Every call is a quote, and nobody was free to pick up
AlarmCCTV has been fitting alarms, CCTV and doorbells since 1985, and the patch is far bigger than the Glossop base suggests. Lyndon Gray drives out to Doncaster, Scunthorpe, Wigan and Stoke, which can mean an hour in any direction before the first fixing goes in. Julie-Anne runs the admin and the logistics from the office.
Almost every inbound call is the same thing: somebody who wants a quote. Lyndon does not answer the phone while he is fitting a system, and Julie-Anne does not have the time to take every call. The business had already dropped its old answering service and fallen back on an answerphone, which is not much of a welcome for a customer who has just decided they want an alarm.
Why they left the answering service behind
The previous provider was competent enough and billed by the call. What it could not do was sound like it cared. An outside answering service is not part of your company, as Julie-Anne puts it, and it is never going to be as invested in the business as the people who own it.
Lyndon, the engineer of the pair, found Cyberstaff and made the decision to switch. He set the whole thing up himself and never once moaned about it, which Julie-Anne takes as proof that it was easy. She was not convinced at first, so she rang the number herself. The AI Receptionist sounds as involved in the business as the owners are, and that was the part that won her over.
Four in ten new customers, and around £20,000 of work
Three months in, Julie-Anne estimates that roughly 40% of the company’s new customers have come through calls the AI Receptionist answered, which is around 40 clients out of about 100. At an average installation value of about £500, that is in the region of £20,000 of new work in a quarter.
The mechanism is not complicated. A caller who wants a quote gets one booked at the moment they ring, instead of reaching an answerphone and dialling the next installer on the list. People fill in web forms, hear nothing back, and pick up the phone instead, and that is the call AlarmCCTV now catches.
Callers think they are speaking to Julie-Anne
One customer told Lyndon that his wife was very professional on the telephone. It was not his wife, it was the AI Receptionist, and Lyndon decided not to spoil it. Several callers have said they only worked it out right at the end. Plenty of AlarmCCTV customers are at the older end and simply want somebody to pick up the phone and agree a day, and the word that keeps coming back from them is efficient.
One caller did realise. When the AI Receptionist asked whether there was anything else it could help with, he asked for a Porsche. It replied that they were good, but they did have limits. He thought it was brilliant. In three months, not one caller has complained.
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