Look the Number Up Before You Choose the Words

Our automatic reply went out to everybody in the same words. That included people who were already customers, with their car already in our hands.

On one day, of the forty nine callers it answered, twenty three were people we already knew and had a vehicle on file for. One of them had replied yes to his own booking ninety seconds earlier. Another was sitting on an estimate from us at that moment.

Both of them got a message introducing the shop and asking what they needed.

Three people, three messages

The number now goes through a lookup before any words are chosen.

Somebody with live work gets recognition and a status. We pulled up your vehicle, here is the page for it. A past customer with nothing currently running gets the same recognition with the question reopened, because they are almost certainly calling about something new. A number we do not know gets the plain ask.

It is the difference between a form letter and somebody looking up from the counter and knowing your face. It costs one database query.

Recognition has to give up fast

This is the design decision that actually matters, and the one most likely to be got wrong.

The lookup is deliberately strict. An exact ten digit match, exactly one customer record, and a vehicle on file. Anything ambiguous returns nothing and the plain message goes out.

Every failure path falls back rather than stopping. Recognition must never be the reason a reply fails to send, because a slightly generic message that arrives beats a perfect message that does not. If you build this, write that rule down before you write the code, because every instinct while building will push toward trying harder to identify the caller.

Define open work the way the customer would

We counted a job as open if it was not finished. That seemed complete and it was not.

It missed a customer who had paid for one piece of work while an estimate for another sat waiting on them. As far as our records were concerned that person had nothing open. As far as the customer was concerned, there was an unanswered number of nearly nine hundred dollars sitting in their messages.

Open means not finished, or carrying a price the customer has not answered yet. Worth checking how your own system decides, because the customer definitely counts the unanswered estimate.

Recognition changes what you should say about price

A worthwhile subtlety. Our overnight message leads with the after hours rate, which is right for a stranger.

It is wrong for somebody who already has work with us. A customer with a car in progress calling at midnight is not asking what a call out costs. They are asking what is happening with their car. Leading with a price reads as though we have forgotten who they are, which is exactly the problem we were trying to fix.

So a caller with live work gets status instead of the rate. A past customer with nothing running still gets the priced version, because for that call the price is the question.

What to try in your own shop

Pull a day of missed calls and check how many of the numbers are already in your customer records. Most shops have never counted, and the number is usually higher than anybody guesses.

If a meaningful share of the people your automated reply talks to are people you already know, you are paying to sound like a stranger to your own customers.