Case Study
Company looks to provide consistent quality service
ARS/Resuce Rooter is an HVAC and home services provider with 57 regional locations, 30 call centers and 350 customer service representatives in 23 states across the U.S. On top of that, the company has grown, in part, through a series of acquisitions, and each of the regional locations is operated essentially as an independent business by the general manager in each location.
The question: Can that type of dispersed operation maintain a consistent customer experience throughout the organization? And the answer, according to Gemma David, manager, Service Training and Development Department, for ARS/Rescue Rooter, would be an unqualified “yes.”
“Customer service is something in which every single center follows what we are doing at the corporate level,” David says. “We recognize that there is nothing that we can do without our customers. In order to keep growing, we have to keep our existing customer base intact, and we want to build on that base by offering the very best service we possibly can.”
She adds: “Everything boils down to how we treat our customer, sand we have been making great strides in terms of catering to our customers and ensuring that they are satisfied.”
It starts with training
“Our customer service representatives - or CSRs - are our first point of contact with customers. They answer the phones and they can make or break a sale. We recognize that,” David says. “That means we have to have not only the best voices on the phone, we have to have the most knowledgeable people - people who really understand what customer service is about and who carry that customer service attitude.”
That’s why customer service training is such a key part of the service operation - and much of that training is carried out over the Web. “We are constantly training,” says David. “It’s not like you join the company, we tell you what to do, then we leave you on your own. Every month I conduct between four and six training webinars - which work well for us because we are spread out so much across the country, and our reps get a chance to interact with one another.” It’s also less costly and less time consuming than flying to deliver training to all of the company’s many locations.
Training for new hires is especially important. “You can’t answer the phone for a company if you don’t know anything about the company,” David says. “So we talk about the history of the company, and the products and services we offer as a part of new hire training. And we go into a lot of detail about that, because a lot of times a customer will call not necessarily to book a service, but just to ask a question. So they are trained to be able to answer all kinds of questions and to know what they are talking about.”
In fact, David adds, “in some of our shops, new CSRs actually ride along with field service people so they can see the job in action.”
Virtual support tools
Ongoing support is also virtual for David’s far-flung customer service team. The company created an online reference tool for CSRs that it calls InfoRep. This is a web-based portal that provides CSRs with information about the company, industry knowledge, product and technical knowledge, and self-directed learning modules. “If a customer calls and has a question about water heaters, for example, and the rep hasn’t retained everything he needed to know about water heaters,” David says, “he could enter the word ‘water heater’ in the search bar and everything we have related to the products and our services would come up.”
CSRs can also go into InforRep for short, five-minute training modules. “If they want to learn something about a new product or if we have a new promotion coming up, we would have a little training session about it,”David says. “They can log in at their convenience and go through it very quickly.”
In addition, the company has a mystery caller program aimed at maintaining call quality. Those results are also posted on InfoRep - including the individual CSR’s scores, a recording of the call, and call center rankings.
InfoRep is also used to celebrate those reps whose mystery caller scores are among the highest. “Every month I feature a different CSR on InfoRep with a photo and have them discuss what it is like to be a CSR,” David says.
Moving from call takers to “nuanced” reps
Because a lot of the company’s growth has been the result of acquiring small service shops throughout the country, it found that a lot of its CSRs served strictly as order-takers early on. “A customer would call to book a service and that’s all the CSRs would do - take a name, get an address, and schedule a service person’s visit,” David says. “But what we find is that customers are becoming more sophisticated and more knowledgeable about the things that they want. And they want to feel, when they call, that they made the right choice by calling this company.”
So, to make customer interactions warmer, more friendly, and more inviting, the company threw away any scripts that were in use and asked CSRs to show more empathy. “People remember the way you made them feel, and even if you are calling ARS/Rescue Rooter because you have a flooded basement, we want you to feel secure that somebody is going to be there to fix it and fix it quickly,” David says. “And we want our CSRs to give people this feeling of confidence by the way that they interact with them.”
So Rescue Rooter threw away the scripts and put together a detailed written guide - called the Nuance Sheet - to what it wanted its CSRs to sound like on the phone. “The Nuance Sheet contains a list of conceptual standards on how to handle a call,” David says. “It talks about personalizing a call by using the customer’s name. It talks about professionalism and what that entails. It covers active listening and call control. It talks about what questions you should ask a customer and the information you must give. It even talks about how to put someone on hold. It talks about virtually everything, and everything is conceptual - which means that you can say it however it sounds natural to you.”
In fact, the only thing left in the CSR’s repertoire that remains scripted is the company’s standard phone greeting. It’s very simple, and goes, “It’s a great day at ARS/Rescue Rooter. My name is Gemma. May I have your name, please?”
“The mere fact that it says, ‘It’s a great day,’ kind of forces people to sound like it’s a great day,” David says. “How can anyone say, ‘It’s a great day,’ and sound down?”
Basic Metrics: Booking percentage and average call time
Besides the quality metric that ARS/Rescue Rooter tracks through its mystery shopper program, the company looks at a couple of other service metrics that it considers important.
“We also look at booking percentage, because in the final analysis we are doing business here,” David says. “We want to make sure that when customers are calling us that we are booking services for as many of those calls as possible.”
In addition, it has recently started tracking average call time. “Yes, we spend a lot of time with our customers, and we want to involved them in conversations and that sort of thing but we don’t want CSRs to spend an hour talking to one person,” says David.
“So we look at average call time, and if a call takes unusually long, we listen to it and try to see what caused it to be so long,” she says. “If it’s dead air, the rep may not have been ready to talk in time, or the CSR might not have had the necessary information to handle the call. So right away we can provide some special training.”
David adds: “We’re not looking to get rid of our CSRs, we’re looking to develop them.”
Contact: Gemma David, ARS/Rescue Rooter, gdavid@ars.com.