Elevating Customer Service into the Stratosphere with David Lord: Secrets to Transforming CSR Call Centers

Unlock the secrets to a customer service revolution with David Lord, GM at Nexa, as he joins me, Corey Barrier, to dissect the evolution of answering services into powerhouse CSR call centers. Our conversation is a goldmine for anyone looking to revamp their approach to customer interactions, as David imparts his wisdom on hiring for conversational intelligence, tailoring scripts, and utilizing technology to not just hit the mark but shoot it into the stratosphere. You'll get an insider's look at how Next is rewriting the script of customer service operations, turning common pitfalls into stepping stones for unparalleled success.

Feel the pulse of your business's heartbeat through the lens of customer engagement and learn the true cost of missed calls—a lesson many learn the hard way. David and I tackle the critical need for quick lead follow-ups, integrating tech to bolster service quality and strategies to keep your lines buzzing even during the busiest seasons. Our deep dive into call-back rates and first-call resolution will leave you equipped with the strategies to turn every ring into a win for your customer base.

As we peer into the crystal ball of AI in call center operations, we reveal how machine learning is set to transform mundane tasks into strategic interactions, freeing up agents to deliver exceptional service. We balance the scales of efficiency and empathy and dissect the tangible benefits of outsourcing to protect the lifeline of your business—its customer service. For networking aficionados, David sheds light on the power of LinkedIn and personal connections in fostering business growth. So, tune in and prepare to be inspired to elevate your customer service to heights you never thought possible.

https://www.nexa.com/

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:57

Welcome to the successful life podcast. I'm your host, corey barrier, and I'm here with my man, david Lord. What's up, buddy?

Speaker 2: 1:03

How you doing, man. Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1: 1:05

Yeah, man, super excited. Our friend, our mutual friend, chris Yanno, actually recommended me have a conversation with you, and I value Chris's opinion, I value what he does, and so I imagine this is going to be a great conversation. And, ironically, we know there's some same people from my hometown, which is strange because I've been here for a long time. Strange because I grew up in a really small town, exactly.

Speaker 2: 1:28

Mayberry right, you grew up in the real Mayberry.

Speaker 1: 1:30

I grew up in the real Mayberry. So, david, tell me a little bit about, or tell the audience a little bit about, yourself, and in next, Absolutely.

Speaker 2: 1:40

Yeah, so I'm David Lord I GM. Next, you know, traditionally we've been known as an answering service. We've really morphed over the last year and a half since I joined into more of a booking service, kind of a boutique CSR call center, so a lot of flexibility. I'm really been on a mission, right. Most answering services suck We'll just call it like it is and how do we become, you know, the least sucky, the best right, and it's a journey and I'm not going to say we're perfect yet, but we're making a lot of progress.

Speaker 2: 2:07

And you mentioned our friend Chris. He's been really instrumental, helping us out and introducing us to some folks like yourselves and then also really pointing us in the right direction, for which you know which big contractors to really listen to. We have a lot of clients. We've been at this for a long time and really listening to our clients, hearing their feedback and then going and executing on that, and I really feel like you know, we've come a long way in the last year and a half and we still have some, you know, we still have some opportunities, but we've made a ton of strides and it's starting to show in the feedback from our clients, which is great.

Speaker 1: 2:42

All right. So, yeah, this is going to be a great conversation because, look, I am. I'm very I get very passionate about CSRs, the lack of attention that CSRs get inside of a company. They're typically the least paid people in the company, which is mind boggling to me. And answering services you said it, I didn't say it most of them suck, and that's been my experience. So what makes you guys different? What are you doing different to not suck as bad as everybody else?

Speaker 2: 3:21

It's a great question. I mean, it's a people-based business and people make mistakes. So, again, perfection is the goal, but it's not reality. But I think it comes down to three things right. One is the right people in the right roles, and I'll peel these three because they sound really simple but they're not. The next one is processes right. And the third one is technology. And maybe go back the other way. Right, you got to have the right people to build the right processes and the technology.

Speaker 2: 3:48

And we really invested heavily in technology about 18 months ago, moved to a state-of-the-art platform, we embraced work from home, so it's allowed us to hire really good people at a good wage, let's say, in South Carolina, north Carolina, texas, versus paying a not great wage in California. Right. So our technology one is reliable, so it's available 24-7, 365 when we're available with live agents. A lot of those legacy technologies are on-prem systems. They're prone to going down.

