Are you losing business?

29 March 2021

I speak to so many hire companies who say they are working absolutely flat out. And that’s great news.

But at really busy times when staff are stretched and multi-tasking, are all enquiries being dealt with efficiently?  

That’s what one hire company with several depots found itself asking recently. The end result is that it has added a dedicated call centre to help field enquiries. 

“Like many companies we record telephone calls for training purposes,” a director of the business told me. “We listened to several and we were disappointed by the number times callers were told simply ‘No, we haven’t got it,’ or ‘Sorry we’re busy, please call back.’ 

“The answer should always be ‘Yes,’ because you can nearly always find a solution, perhaps by sourcing equipment from another depot. Or else we’ll buy it.

“I don’t want to sound harsh on the guys in the depot. They can be so busy with customers at the counter, calls to handle and paperwork to sort. So we decided to relieve them of some of the burden. 

“We routed calls from this location to a new call centre manned by two people and sales have gone through the roof. The projected monthly figure for the depot went from around £65,000 to nearly £85,000 after just four weeks. Organic business had obviously been coming to us but we weren’t capturing it. 

“The call centre is also now handling enquiries at another branch and we’ll roll it out across all locations when we can recruit suitable people. This is just to handle incoming calls, not to make outgoing ones.” 

A particular challenge is finding telephone call handlers who also know about equipment. 

“We picked one of our sales team who has worked in a call centre environment before and who’s not been able to travel much at the moment because of the coronavirus. We also recruited someone from a national hirer with telephone handling experience. 

“The phones still ring in the depots and we’ve told the staff there to answer if it rings three times, as that means the call centre is busy itself. It's working really well.”

So it’s a positive outcome - well, mostly. With all this new business, the hirer needs more kit for the fleet but, like many other companies, is finding that some items are in very short supply. 

And I’ll touch on that in a future blog post. 

Above: a typical call centre. (Photo: Tima Miroshnichenko/Pexels)