback back to them to bring that into the call center and to provide you with that ammunition to say, Hey, go talk to Sarah because she's screwing up this call and she needs some help right now. But to have that real time feedback, I'm really excited for it and I'm sure it's, it's more ammunition for you, more KPIs that you can look into.

Alyssa Briggs: 14:35

And we do have some stuff like that. I don't have any reports pulled on it, but I'm sure that I could where the transcripts will say, hey, chill out your tone a little bit, or try using these empathy statements. And there's things that AI will help with on the transcripts of the phone calls, to let the CCR know if their call is going positively or negatively and I'm sure I could pull reports on that, but I don't know.

Evan Hoffman: 14:58

Wouldn't it be cool if you could get their color code of the caller when you're on the phone with them, and their temperaments and everything, and it's just giving the CCR that kind of information in real time.

Alyssa Briggs: 15:07

The needs and wants of specific people that are calling in or, how we would phrase a specific question or our tempo or tone and, we'll pretend to be different personalities because it's important to flex to, to our customers based on their color code yeah.

Evan Hoffman: 15:22

No, a hundred percent. Yeah. No, I think all of that is fantastic and being able to get with your people one on one is incredibly important because this job is not easy. You've got a lot of customers that are calling in, that, let's face it, no one's excited to drop 10, 20, 30, 000 on a new air conditioner, right? And when your power's out, or your toilet's backed up, and all these, it's never a happy call that they're making or rarely at least.

Alyssa Briggs: 15:50

Occasionally, yeah, occasionally it is, but for the most part they're calling under some stress.

Evan Hoffman: 15:54

Yeah and so that weighs on your people and so the more attention that you can give back to them, the more training, the more coaching and the better the environment you can make it for them. The greater the experience they're going to deliver to customers so.

Alyssa Briggs: 16:06

I agree. I totally agree.

Evan Hoffman: 16:08

As we wrap up, what is one question that you wished people would ask you more, but they don't? Now this can be business related or personally related.

Alyssa Briggs: 16:17

I don't know.

Evan Hoffman: 16:17

I know it's a tough question.

Alyssa Briggs: 16:18

I have no idea. I, a lot of people ask me questions that they want to know about our call center and our KPIs and I feel like

Evan Hoffman: 16:26

So what's the thing that they're missing then? Because a lot of people will ask those questions. What's a question that they should be asking?

Alyssa Briggs: 16:32

I do think that I get asked a lot what's the secret? What's the one thing? If I could do one thing, what would you say? What would you advise me on? What's the silver bullet? What's, what do you guys got in the water? And it's I just think it's important to focus on your people. I think that they think it's one, process that we follow or one KPI that we track or one report that we've created or one training that we execute really well and it's not that honestly, it's just prioritizing our people and I don't think they ask that enough about I could go through our department and show you all the cool things that we do for recognition and shout outs and morale is profitable. I think good morale is profitable and you can't necessarily build a report around that and you can't necessarily map out a KPI around just having happy people in your department and so I don't think that's asked enough as far as we keep morale up.

Evan Hoffman: 17:29

And do you think that's through your training and the one on ones that you learn those things and you're able to recognize it? Or is there something else?

Alyssa Briggs: 17:35

Training and one on ones are a part of it, but it's not the biggest part, honestly there's CCRs that run around the call floor all the time just showing recognition, appreciation and giving recognition and emails that go out just saying thank you and like this person was awesome or look at this review that came through with this person's name and it's not even me doing those things. It's just, they feel appreciated through maybe the one on ones and the trainings, but it steamrolls into, I want to do this, I want to have a board with people's pictures on it, and I want to celebrate these big wins for them and it's not me putting in that legwork. It's, they're just, they're happy, and so they want to help make other people happy.

Evan Hoffman: 18:16

No, it's 100 percent true, right? And it's funny, I came up with Kevin too, the same idea of the best thing that you can do to deliver a five star customer experience is take care of your people. Because when you take care of your people, they're going to take care of customers. Yeah. Awesome. Thank you so much for this, Alyssa. I appreciate it and until next time, cheers.

Thaddeus Tondu: 18:37

Well, That's a wrap on another episode of HVAC Success Secrets Revealed. Before you go, two quick things. First off, join our Facebook group, facebook.com/groups/hvacrevealed. The other thing, if you took one tiny bit of information out of the show, no matter how big, no matter how small, all we ask is for you to introduce this to one person in your contacts list. That's it. That's all one person. So they too can unleash the ultimate HVAC business. Until next time, cheers.