Speaker 2: 4:22

Who wants an answering service that can't answer the phone when you're closed? I think Goal 1. And then we paired that with what I call our dynamic scripting tool. But in essence, the technology takes the scripting out of the agent, right? So we hire for conversational intelligence, adhering the scripting and then the tool recognizes this number is Corey's number. Here's how Corey wants us to answer the phones and all of that is handled in a really robust process and onboarding. So anybody who comes online with us goes through a one-hour kind of training for us where we capture what are the services, what are the pricing, what are the zip code tools, what's the scheduling software you use, what's your messaging? And we answer that when do we dispatch what's on call? We take that. We then program that in our system. Technology folks go and program it and then we demo it for the client and say hey, this is what we

Speaker 2: 5:17

heard, is this how? The reality of how it is? And invariably they say, yeah, no, tweak that, tweak this, change that. Then we go back and we say, are you good? So where we used to say, hey, sign the dotted line, sign up with us and we'll have you live tomorrow, that's not reality. Reality is we need to spend a couple hours with you where you really teach us like we're the new hire for you. Now the new hire happens to be focused on HVAC, plumbing, electric.

Speaker 2: 5:42

Our agents aren't handling calls for other verticals. Those are handled by totally separate agents, totally separate business units. So they have some industry understanding but they don't know what your values are, corey, what your price points are, what your services are, what your memberships are, and so that's a little snippet of it. And then, obviously, for 60 days you work really tight with that onboarding specialist to make sure that your account set up right, the billing's right, we're very flexible, our billing's transparent, we don't charge for after hours or holidays or other overages. It is a base rate. That's what you pay. You go over, you pay overages and you can adjust your bill at any time or your package with us at any time. And you'll work through that 60 days to really nail the amount of minutes you need, the services you need and the performance. So that's a snippet of it.

Speaker 2: 6:32

I think that I talked about that being remote. I think being remote it scares some people who are used to your traditional call center environment. All our calls are recorded. We use an LMS system that is included that you get when you sign up with us, so everything we use is really state-of-the-art cloud-based technology and it allows people to work remotely. What that also means is when a storm comes through North Carolina and an ice storm and it knocks out the power, we don't have a call center going down.

Speaker 2: 7:00

We might lose an agent or two, but the rest of our hundreds of agents are going to be there to service your company in Mount Airy, Whereas if we're a local call center in Mount Airy and we go down, we're no help to you when you have a big storm and you need us right.

Speaker 1: 7:15

That's a great point. So it sounds like you're super flexible for both the billing and the convenience of making sure somebody's going to answer that phone. So what would you say has been the biggest struggle outside of people?

Speaker 2: 7:37

Honestly, I think the biggest struggle outside it's a great question, corey I think it's engaging with our clients figuring out we have 1,300 clients in our home service portfolio and we moved to Salesforce about 18 months ago, as you know, for managing our sales and our client base. The data in there is only as good as what gets put in. You take 1,200 clients over. We've been really at this since 15 as Nexa Before that it was known as other brands spin around since 82.

Speaker 2: 8:15

We have clients that have used this forever. They don't really like to talk to us much Historically. They're like set it and forget it. Really, as we move from an answering service, we now do outbound, we do lead form follow-up in real time. It loads in our dialer so you don't have these like hey, angie this lead by the time I called it they already had like three quotes Like well, you need to call that within three minutes.

Speaker 2: 9:00

We've added these services and it's getting in front of our existing clients and hey, we can do a lot more for you. We can be better, we can be less sucky. Getting those clients to engage with us has probably been the biggest hurdle, just because the data is for a lot of these. We all know the ghettos, we know the Echo Plongings, we know the big players, we know who they are. They're out there. But there are a ton of really good growing companies out there that if we could just have a dialogue with existing clients, we could make our service a lot better. That's been the biggest challenge is just getting in front of our existing client base and explaining and refining our processes and leveraging the new technology with them.

Speaker 1: 9:46

Yeah, my experience with contractors are they are adverse to doing things that are not convenient. I mean, and it's not convenient to have to go through this dialogue with you. In the long run it is massively convenient, but it is a hurdle getting these guys on the phone or getting them on a Zoom call especially. It seems like I guess it's not priority. Until it's a priority, then it's not too late. But you're behind the. I'm trying to think of what else. You're in reaction mode at that point. Then conversation gets hurried. I'm just guessing.

