Recording Calls & Training Staff on Answering Calls?

[kaseylauren]

A few questions regarding recording calls that come into your office, as well as effective training methods for teaching staff how to improve their phone answering skills...

1. Do you record calls that come into your office? If so, what company/service do you use? 

2. For those that do record calls into their office, how do you use those recordings to train your staff? 

We don't record all of our calls, but those calls that we get from our print YellowBook ad, as well as our PPC ads have special tracking numbers which are recorded. While I LOVE the concept of listening to those calls and then using those recordings to train staff on what they are doing well as well as areas that need improvement, this is a very time intensive process. Does anyone have an alternate solution --- perhaps a service that transcribes the calls? something else?

3. For those that meet with staff for call training purposes, how often do you meet? What do you cover during those meetings (and more generally, how do those meetings run)??

I'm looking for a more effective way to use these recorded calls to train staff, so any insight into how I do this more effectively (and with less time), would be greatly appreciated. Thanks! 

[emily]

Hey!

1. Yes. We use the ROI guys (Richard Seppala). If you have a Foster website, they will work with DSS to load the calls into the DSS system. That way, you can listen to them in DSS and view them alongside your book orders & ngage chats. 

2. We have used Chris Mullins as a phone training service, but we found that there are lots of Southern mannerisms that don't translate well into Yankee phone scripts (no disrespect.). However I will say that she is EXCELLENT as a source to get your phone people on the same page and to get everyone understanding the importance of the script and the benefits the office gains from using a system. So, my office is now doing a modified script and are still implementing many of the concepts taught by Chris. 

Listening to calls is an incredibly time intensive process. We meet once a month, usually during lunch, and what we do is this: everyone brings one call to the table. It is either a call where they made a personal breakthrough (difficult caller, was able to get xyz information out of the caller, etc.) or they had a huge problem. We then discuss the issues or the ways in which someone overcame an issue, and discuss ways to improve. We discuss the close rate for potential client calls, and we talk about what we can do to improve as a team. It is very supportive and positive, there is a lot of teamwork going on. 

Teamwork is a pretty new concept for our office, so don't think i'm bragging. It took a year for us to get to the point where the phone people could sit at a table and discuss phone calls. But it has been worth it. An hour a month has made a huge difference.

Meetings are run by me. I am not a phone person primarily, but I do handle a few pncs a month. I got the job because how well we do with the phone is a direct correlation with how well our marketing is working. And our attitudes and actions over the phone reflect back on us directly. So, i schedule the meetings and keep them from going too long or going too haywire. We keep the format of the meeting pretty loose - a general check-in on how we think we've done for the month, move on to listening to a few calls and discussing them, then move on to discussing where we can improve, what we think we're doing well at, our close rate, who is calling. Sometimes, if we think we're getting spammed or getting crappy leads for a practice area, we talk about that and what could be the reason why. It's pretty organic, and we keep it informal. 

kasey - do you have a way to track your potential client calls? a spreadsheet? a task management system? If not, I recommend flow. (www.getflow.com) It's pretty cheap, but it works much better than a spreadsheet. We've been using it since January, and we LOVE it. We're now using it across the office for case management, marketing plans, whatever projects we're working on. And you can use it on an ipad or phone. It's cloud based, so it updates automatically in real time. Flow has also helped the phone team in the monthly meetings, because we know as the month has progressed, where everyone else is at. So it doesn't take much time any more to get everyone up to speed. 

Long story short - record your calls. listening to them is another ball of wax that will depend on your firm and how y'all want to handle it. 

[Ashley Romao]

Recording calls for us has revolutionized the way we answer calls.  From your end, you may think you sound great and nice, polite, etc, but when you go back to listen, you may be cold and unapproachable.  Seriously.  We've changed EVERYTHING over the last year, year and a half. 

We use Callsource to record our calls and we LOVE them.  We have corresponding numbers for every single marketing venture/promotional item/location, and they are all reported to me weekly.  I can tell you exactly how many calls came from our website, phone book, and everything else last week, heck, even yesterday and today!  There are many more benefits too, you can use it to look up a number if a call got disconnected, or if someone didn't want to give it.

