Mark,

More often than not, technicians are the worst people to have answering the phone. To them, any problem is "a piece of cake." And you know how little a piece of cake is going to go for. Techs will try to diagnose over the phone and they price over the phone. Even when exposed to the proper training, it has been my experience, they do well for a while, but soon go back to their old habits because that's what they know.

Our best managers on the phone are non-technical. I don't want to turn this post into a novel, but we have keyword-level call tracking with call analytics. Essentially, what that means, is that we get a scored report on every single inbound phone call coming into the shop.

Although each phone call IS recorded, we only listen to a small minority of the phone calls for quality assurance, but EVERY phone call is machine "listened to" and run through hundreds and hundreds of algorithms, listening for certain words, phrases, tempo, emphasis, etc.

We're actually able to accurately "score" our managers on what percentage of sales inquiries they convert into appointments. We, or the manager themselves, can access the scoring or the recorded calls, online 24/7, as everything is stored online in the cloud.

When we are paying around $13/click for PPC advertising, we want our managers to convert that caller into an appointment. We don't want them to be trying to diagnose a transmission problem or selling a rebuild over the phone. That's not what the phone is for. Who, in their right mind, would buy ANYTHING for several thousand dollars over the phone????????

The ONLY thing we will price of the phone is a simple fluid and filter change.

When a shop owner takes the phone seriously, like it should be, they can almost double their revenue. For example, we are about a $700K/yr. shop. 4-bays, 3K sq. ft. Nothing special. After we started PPC advertising and call tracking (no other changes) we went up to $1.3M/yr. True story.

I don't know how well this would work for a General Repair shop, but it works well for a transmission shop.

Larry Bloodworth
Technical Information Specialist/Technician
Tanner Transmissions
Draper, Utah, USA