Speaker 2: 10:32

I mean, look, these guys are busy. You're an entrepreneur, you've run businesses. We got someone said it the other day, I don't know if it was Tommy, or somebody said we're always bleeding, we're all bleeding. There's always something. When you get big enough, where you're dealing with fires, I get it. The last thing they want to do is probably talk to their.

Speaker 2: 10:51

To your point, the CSRs are known as this low-cost, it's a cost center. They don't. A lot of them aren't realizing like wait, if I'm spending marketing dollars and I'm not answering every single phone call, I'm leaving money on the table. That's why Chris loves us and a lot of real-time marketing and all these marketing, the search kings of the world. We work with all these guys because they know hey, my ROAS, my return on ad spend, is going to get better if I have my company answer in the phone and book in these appointments at a high rate. I think it to your point when we have a storm or a holiday and a client doesn't tell us they're going to be closed, which means when they're closed, there's a different escalation path for dispatch If they don't tell us that we don't know, we can assume.

Speaker 2: 11:36

But if we assume they're closed and we follow the closed dispatch path but they're open, then we're really we're just not performing.

Speaker 2: 11:43

To your point we get a lot of calls, a lot of tickets, a lot of frustration around the holidays and we try to do a good job of sending messaging and saying hey, the holiday is coming or are you going to be open? What hours? What are you adjusting so that we can get ahead of it? You'd be shocked how few of our clients actually engage with us and say hey, dave, we're going to be closed on Friday, we're going to have changed hours on Saturday and we're closed Sunday. To your point, when one call has a wrong escalation, then it's depth count nine. Getting that just reiterating what you said. If we can just get in touch earlier and have a better dialogue and better engagement and again, some of this is on us we set it and forget it for years. We train this a little bit. We're trying to come out of that now and anyone listening, if you can just engage with us, even if it's bad, we like engagement, some engagement is better than no engagement.

Speaker 1: 12:35

Yeah, actually, david, I'm not shocked at all. I'm actually not in the least bit shocked. Yeah, I'm really not in the least bit shocked. It's pretty wild. I guess it's just not high on the priority list until there's a problem. But you would think I mean, look, it drives me nuts to see.

Speaker 1: 13:02

Well, it drives me nuts to see that the answer in service has picked up. First off because we pay people to answer the phone. So I know it's there for a reason and I know it's very beneficial when you're supposed to need it or when you're not supposed to need it. It is a pain point for sure. A bigger pain point, a much bigger pain point, is when I see 50-miss calls. It makes the hair stand up on my freaking arms. It's just because you're right 100%. You're spending thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars to drive that call to your phone just to get no answer or to get usually a much less qualified person at an answering service to answer the phone and take very basic information which is not super engaging. So how do you engage with the customer from the answering service standpoint? How do you get them to engage with the customer a little bit better than your average call center, because that is important.

Speaker 2: 14:11

Yeah, it is. I want to go back, remind me that. I want to go back to something you said, because we did an analysis early last year. We scored 200,000 phone calls and we scored them for data feedback on if you had a poor experience. If nobody answered, did you call back and if you did, you leave a message. There were like six quadrants. I have a slide on it. It's a great slide, but it was amazing 85% 85% of missed calls did not call back. So if you're spending money to drive marketing for new acquisition, that's probably like 95, because you have to think the people that call back are the ones that, like I dealt with Corey. I know, corey, they're probably busy, but I want to deal with Corey, so your existing clients going to give you a little bit more Now.

Speaker 2: 15:00

35% said a wait time was a reason not to do business with a contractor, but 85% of people did not call back. So if they're going to Google, they see you, they call you, you don't answer, boom, they call the next person right, and Google now in LSA ranks you based on that right. So it's a ranking factor responsiveness to text, to their messaging service and to their phone. The other one that was interesting, cause we hear a lot of this with smaller contractors oh, if it's I'm the on call at night, we rotate a cell phone and I'm like oh, do you answer them? Oh, no, they go to voicemail. Less than 80% of people now, or sorry, more than 80% of people, won't leave a voicemail, will not Like, we're so conditioned and that's just going to grow because the new generation I mean, I've gotten there, I don't leave voicemails, I don't even listen to my voicemails, I just call the number back, if I recognize it right.

