Somebody called your line after hours. This is what happened next.
We rang your published number outside your opening hours with a real problem, recorded what answered, and scored the call against a sixteen-point standard. The card you are holding is the result. This page is what sits behind it.
WHAT WE DID
- 01We called the number you publish.
Outside your hours, from a normal phone, with the kind of problem your customers actually call about. Whatever answered is what a customer would have got.
- 02We kept the recording.
Every line on your card carries a timestamp, so you can go and listen to it. Nothing on the card is an opinion about your business. It is a description of one call.
- 03We scored it against the same sixteen points every time.
The checklist does not change per company. Yours was graded on exactly what everybody else is graded on, which is the only way the score means anything.
WHAT THE FOUR LETTERS MEAN
- GGOAL Did the call do the job it exists to do?
- OOPERATIONS Did every step run clean?
- AACCURACY Was everything it said true?
- LLANGUAGE Brand, tone, and what the caller left knowing.
Your card shows the score and the worst miss in each of the four. It does not list the individual points you missed, because working through those is a conversation and not a page. That conversation is fifteen minutes.
WHAT A WEEK OF THIS IS WORTH
We do not know your numbers and we are not going to invent them. Put your own in and the arithmetic is the same one we would do in the meeting.
This assumes the people who reach you out of hours are worth the same as the ones who reach you in them. On timing, the largest study of the question looked at 1.25 million leads across 42 companies and found that firms responding within an hour were seven times more likely to qualify the lead than firms responding later. The same team audited 2,241 US companies and measured a 42-hour average response, with 23% who never responded at all. Oldroyd, McElheran and Elkington, Harvard Business Review.