I agree with Kasey, it is very time intensive to listen to calls.  But it is vital.  We are able to save all calls directly through a ftp from Callsource and we can save them all daily.  So we have all our calls saved, since we began recording them pretty much.  Carve out time once a week to listen to calls.  We are trying very hard to get better at this too, it's hard to step away from the work of the every day to evaluate how things are going.  Everything else is more pressing, but this truly is more important.

We meet at least 1-2 times a week, me and my "bat phone" team, as we call ourselves.  I have 3 other girls who answer pnc calls, and I will take a few each week too.  I will select a call from each of us to listen to, and listen to them before the meeting so I know what issues happened, where things can improve, and also what deserves praise.  The team loves our meetings.  The way I choose calls is I look through the intakes that have come in since the last time we've met, and pick the names of the PNCs, then go and find the call that corresponds to it.  I find it is much easier to approach it this way than to play "call roulette" as I like to call it. 

[Kasey Richardson]

Emily,
Sorry I am a couple days late in responding. Thank you for getting back to me so quickly -- your post was very informative! A good number of our calls are recorded, so I think we at least have enough of a pool to work from with regard to ongoing staff training. Seems like the consensus is that it takes up a chunk of time, especially if you are listening to the calls on your own before meeting with staff (as Ashley pointed out, and like I had been doing), but it's worth the effort about 10-fold, so I guess it's back on my weekly agenda to hit on at least once a week! 

We use Infusionsoft to track potential client calls. I'd be interested in seeing a few screenshots of how you are using flow, if you wouldn't mind sharing though. I think it's always good to compare what you are doing to what other people are doing -- our system seems to be working (and I am in the midst of doing some major Infusionsoft cleanup before transitioning into the campaign builder), but it's always good to look at other systems!

Let me know. Thanks!

[Kasey Richardson]

Ashley,
Thanks for your insight as well! I really like the idea of identifying the intakes and then pulling the call recordings for those PNCs specifically.

If all of your PNC's call on a line (or lines) which are different from those that the clients call in on, I would assume this means that once you sign someone up you give them a different number to contact you on which doesn't ring your marketing line (at least that's how it would seem to work, to me at least). If this is the case, how do you train clients to not call the marketing line?

We market with our main line, and I have thought about possibly giving clients the numbers for our other lines (and trying to differentiate between PNCs and clients, so that whoever is answering the phone knows that if line 1 rings, it's a PNC, but if ones of the other lines, it's a client).... but I know that many of our clients call the main line right now, so I'm not sure how much success we would have with this. Also, I'm not sure what we would do when the PNC line is in use (right now it just rolls over to one of the other lines that are open).

Do you need two different phone companies to keep these two types of calls clearly separated? I guess I am curious about how the actual technology works.

[Charley Mann]

Hey Kasey,

When you say that you track calls through Infusionsoft, what do you mean by that?

Charley

[kaseylauren]

Charley,

Any PNC who contacts our office and doesn't get us on the phone (i.e.they fill out a web form, or used ngage live chat, or perhaps they leave a message with our answering service), gets manually added as a contact record in Infusionsoft. Our staff then attempts to get back in touch with that person to get an intake, which we also use Infusionsoft for. 

I am using the field "person type" to track and segment between "prospects" (we need to get an intake) and "leads" (we have an intake). I also have a call note template that we use which automatically adds a prospect to our lost lead sequence after we have attempted to get that person on the phone and complete an intake X number of times. I have saved reports in Infusionsoft which our staff can pull up, so that they know which prospects they need to follow-up with and attempt to get an intake, and others with whom we have intakes, but perhaps are waiting for attorney feedback. Similarly I have reporting saved for leads that we reject, so that our staff can run batch rejection letters at the end of each week. We also employ this reporting strategy to track which cases are in different stages in the process. 

I will say that this system is continuing to evolve, and just got a major overhaul and cleanup last week. I need to spend some time cleaning up (and further segmenting) our "leads" report though.... I've noticed a pattern wherein the attorney wants to review additional documentation of some type before setting up a NCM (and signing up the case) -- such as pictures, bills, accident report, insurance information -- but we haven't been very good on following up with these leads after that initial conversation and request for documentation, so that is on my list for this week. 