Speaker 2: 15:51

So those are some fallacies that I think some contractors still have, like, yeah, I got a phone, yeah, they'll call back, they don't. So if you're thinking that, don't. And the average small business we know this from our friends at CallRail. I think 108 is the average number of calls in a month for a one truck, small contractor starting out, and over 56%, I think, is the number, is a lot of numbers to remember here, but over 50%, I know, are bookable actions. So of your calls and this is over general right so obviously, if you're marketing Google and it's a Google phone number, 90% are probably. But overall of all the calls you get, over 50% are bookable actions. Right, those are opportunities for revenue. So to miss one, what's a new HVAC worth 30,000 these days?

Speaker 1: 16:42

I mean it's worth over the lifetime value that client with membership and service.

Speaker 2: 16:46

That's huge right. So no missed calls. So anyway, sorry, you asked something else, but I just had to hook onto that one because we have some really good data there.

Speaker 1: 16:55

That's really staggering numbers. So how do you know and obviously I can look in my service type and I can say all right, I see that we've missed, let's just say, 50 calls and I don't know how it knows other than if it's a Google call or if it's a marketing channel call. How does it know if it's a bookable call? I'm curious.

Speaker 2: 17:20

How does it? Oh well, what we did was we scored these 200,000 different contractors. We listened to all the calls so we knew, okay, this call was bookable, this call wasn't. So we know of the total population of 200,000, let's say, 50% of those 100,000 were bookable. Okay, how many were missed calls across that whole portfolio? 100,000, extrapolate out the 50%. It would make sense that of the ones that were meant, we didn't only miss the ones that weren't bookable. So we used that data.

Speaker 1: 17:51

That makes sense, okay, All right.

Speaker 2: 17:53

So I'm gonna ask you a really tough one, Sorry you asked me something else, cori and I just went off on data.

Speaker 1: 17:58

Well, you know, and I should have written the question down, because I have ADHD and sometimes I just check things off my brain and I forget. I don't remember what the question was, but I do wanna ask you could be a challenging question. So what is your take on artificial intelligence? Because it's here, it's not going anywhere. Tell me what your thoughts are on that in your line of work here.

Speaker 2: 18:27

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I like change, I like new technology. I think you probably got that out of me. I like data, so I'm excited about it. I think it's gonna allow us to really deliver on no missed calls. Right, I think that's gonna be the first iteration we see. The first iteration we see is it rings three times. We answer. Our average is around eight seconds, right, two rings, four seconds a ring. That's our average.

Speaker 2: 18:57

We have these new storm cycles that are wiping out the United States and everybody's closed. Or we have some really big insurance companies and we have some big national players storm chasing that obviously they have these massive spikes and we try to work with these clients, like we said, to coordinate and say, hey, I'm gonna have 100 times the call volume, I need five, 50 people. It's impossible sometimes to scale. I think it'll really allow us to have zero missed calls very soon, really soon, I think within a quarter. We're gonna be rolling something out later this quarter and I think it's gonna be game changing. I think the dispatch part like matching the call to dispatch there's gonna be some cool machine learning to say, hey, corey is the best closer on and has the setup and skill to sell this client and it'll do some cool machine learning in the background. I think automating that and making that where there's no human interaction is gonna come later. I think booking is gonna come in between those two. But I think the basic answering and hey, oh, you wanna cancel your appointment? Okay, let me let you talk to somebody. We want somebody to try to save that. Oh, you just wanna copy your bill? Hold on one second, let me get that for you. And I think AI David will handle that first section of really easy. Hey, we're really busy right now, but we wanna help you. What can we help you with? Oh, you wanna reschedule? Well, does tomorrow work? Great, okay, I'll get with our dispatcher and have a book you and they'll let you know if there's an issue. Thanks, take care, we're gonna be close. We'll have that pretty soon here.

Speaker 2: 20:31

I think that next section of more nuanced, I think really it's clients getting used to it more than it is and cut their customers. Then I called. I called six and fix and I got this Corey guy. He sounded like Corey but it wasn't quite Corey. But it's close. Empathy's there, the transcription's there, it's getting faster. So I feel good about AI there.

Speaker 2: 20:57

We've been using it to score calls. Right, because we record all our phone calls, we can share those with our clients. It sucks up a lot of bandwidth in our portal so we don't love to do it, but we all clients get access to a portal that shows arrival patterns, all messaging, who took the call, who the call was from. We can give all the recordings there. Obviously, historically, scoring calls QA has been a manual process, right, and we still do that. But we're trying to needle in a haystack historically to find let's call, listen to these five calls from Corey. Listen to these five calls from David. Ai can listen to transcribe and listen to all of them and go wow, this call with Corey had a lot of F-bombs. We should probably listen to Corey. Corey, wow, corey's booking, everything Like his booking rate is really high because now we have booking rate reporting at the agent level, we can go let's go, listen to all Corey's calls and figure out what he's doing right so we can go share this with the rest of them, right?

