Is Your Phone Making $400 A Day?

If you can’t answer your own damn phone, sell your shop tomorrow – without a live person on the other end of that incoming call you are wasting a resource.

How many customers have you lost to that mechanical receptionist answering your incoming calls? It’s time to meet one of your key, and often overlooked, marketing tools – your telephone.

Everyone has been stuck in “voice-mail hell” from the credit card company to the insurance company and beyond. The only difference between the phone system of a conglomerate and that of a small shop owner is the price of the system. The big guys may have $100K to spend  to your $50 answering machine but whether the customer is pushing fifty buttons or listening to a boring message it’s the same result. It infuriates your customer and tells them you just don’t care.

The reality is, you are not Petco or Petsmart, and your success as a store owner relies on personal skill and customer interaction. Those attributes make you unique as a shop owner and have to become part of your brand. That should  include answering the phone so your customers get the information they need immediately. Don’t make them wait. They want their grooming now, they want their information now, they want that flea problem solved now – not two days later. If you don’t see that logic, you need to get out now.

Let’s take, for example, Jack and Diane, two very busy professionals, new to your area, with 2.5 kids and a dog that is groomed regularly. Searching for a new groomer, Diane does a little googling and your website pops up. She’s impressed and ready to book her first appointment. Except when she calls, she gets that infernal machine.

Time is a luxury with this busy family and rather than wait for your return call, which she knows may or may not happen, she moves on to the next google hit. And you have just lost a future regular, loyal customer.

Let’s say you are so busy grooming that $40 dog that incoming calls are rolling to voicemail. One of those calls just happened to be a local TV station or newspaper looking for an expert to interview for a story on the grooming industry. And they are on a deadline. Do you really think they are going to leave a message and then wait on the off chance that the return call will occur before that deadline? No, they’ll move right along to the next shop – and you just missed out on some invaluable free advertising. How much is that type of advertising worth? If you had just answered your phone, it would have been you, it’s a no brainer. But you were busy grooming a dog.

You have to understand your customer. Here in 2012, consumers have access to the internet and expect immediate results. A potential customer might be listening to your message droning away, “Thank you for calling, we are unable to answer the phone right now”, but what they really hear is that they are not important, you are unprofessional and too busy. Those callers are going to hang up and call the next salon on the list which isn’t as clean, doesn’t have Splash and Dash or your great reputation. But it does have one key service that your shop doesn’t possess.

“Hello, Super K-9 Kuts, how may I help you?”

Because a cheerful, live person is answering the phone, the caller is able to ask a few questions, book a grooming appointment and is on his or her way to becoming a loyal customer to a salon that is inferior to your own in almost every way.

Except one. That owner realizes the value of answering the phone in person rather than relying on an answering machine to greet customers, old or new.

And that one service has netted the next salon on the list a new four-legged client that requires regular grooming or maybe some free advertising or myriad unknown opportunities that may have been waiting on the other end of the line.

All because of a phone call.