Hopefully that makes sense, and answers your question. If you have any other questions, just let me know! 

Now a question for you: Ben mentioned something on basecamp about using Infusionsoft for either requesting med records and bills or tracking those requests (I wasn't quite sure from his post).... can you enlighten us a little bit more? I've started and stopped on a project like this a couple times (and I think you and I may have had a conversation or email exchange about it), but never really figured out a system that would really work. 

-Kasey

[Charley Mann]

Gotcha - I thought you might have discovered some awesome plug-in that tracks incoming calls and merges numbers into Infusionsoft (wouldn't that be spectacular?).

We could probably do more with Saved Reports, so I'm glad you mentioned your use of them.  They are probably one of the more underutilized options for our front-end staff.

As for using Infusionsoft for the medical records, it's a mostly manual process right now, but there is a lot of development happening on our end and in partnership with Infusionsoft, so that's probably what he was discussing.  Ideally, what we need to do is create a Notes Template that automatically activates Tasks that ask about the records, which "ping" the staff member at the appropriate time marks.  It would be ended by a tag being applied that would say something like "Records Received" or something similar.  I'm actually working with the staff to today to put something simple together.

I would love to brainstorm some ideas about what this kind of system may look like (maybe that's something we can spitball about at the end of Wednesday's call).

Charley

[kaseylauren]

So with regard to medical records and bills, if I understand correctly you essentially want to use note templates that automate tasks/reminders for your staff to request or follow-up on requests for medical records. Am I on track here? 

We played around with something like this, but didn't get too far. We also thought it would be nice to have all providers entered into infusionsoft so that we could use letter templates to generate requests (so this didn't have to be a manual process), but again, we didn't get super far -- and ran into an issue when we realized you would need the ability to merge both contact and company information from a person and the provider, which I don't think is possible, at least at this point. 

For the time being, we are tracking the actual requests/follow-up on those requests with our calendar (or through a service), but I am using that "person type" field to track those clients who we are requesting records for, and those for whom we have received all records and bills. I have note templates set up for each of these that then send out email notifications to the attorneys to keep them in the loop re: status of each case. Again, I have saved reports available for different case statuses. 

If we have time on Wed, we could definitely do some brainstorming re: Infusionsoft & rec/bill collection !

[Ashley Romao]

Kasey--
All of our PNC calls come into one phone system, what we call our "bat phone."  It has 3 lines, and there are 7 of us in the office with a "bat phone" on our desks, so any of us can take a call.  When a PNC calls our office, we do not transfer them to anyone, whoever answers is able to speak to them, refer them, or set an appointment right then and there.  We don't believe in putting people on hold. 

When a PNC becomes a client, we train them that their paralegal will be their point of contact, so they call their paralegals directly.  We don't have a receptionist to direct calls. 

Both of our phone systems are through one company, Cox.  But they are two completely different systems that don't communicate to each other. Our Callsource numbers are forwarded to our bat phone lines, so no one is ever calling the direct number to the phones, does that make sense?

As to what you guys are talking about with tracking PNCs, we use our case management software, Needles, to do that.  Infusion is strictly for marketing leads in our office, but our PNCs get exported to Infusion daily so that they get on a newsletter sequence.

[kaseylauren]

That all makes sense. Thanks for the information, Ashley! 

[emily]

We have 2 infusion log-ins for our office, so managing PNCs through the contact options isn't really feasible. It's a good idea though- centralizing everything. We also don't use needles, so that excludes us from those options.

Here are some attached screesnhots of flow.

For intake, when a person calls or we get a notification, we start a new task in our VB Intake list in flow. We title it with the person's name and injury. In the comments, we include the description of what happened, the person's contact informations, and other intake information. Then, the entire intake team is invited to share the task, and Brian and Vuk make the final call as to whether or not we want to sign it. Once the potential client is signed or has been rejected, the task gets checked off the list and goes onto an archived list. 

We have the capability to run reports on completed tasks and lists, so we can review and track leads that way as well.