Speaker 2: 21:53

Oh, wow, corey doesn't really spend a lot of time on the pricing. He's just talking about the value of the service and how we've been around for 80 years. That's how to sell. You know X, y, z companies service. So we're using AI there and I think AI for answering and really the basics will be there in a quarter. We'll be out with beta this quarter. I think we'll be able to roll it out to our client base in a more scaled solution and kind of call it Q2, q3.

Speaker 1: 22:24

So I think I probably, if I were a betting man, I would bet that most people, even having access to that data the scoring to be able to see the calls my guess is, very rarely do they look at it.

Speaker 2: 22:41

Yeah, I think it's. It's the top 20 large players, the ones we know that have call centers with a hundred CSR, the ones that use us for overflow nights, weekends and when they get overwhelmed. But they really try to do it themselves internally and they have that scale. I think they probably ebb and flow. They do it really well. Then, when things get tight, the first thing they do is usually get rid of that VP of call center operations who's probably driving that QA, and they keep the people the line level without that supervision. That's where I think the training, the development, the QA those all fit together. And obviously recognition and incentives. That's the four key things in CSR world, as you know, and I think they're the first three to go. Monitoring, training those are the areas people cut when things get tight. That's what's nice about an answering service, whether it's us or others.

Speaker 2: 23:35

Everything's included. I have VPs of ops. I have the LMS tool that's enterprise, cloud-based, super intuitive. The knowledge owls. We use litmus for our LMS. The coaching, the QA, the phone system it's all included. When you look at the per hour rate, is it that much cheaper than doing it yourself? Per hour For one body? It is, but when you add in all that overhead, it's significantly cheaper. Plus, it's less of a headache to your point, and they can really focus on what they do best Whether that's really normally leading teams of technicians.

Speaker 1: 24:20

Let's just take an example of somebody that you've seen that had all those pieces in place. We had the VP or whoever was managing and looking at that data. What kind of change have you seen? When that stops To your example, do you? Obviously things sustained for a period of time, but then how much does the success rate or that company drop off once someone's not actually have their hands on it? Six months.

Speaker 2: 24:59

I have a great example, Corey, because I literally had a call from a client yesterday that left us six months ago said we're going to do this in-house. They left us. They called yesterday. We're like can we come back? Can we come back tomorrow? It all started with they'd scaled up to 12 full-time CSRs. They had a head of call center manager.

Speaker 1: 25:21

The call center manager left over the holidays.

Speaker 2: 25:25

They lost three agents. Then they started listening and looking in. The owner started looking in and was like, oh, these are terrible, got rid of three others, brought in three temps to try to just handle the volume and realized that he didn't have time to manage it. Then they called us and said hey, this is terrible. People are waiting four minutes, I'm abandoning 40 percent of my calls, I can't keep this thing staffed and I need to come back as soon as possible. It's definitely not something you can get that savings in the first month or two, because the people stick around and it depends on the business and how tight the business is run and how involved that owner is or whoever they're delegating that to. That was a very real one. That just happened, literally happened yesterday morning.

Speaker 1: 26:08

Yeah, because that makes complete sense. So just on average, let's say I'm a $10 million HVAC, plumbing, electrical company. What's the average cost? Is it per minute? How does it break down? Yeah, that's a great question.

Speaker 2: 26:31

I'll just say our average client using us for answering and booking services or going into the booking links and booking the appointment for them, that call is going to run right around five minutes. Everybody goes wow and that's one of the digs you hear on answering services, like the calls are too long. But if I don't have a long call then I'm not building empathy, I'm not verifying the client's information. So there's a delicate balance. So you can get down to about four minutes on a booking call on a really sophisticated service titan logging in, going in. You know how service titan is custom for every single location, every. It can be right and if we're doing that and it's really in that, they could be a seven minute call. So there's a pretty good balance. A basic message taking is about a three minute call, right. So, like I said, the average small business is getting around 100 calls a month. They're normally missing about 20%. So probably $10 million, hvacs a lot bigger. They're probably getting over a thousand calls Probably missing. You know, call it 150. So if you take 150 calls times five minutes, that's 500 minutes.

