Fuse Service operates under a fundamental and foundational principle: It’s never good to miss a call.
To Stanislav Pakarin, answering calls is so important that he rewards his customer service team with profit sharing on jobs they’ve booked. “Big numbers,” Pakarin said. “They’re making pretty good money.”
Even with that, there are times when calls slide through. In the past, that cost Pakarin in missed opportunities.
To address that issue, Pakarin turned to Live Voice in Scheduling Pro, a ServiceTitan integration in the all-in-one cloud based software for the trades.
With Live Voice, Scheduling Pro provides trained agents to take calls a business’s team might not be able to answer. Scheduling Pro hires people knowledgeable about the trades who are able to handle a call. While they might not know everything about an individual company (promotions, memberships, etc.), they know enough to answer a question and book a job. Best, it is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Call it the ultimate backstop.
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“In terms of skill, they’re great,” Pakarin said. “No complaints about it at all.”
Pakarin is a Russian immigrant who built Fuse from a small HVAC company in the San Jose area to one that now includes HVAC, electrical, plumbing and refrigeration, with 20 franchises in California. Fuse just earned a license to operate in Texas, and is working toward operations in Florida.
Once on ServiceTitan -- “It's really the best investment, the best software we ever used for our company” -- he quickly realized the benefits of Scheduling Pro, something he considers a secret weapon. Once he started using Live Voice, he appreciated it more. Fuse’s setup takes advantage of a simple ServiceTitan setting to automatically roll unanswered calls to Scheduling Pro and its team.
“They answer it right away, and they help the customer,” Pakarin said. “We don’t have missed calls, basically.
“It’s an external tool to make (CSRs) work as efficiently as possible.”
How that happens is this way: Pakarin offers incentives to have the team take as many calls as they reasonably can and as efficiently as they can. They know that if they miss a call, they will miss an opportunity. It doesn’t demand they do more than they can, but it does ensure they do all they can.
“We like to make sure everyone works on a profit-share base, same as dispatchers,” Pakarin said. “So basically what it means is the more phone calls they took, the more money they made. And if they missed a phone call, they didn't make money.
“It's fear of missing opportunity.”
But even with that, some calls fall through the cracks. People get busy. Calls come in bunches. Pakarin’s past experience showed that those missed calls often did not lead to business. CSRs would return the call, of course, but people might not answer or they might have already moved on to a different business.
Live Voice provides the backstop to ensure no calls are missed. With Scheduling Pro’s integration with ServiceTitan, calls are recorded, and Scheduling Pro provides a transcript. “It’s all transparent,” said Pakarin, adding he’s not heard a complaint about how the two work together, which means setup and integration are seamless.
“At the beginning, I was pretty skeptical about it,” he said of Live Voice. “I was like, ‘How can someone know what we're doing, what offers we have, and all this stuff?’ Because we train our CSR team almost every day, and we have some news, some updates, some promotions, some something which they need to know about.”
He quickly found that concern was not one he needed to worry about. Especially when he focused on what Live Voice can do. He’s now at the point where he understands Live Voice will not know all the minutiae about his company, but it will provide the knowledge to address a concern and schedule a job.
“If we're looking at the big picture, it helps a lot,” he said. “It works. There are some small bumps on the road, yeah. But it's so minor.”
Fuse regularly checks calls to make sure they are handled properly with the right empathy and concern, and that the right job is booked to the right person.
“Other than that, no, I don't think we do anything extra,” he said. “It's a standard ServiceTitan process, just messages, confirmation from customer, and that's it.”
Pakarin wholeheartedly recommends Live Voice, especially for larger businesses.
“You can’t afford not to schedule jobs for your technicians,” he said. “(With Live Voice), you have backup all the time. It’s just a nice backup for your team.”
