Three Vital Questions

Customer Emails

In 1998, when emails first began to arrive, it is fair to say that they were treated as a novelty.

I remember one of my very senior field based colleagues (a prize to anyone who can guess who it was) at the time had his secretary print off his emails at the end of each day, put them in an envelope and post them to him at home every night. He would then scribble on them and put them back in the post for her to type up the replies.

In a world like that, most agents would cheerfully ignore incoming customer emails saying “if they were serious, they’d ring up”.

Even my own standard process at that time was that emails should be printed off and handed out at the morning meeting for each negotiator to make contact. We would phone them if they didn’t answer, or if they didn’t give a real number then we’d bin them. We certainly wouldn’t email them back as we only had one “email machine” in each branch.

But twenty years later, things couldn’t be more different. People get dissatisfied very quickly if you don’t respond. The modern world of Apple, Amazon, Uber, Just Eat etc., sets people’s expectations in a whole different place.

Businesses like that set the bar for all of the other things that people “consume”.

Three Questions

So, in my presentation I talked about the three questions that I always ask potential Callwell customers.

1. Do you care how quickly incoming customer emails are dealt with?
2. Do you measure the performance of your branches against a set standard?
3. Are you happy with your performance?

If the answer to 1 is no, I suggest to them that we talk about football, The X Factor or Brexit instead because talking about Callwell would clearly be a waste of time.

If the answer to 1 is yes, but the answer to 2 is no, I suggest to them that we talk again once they have done so.

If the answer to both 1 and 2 is yes then it’s all down to number 3.

In two years, I’ve only had two customers say yes to all three question (they both know who they are, don’t you?) In both cases I shook them warmly by the hand and said well done, Callwell can do nothing for you.

If the answer to 3 is no, then I know that I have found the next Callwell customer. This is a business that cares (really cares) about customer service and is prepared to invest in improving it.

Email Leads

Callwell enables our customers to respond to all email leads with an outgoing phone call within seconds.

Callwell displays all incoming emails in a separate dashboard away from the routine inbox.

Callwell score gives our customers a real time leaderboard of how their branches and regional managers are performing against each other.

For an online demo click here.