Speaker 2: 27:42

Our 500 minute account is going to be less than $1,000 a month. So you're talking less than $1,000 a month to cover 20,. You know that phone rings at the graveyard, I'm answering it and I'm booking that appointment for it. So you know, if you try to hire no matter your size you're tiny and you want to hire the full hoop, we call it 24, seven, 365, with vacations, holidays, sick time you need five people. So think about what five people costs and think of you know again, less than $1,000 to do it. So it's super priced. To our point, if we land you one deal you would have missed in a month, in a year, it pays for itself.

Speaker 1: 28:25

So is that $1,000 per person. So would that be $5,000 a month or $1,000 for five people.

Speaker 2: 28:33

That's why that technology is so important. You're accessing over a hundred agents of mine for that price. So that's where our agents know. Okay, we're handling calls for home services, the bulk of which are HVAC, plumbing, electric. Phc is our biggest vertical by hundreds. Right, and they're sitting there and we hire and we train for you gotta smile when you answer, you gotta, if it's an emergency, you gotta have empathy, make them feel comfortable, and then you follow the script and that script changes every call based on where that phone number's coming in. So the way it works is you'd set up your call tree right on your side and say hey, after five I'm rolling my calls to you. Okay, do you wanna roll a different? Do you have a prompt that says we call an IVR? That says press one for sales, two for service, three for billing or all other? Yes, I'll normally give you a different forwarding number for each of those and based on that forwarding number, my tool will script differently so that agent knows to answer the sales call this way.

Speaker 2: 29:37

Oh, it's an other. This isn't a sales call like call back during the day or I'll let the billing team know and I take a message. Get off the phone. Right, that's we don't need a long call there. Oh, it's service, this could be an emergency. We need to dispatch to the on call or we just book it for the next day if it's not, and we have different scripts based on those DIDs. We can. Also, if you're small and you just have one phone number, we can also say thank you for calling. You know, gave someone services. Is this an emergency? No, okay, how can I help you? Oh, you wanna schedule, have us tomorrow, look, so we can also do the if-vanned dropdowns. I say all that for that tool is so important because these agents are taking calls from, you know, gettle, echo, happy, high Five, like it. Just the calls come in and the agent just follows and answers based on that script. So you're not getting dedicated people, you're getting a group of agents and a group of minutes.

Speaker 2: 30:31

Now, one of the differences with us we do have clients that are like, hey, I want you to do something really custom. I want you to. You know, I wanna give you a dialing list, I want you to outbound and book them in my tool and we'll say, okay, I'll give you five people full time and they'll just dial on your behalf. I have other agents who use or other clients who use us for hybrid. So they are big enough where they say, hey, I need 10 full time people, I want them only, I just want them to sit there, even if the utilization isn't great. Because that's the name of the game in call centers utilization, utilization, booking rate. But utilization if you wanna make money as much as the booking rate, I can sit people there and then also a graveyard. It may not make sense. I can have a role to a general population. So that's kind of that boutique flexibility I was talking about early on.

Speaker 2: 31:16

Those are some of the things we do that I don't really know many competitors that do. They may do outbound or they may do inbound. They may do a little outbound, inbound, but they don't normally do. You're normally a big fixed head count call center company. There's big BPO's or your super niche and we're kind of we play both right. The bulk of what we do is what we call shared service, where you're using an agent is shared across and that's where you get the really cost effective solution. But again, if you're big and you want dedicated folks, we're all over that as well, we're happy to do it.

Speaker 1: 31:52

One thing I think that you said that was really important for any owner that's listening to this is the empathy and being able to build a small relationship on that call. And even if it takes a minute longer, I don't feel rushed, I don't feel like you don't care, I don't feel like you're just somebody just answering the phone and that really changes whether that customer is gonna fulfill that call or they got a call back and cancel, whether they feel listened to. So you know, when people push back on that and I don't know how many people do, but I would imagine you know people probably think, well, they just stretched the call out, but you've got to get the right information, you got to be able to listen and sometimes that's out of your control because the customers they are frantic, they have never called in for a problem like this and they want to feel better about you coming out and stopping the water from going all over their house or whatever. That case is Right. So yeah, I totally agree with that.

Speaker 2: 33:01

I think, corey, it is one that is a historical. I think you heard that a lot. They just they take their time on purpose. I've heard a lot less of that over the last year, last six months.

