Optimizing contact centers: Q&A with Hatch, Peterman Brothers

This story was written in partnership with Hatch. Watch the full recording

On Wednesday, I moderated a contact center-focused discussion between Hatch CRO Tim Geisenheimer and Peterman Brothers CEO Chad Peterman, covering:

• Team structure
• KPIs
• Increasing booking rates
• Outbounding
• Culture
• The role of AI

Below are the highlights, edited for clarity.

Team structure  

Chad, can you help us understand how Peterman’s call center is set up?

• We have about 20 people in the call center, including a manager and a couple of supervisors. We also utilize AI to answer calls. Just to give you an idea, our AI will typically book anywhere between what three to four CSRs can actually book in a day. We’ve got 11 locations across Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky, and all of those calls are answered here — it’s centralized. 

What about dispatch?

• They’re separate, and they’re all centralized. Every call across our locations is dispatched out of Indianapolis. We have a dispatching manager, but we consider her “Sales Ops.” Essentially, a call comes in, and they’re looking at the capacity boards to understand if we can run the call that day or if we can’t. There are a bunch of different rules, but that capacity board is the dispatchers’ way of holding the call center accountable. 

KPIs

Can you give me some color on the main KPIs you’re measuring?

• The one metric that everybody should live and die by is ‘booking rate.’ And when I say booking rate, you don’t want to look at your raw booking rate — between 50 and 70 percent of the calls that come into your business are not leads. They’re telemarketers or spammers. 

• So you want to look at leads, which are any time someone’s inquiring about a service you provide. And you want your booking rate to be over 90 percent of those calls. 

How do you personally manage that day-to-day? 

• Every morning, my call center manager sends me our booking rate from the day prior and month-to-date. Along with that, she gives me ‘unbooked calls’ — and the reason they were unbooked. That gives us visibility into coaching that needs to happen in the call center. 

• Like, shoot, we should have been able to overcome that. Or, they made a mistake and said we didn’t offer a service in this location, but we actually do, or whatever the case may be. The other piece of that is it’ll tell you where you need to build labor. If, all of a sudden, we’re getting a ton of drain calls for this location, but we only have one guy there, we know we’re missing out.

Increasing booking rates

Tactically speaking, what do you guys do to reach and maintain that 90%+ booking rate?

• We have call center tiers, from one to three, for CSRs. And we route calls based on what they are to the right CSR. Those CSRs advance simply because their booking rates are high, their membership sales are high, and all those things. So there are metrics in place for them to move up levels.

• One hugely impactful piece for us was that we started telling our CSRs what we’re paying for leads. Do that. Go tell your CSR what you just paid for that lead. And if they’re a good CSR, their eyes will open wide up and they’ll go, “You paid $200 for the phone to ring?” Yes, now you know why it’s so important that you fight like hell to book that job so we can run it. 

• I think the other piece is giving your CSRs tools to fight objections. Everybody knows what the common objections are: “Hey, I want you here today, not tomorrow.” Well, can we waive a diagnostic fee? Can we give someone a credit if we need to reschedule them? Like, are you really going to sacrifice making that $85 to not run a job that could turn into a couple-thousand-dollar job? 

• And then it’s really training and coaching on calls. So, our supervisors are utilizing technology to review calls. Like, where didn’t we mention this? Where could we have said this? Or, this was a perfect opportunity to pitch the membership, etcetera.

Outbounding

Let’s talk about outbounding. Can you give me some color on the strategy?

• Gone are the days of people picking up the damn phone — people respond to text messages. 

• We have Hatch campaigns where we’ll send out a link to customers to book their maintenance. When you think about outbounding in a call center, they can pick up the phone and call, but how many people can they legitimately call in a day versus sending a text message to a thousand people?

• We’ve had days where we’ve booked 50 percent of our maintenance-focused text messages. That’s a huge time saver, and it’s a hell of a lot more efficient, because it gives CSRs time to talk to the customers who actually want to. 

Can you speak to any of those campaign specifics?

• Our rules are that if the job is run between the beginning of the day and noon, and it’s unsold, that customer will get a text message in the afternoon saying, “Hey, this is so and so, just checking in and making sure Billy did a good job, and so on.” If it’s the afternoon, then they get the text the next morning.

• I’ll give you an interesting stat. I was at a conference last week where Google presented, and they have all this data. They say that in home services, and I’m going to butcher this a little, 25 to 29 percent of work is bought the same day, and another 22 percent is bought on day two through seven. That tells me that if you’re not following up consistently — if you don’t have a campaign that stretches out at least six to ten days — you’re missing out on a ton of work.

Culture

How do you think about the call center’s purpose compared to how you used to, say, several years ago?

• When you want to create a high-performing call center, it needs to be thought of as a sales center. They’re not selling a new water heater over the phone, but they’re selling that appointment. They’re selling your company as the right one to send a technician to their home. And I think that’s where you start to see this growth. There is so much money to be gained in that call center. 

Internally, I’m sure you faced some pushback at first, no?

• In the end, it’s all about communication. In a typical environment, how much information about the business do you give your CSRs? Probably little to none. We were guilty of the same thing. It was like, “Just answer the phone.”

• Well, when we started getting more strategic, we realized they needed more data points and information about how this all works. Because, especially as you become bigger, you become siloed.

• For me, in the transition to that, it was simply educating them more on the business. Like, “Hey, Nancy. Fantastic job. You booked calls that resulted in over a million dollars of revenue for this company. Thank you. You’re awesome.” I think, traditionally, CSRs have been an afterthought, so it’s about honoring them and understanding that they’re super important. 

The role of AI 

What’s your take on the ‘AI vs. humans’ conversation? It’s obviously polarizing.

• We can use AI to scrub all the junk off CSRs’ plates so they can focus on taking really good care of customers. It’s, “How do we make our CSRs better and more efficient at doing the things that they’re very, very valuable at doing, as opposed to taking umpteen dozen calls, all of which only 30 of them were customers asking for your service?”

Tim, do you want to add anything?

• We believe AI will be a co-pilot that CSRs can work alongside. We’ve built things so that AI is responding to some of the more rote or repeated questions, and then, if things go in a direction where maybe a CSR would be able to handle it better, you can hit a button, and they can take it over. 

• But another benefit is capacity. You can’t staff humans to handle 95-degree days, because it would be irresponsible during the time of year when it’s not. So, having technology that can help you scale with capacity up and down, as needed, to be alongside the great team members you have today, is how we look at it.

Bonus: Callbacks

Chad, how do you turn callbacks into revenue opportunities?

• I think if there’s one thing I’ve learned about callbacks, it’s training your techs to understand what is actually a warranty. A lot of times, the tech just goes out there and assumes it’s a warranty call, so they don’t charge for anything.

• This happens all the time at HVAC: We repaired one thing, and now we go back out. They’re saying the unit’s not working, so it’s “warranty.” But then we come to find out that another component has failed. Well, that’s not a warranty call. That’s a chargeable call because we didn’t touch it. 

This story was written in partnership with Hatch. Watch the full recording