A change machine (or jukebox, pool table, or other critical piece) in one of your game rooms breaks down Friday night after the close of business in one of your locations. The customer does as you instructed them to do and calls your office and leaves a message with your answering service. The answering service either pages out the wrong information, doesn't do in a timely manner, or maybe they lose the information and don't page it out at all. The first you hear about it is Monday morning the customer calls you at your office screaming because you have lousy service, but you never got the message...
We have always used an answering service for most of our companies 50 year history. The above scenario occurred in our company too many times, and changing answering services was no improvement. I just had problems with different people. Then I investigated voice mail.
My father was totally skeptical, as were others in our company. We are going to have our customers talk to a machine! It will be the end.
I knew if I messed this up it may be the end of me. I lived phones and voice mail for 60 days in 1994. I sent out a request for a proposal based on what I thought I wanted. I visited nine phone companies. I didn't invite them to my office, I went to there's. In our case, our current phone system was obsolete, 1970's genre, so I needed new phones to go along with our voice mail system. At that time we had five incoming lines, with twelve phones.
What I found out was amazing. It was clear at that time that for the performance and money, the majors, AT&T, and Southwestern Bell, were clearly inferior for our purpose. The phone companies that rose to the top quickly were, you guessed it, of Japanese origin. We purchase a Toshiba system, phones and voice mail together, for around $13,000. The voice mail was approximately half of that cost. This compares to a very impressive AT&T proposal, complete with coffee and donuts, for $25,000, and it didn't do what the Toshiba system did. I later called my long distance carrier at the time, AT&T, and changed. I figured they were probably too high priced in long distance too, although I didn't compare, I just changed.
Today you call Chilton Vending and you get a professional greeting (I traded out with a local radio personality) that asks you to press "2" if you have a Chilton Vending service call, then prompts you to the correct market (we have different service personnel for different cities throughout Kansas and Missouri). Then in the local service persons voice, they are ask to leave a description of their problem, and told a service person will be paged immediately with their message. That message not only goes into the service persons mail box, but it is also "auto copied" into a second mail box which is our secretaries voice mail box. When she retrieves the message the next morning, she will also have written documentation of the call from the service person who completed the call, and then faxed to the office that night. The customer signs that service call form after the problem is corrected. The voice mail is date and time stamped. We will then track how many minutes it took to respond to every service request. We will track that number in our computer system.
The customers message is programmed to page the primary service person every ten minutes until the message is retrieved. If after one hour the call has not been retrieved, the voice mail system calls the next programmed number, the service person's home, then his cellular phone, then his secondary service person, then the Service Manager of the company, first his pager, then his home, etc... This all happens in ten minute intervals. If still no answer, the voice mail calls me at my house, and then, God forbid, the last number in the chain if the message is still not retrieved is Stan Chilton's home phone number-two hours after the initially message was left by the customer.
The biggest benefit is there is no human intervention. The above will happen 100% of the time without fail. The other benefit we realized after the installation is that we not only get the service "facts", we get the "emotion" which is equally if not more important. With voice mail there is a difference between, "This is Joe and your jukebox is not operating properly" and "THIS IS JOE AND YOUR _________ JUKEBOX IS NOT WORKING AGAIN, GET YOUR ______ OUT HERE OR ELSE! Obviously, these calls may be prioritized differently.
Another enormous benefit is that we use it constantly for internal communication at Chilton Vending. So much so that we have recently doubled the size of the system with a $4,000 system upgrade.
The initial concern that we will lose every customer we have was unfounded. During the day at Chilton Vending our secretaries still answer our phones. Some customers are irritated because they
just want to leave a message in voice mail for service. For those customers we have given them a separate number which is voice mail 24 hours per day. Customer reaction has been very positive. I don't ever remember a serious negative reaction.
Voice mail systems are a lot like being a coin machine operator. There are a lot of bad ones out there that give the good ones a bad name. Setting up your voice mail system takes a lot of thought and planning. You've all experience bad voice mails where you call up and get routed 15 times and then disconnected. Spend time looking at every possible scenario a customer could experience, and keep routing to an absolute minimum.
If you're one of those that say, "I hate voice mail". Get with it! It's irritating to call someone who doesn't have voice mail today. My phone is extension #210 at Chilton Vending is you want to call me, anytime, 24 hours per day.