Speaker 2: 33:14

I think I've heard it from one client who was a little frustrated around. You know why are you repeating the phone number Right, especially on existing clients? Because some clients don't give us their database or they don't refresh, and if they're not refreshing then we don't know it's an existing caller when it calls in, and so that can be frustrating for them and we get it right. So we try to technically overcome that with some tools. But it's historically something, but it's also something in our, something different, like when we were doing sales. When I first got here it was just a conversation but there really wasn't like a demo material, a demo environment to showcase how it works and it's.

Speaker 2: 33:53

I believe nowadays people want to see it, they want to feel it, to understand it. They don't just want to hear some salesperson talk about it. And so we started doing demos with, you know, a live kind of hall and we play it and we show how it strips, where the agents on teams. You know we're a big team shop, so nobody's writing stuff down PCI compliance, soc2 compliance, like we don't have paper and pens on desk. Everybody's got dual monitors and when you listen to those call I make all the clients at least listen to the first minute and a half of prospects that we talked to. It takes a minute and a half just to get what's the situation. Is it something we can service, make them feel comfortable that they call the right place, get their name and phone number? Just doing that is going to take a minute and a half. Now you're trying to book. Like how many times do I know it happened to you and I trying to book this?

Speaker 2: 34:44

It's like hey, when are you available, corey? I'm available. Then what about now? How about then? We go back and forth? That's not two seconds, that takes a minute. Oh, let me check my diary, let me check if my husband will be home. Some of our, you know, if it's a new system, they require both homeowners or home right Decision makers. So let me coordinate. Like so the expect. I think it's. I think the contractor's starting to warm up to the fact that, like hey, an extra minute on a call to build empathy that'll close me a deal is way worth it. And trying to rush off the phone and not build that report.

Speaker 1: 35:16

Yeah, that's good news. I'm glad to hear that. So when I did have a question I think I literally lost it you said something that really caught my attention. Oh, I know what it was. They're not really mad at you when they're complaining about the cause being too long. The truth of the matter is you've got to look at yourself, because if you didn't provide the right information, you're not providing the database, you're not refreshing the database, and I'm sure you go over all that stuff and explain it in detail. I'm sure they agree to it. But ultimately, if it's not getting done, that's not really on you.

Speaker 2: 35:56

Yeah, I think it's also up to our. We did a lot of training with my customer service group not the CSRs, but my account management team and our CSR team and we've been doing more. We got some work to do in some areas there. Account management, we're getting way better. He's really invested there. And then in CS, and it's really that question behind the question, like, okay, they're asking, they're saying the calls are too long, what does that really mean? That means they're concerned about their bill.

Speaker 2: 36:24

So let's have a conversation about hey, what can we do to maybe work on their billing, versus the calls are too long because, to your point right, we may have a mistake, there may be a technical gap, there's something we can fix there that we should look into. But the question is, I feel like I'm not getting the value. So how do we make sure we're giving the right value to that that you know?

Speaker 1: 36:45

partner. That's right. So so how much you know, how much in-house training do you guys do for your CSR? What is that? What is that process like? Yeah, what is the process If you bring somebody new on the remote person, what do they have to go through in order to be at the level you need them to be at to take off?

Speaker 2: 37:09

Yeah, it's two weeks classroom kind of style, full time, no matter when they start, whatever shift they're working, if you come in, if you're doing part time or full time. You got to work two full weeks, nine to five. We do trainings. We have trainings going on every week. We may take a week off here or there, but it's a two week training. The first is kind of soft skills about us, what our mission is.

Speaker 2: 37:35

We're an extension of your, of our clients. We believe we're the voice of our clients. We're an extension of our clients. What does that mean? The why I call it.

Speaker 2: 37:43

We spend the first couple of days on the why, some basic technology training and then obviously a bunch of industry terminology. Then they get into kind of call monitoring and then week two we'll go into they get paired up with a mentor and they'll be shadowing and then they'll take calls in. The mentor will shadow with them. Everybody starts. So, like you know, we have different cues, different levels of services. I talked about like that basic answering. I'm taking a message. We still have a lot of clients that use that service and so they graduate. They'll take what we call those level one calls, like really basic messaging. They have to do that for 60 days and prove a proficiency there before they get to level up to a level two and then they'll get into scheduling and booking and then they can add dispatch and on call and so that's a you know, 60 days to get to the first level and then from there we kind of feel it out right.

