Utopia Is a Moving Target

By Susan Kirkpatrick

If you remember the days of cord boards and paper messaging, you watched firsthand as putting pen to paper to write a message morphed into placing your fingers on the home row on the keyboard to put legible characters on a screen and produce a masterpiece of a message.  But it didn’t stop there. 

That message could be transmitted over the air to pagers and over phone lines to fax machines.  Some answering services had integrated voicemail and the ability to relay messages to voicemail.  We could automatically notify a client that there was a message waiting and the client could check in and listen to a summary of the call – all without operator interaction.  What a world it was!  This was Utopia.  Who could ask for anything more? 

The expectation level of the customer and your willingness to provide quality service has brought about continual advancements in messaging.  And now, meeting the challenges of today’s client expectations requires a further break from the traditional message form.

Even in its best days, the paperless message form on the video monitor was merely a nice and neat “While You Were Out” pad.  While messages were electronically stored, retrieved, and printed at will, from the top to the bottom of the form, it was still just one message containing valuable bits of information.

With the development of scripted forms and scripted messages, each entry on the message form has been transformed into data – valuable, mineable data.  Today’s scripted messages are “intelligent” – containing appointment and on-call schedule information, database lookups, and automated dispatch actions.  All of this is possible with little or no operator interaction or even the necessity for operators to “read the screen.”

Case in point: I recently had to order more propane for my home.  I looked up the phone number of the propane company on their Web site.  I called the company and placed the order; the call took about three minutes.  But since I went to the propane company’s Web site to get their phone number, why wasn’t there a “Fill It Up” button on the page for me to click?  It would have been more convenient for me and less costly for them.  Simply put, Web-scripting tools make possible the convergence of Web presence and call handling.

Web scripting is the ability to tie a client’s Web presence together with their TAS data.  A Web-based call-scripting tool can turn a situation such as my propane order into an opportunity for your TAS to branch out with a new service offering that mines existing information to yield a mother lode of new revenue.

In the example of the propane client, a Web-scripting interface would allow information to be sent to the TAS, and this information could then be processed the same way data from an incoming call is handled.  In essence, all data from calls or from information posted by a Web script could be funneled through the answering service’s data processing logic for the particular client.

Additional logic can be used to determine whether data should be saved to an external database for further processing, dispatched immediately, batched to be faxed, or emailed to the client later.

With today’s Web-scripting tools designed specifically for the TAS industry, the propane company’s after-hours answering service could easily provide the propane company with a hyperlink to a Web-enabled, intelligent call script.  During the day, this Web-enabled script could simply auto-email the results to the proper department at the propane company.

With Web scripting, you can now expand your revenue stream.  You are involved 24/7 with your clients, and you increase your profitability by leveraging existing expenses without increasing operator time.

To move from the present into the future, you need to let go of the idea that you are just an answering service.  You don’t just take messages; you make the most of opportunities.  For example:

• You don’t take messages for HVAC companies; you acquire sales leads.

• You don’t take messages for apartment communities; you are the first contact with future tenants. 

• You don’t take messages for medical groups; you are the first responder, connecting with patients, initiating consultations, and relaying pertinent information for them.

Let’s leave the past and present methodologies; it’s time to take advantage of tools that are available right now and start providing more “opportunities.”  The more opportunities you take advantage of, the more value you provide to your customer base and the more money you make.

I’ve seen many answering services gravitate to Web scripting for a variety of uses, such as service companies, insurance companies, apartment communities, and funeral homes.  Web-scripting innovations also are being used as client-sharing tools, providing solutions for a TAS of any size to manage major inbound/outbound campaigns that previously were reserved for large call centers.

Utopia has shifted again.  Are you shifting with it?

Susan Kirkpatrick is the lead trainer for Amtelco.

[download issue]