Speaker 2: 38:40

If they're really solid and sharp and they're picking it up, they've done it before boom, or it could be a year and they just stay in this level. They never get to dispatch and that also gives us obviously that's how we give people the opportunity to make more money, right? Because one, you get a beggar hourly rate and then obviously if you get into booking, you're getting incentives on top of that. So that's, that's how it works. That's how it works. Everybody has a team manager, one to 14, 15 ratio. They're meeting with their you know their team manager for kickoff of every shift. They have a one on one every week. They have a skip level with their VP of ops every month. Like I said, they're getting call scored every week. We review it every Tuesday, the executive team, all the Tuesday mornings. We go over the prior weeks QA scores. Every Friday we have an ops review about it. So we've got a pretty, a pretty dialed in process for managing performance and quality.

Speaker 1: 39:38

A lot more robust than I, than I anticipated, really, and I guess that really reflects on why the company successful, because if you're not doing those things, you can't really expect to have 12, 1300 clients, and I think all those things are super important in. Yeah, 100% training is I would say, it would almost argue is probably one of them, one of the least, one of the most abandoned Processes in the industry, like a lot of people just don't see the value in training and it's the most valuable in my opinion.

Speaker 2: 40:18

I heard I think it was Ismo was talking from next gen. You know, ismo, oh yeah, I love us that guy. So just just point you direct and simple and it makes sense, like I actually saw last week. I told him like you want to sell more, hire more salespeople is probably my best, my favorite quote. I say that all the time to my sales guy Like, oh, you want to sell more, get more SDRs, get more salespeople. The other one he said that I thought was really interesting I think it was Ismo I'm sorry if it was someone else and I'm not giving credit to them was they saw a really good success when they stopped having training done by their, by their reps.

Speaker 2: 40:53

So instead of having their best salesperson train, they had trainers and they had a process and they had a book and that's what they followed was that process and they didn't do the train by sit you in a truck with your. You know what I think is my best sales guy? Because they train them how they do it, not how you want it done, and I think that's a big, big one.

Speaker 2: 41:14

We have a training department like six, eight people that all they do is content development and content delivery, upskilling, you know if you're a complex if we brought a next gen on board and we're doing something at scale for a client like that, we would have a special training, lms develop that every agent that would handle those would go through.

Speaker 2: 41:34

So we hire, we do that onboarding I was talking about. But we are constantly doing up training and new skills training and new client training as we bring on new clients. Again, not every client, those those simple calls that you know they can follow the script and there's no nuance, easy peasy. But if it's a technical or really specialized use case or something that's a little bit different or a change, they go through that. They have to go through that training to get on shift before we'll take those calls and that again it delays that go live, which can be frustrating for us to realize a new client and for the client to realize the service. But as, as we talked about, like, training is just the key right, you can't, you can't shortchange training.

Speaker 1: 42:19

You cannot in in, you hit on a really good point and we'll we'll kind of wrap up with this, like I think that when you you know historically and it's my experience shows that when you take your best salesperson out of the field or your best caller, your best whatever, and have them to start training, they're not trainers, they're great salespeople, they're killing it for you in sales, but that doesn't mean you're a great manager and I see this a lot.

Speaker 2: 42:48

It's a great yeah you just lost your best salesperson from the field and in a lot of cases it's intuitive to them when they're really at that level and and it's not to this new salesperson who's trying to get one in 10, but I agree, and it's frustrating, it's frustrating for that guy to be now managing people when that's not his skill sets.

Speaker 1: 43:09

It kind of you set him up for success, truthfully. Not success, rather. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Well, david, where can people find you? Where can people find it? How do they get a hold of you for, for Nexa and? And if you want to put something out there where they can reach out to you personally, let's, let's hear it.

Speaker 2: 43:28

Absolutely. I am a big LinkedIn fan David Lord eight, I think, or David Lord Nexa on LinkedIn, that's. That is the best way to kind of get me. Obviously, I'm trying to do better on Facebook. You and I connected through that. I'm not. I'm a little behind there. I'll just be honest with you. I'm working on it, but the best place is LinkedIn. If you want to talk to me specifically or if you want to learn more, you can go to nexacom and we have demos on there. You can request a demo, you can submit a form, and that all gets to myself and my sales team and I'm on the trade show. You know, like you and I were talking about it earlier, I'm trying to get out there and be in front of as many clients and prospects as I can, so I'll definitely be out in the field a lot as well. So happy to reach out and let's get together Love it, David.

Speaker 1: 44:20

appreciate you, my friend.

Speaker 2: 44:22

Thanks, corey, it was great. I appreciate you having me.

Speaker 1: 44:24

Yes, sir.