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In 48-Hours have 24/7 Live Phone Support and Live Chat (Done-For-You)
•Lance Hood•Season 1•Episode 8
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00:00 | 22:20
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In this episode, Lance Hood of FranPro interviews Kristi Anderson of VoiceNation. Kristi Anderson is an incredible resource for any franchise organization. If you would like to work with VoiceNation go here: https://Franpro.vip/GoVoiceNation
50% of leads call after hours. Try setting up a 24/7 live answering support and live chat in less than 2 days. Fully customizable. Corporate has an umbrella account and franchisees receive sub accounts. 2 Weeks free.
Covered in this call:
Offers 24/7 live answering support and live chat
Integrates with popular CRMs and provides real-time analytics
Custom greetings, hold music, call routing & scheduling
Corporate has an umbrella account with franchisee sub-accounts
Activation is quick, with onboarding in less than 2 days
Want to transform your business communication needs into a seamless, engaging, and efficient system? Join us as we chat with our special guest, Kristi Anderson of VoiceNation, who will spill the beans on how their ground-breaking live answering service and live chat can revolutionize your businesses - be it franchises, brokers, home services, or customer support. We delve into the nuts and bolts of how their service captures visitors, calls, and leads, and the unique features such as call tracking by phone number, scripts and answers. We also touch on the importance of live chat in engaging potential customers and VoiceNation's flexible services including no contracts, monthly plans and HIPAA compliance.
Did you ever imagine that a live answering service could play a crucial role in landing a half a million dollar job or dealing with a frantic call about a rabid raccoon? Kristi shares some riveting stories that will make you rethink the power of prompt communication. We also discuss the ease of use, superior service, and streamlined onboarding process offered by VoiceNation. Stay tuned until the end as Kristi reveals an exciting special offer for our listeners. Get ready to revolutionize your business communication with VoiceNation.
Well, hi everyone. Today I would like you to meet Christy Anderson with Voice Nation. Kristy, welcome.
Kristi Anderson (VoiceNation):
Hi, it's my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.
Lance Hood (FranPro):
So, Kristy, I think what you guys do is extremely important, and the more I dug into it, I realized how valuable this could be Not just I could see this for franchisee's and also brokers, because we could all use help like this to sift through conversations and handle them for us, especially in a more professional manner. So can you take a second and really share what Voice Nation does?
Kristi Anderson (VoiceNation):
Absolutely. Thank you for asking. So we're a live answering support service along with live chat for your website to capture any visitors that come to your site, any callers that call in. Otherwise you might miss those calls, which is that translates into new business. So we're there for you 24, seven, 365 nights, holidays, weekends. We're there to capture all of your calls.
Lance Hood (FranPro):
Right and, as they're going to see in the upcoming demo, is you guys actually have some pretty incredible stuff. So one of the things is that when a call comes in, you can track it by phone number, but you also have all these specific answers and scripts and things people can do, because I see this as lead generation. You're talking to somebody who's coming in, who needs to be placed in into a position so that they can do business with you, whether that is like a home service franchise or somebody who's sending a tech out to a company or a business that needs somebody to answer the phones, do customer support, or even like handling new leads, to sift through and set appointments for the leads. You know everything's. I can't afford a virtual assistant to handle all these leads. Well, you can. You can actually have, for a very affordable price, you can have a quality person who's friendly and competent, who can handle those leads and schedule them for you.
Lance Hood (FranPro):
So, yeah, we all get so many leads and it's expensive to follow up and and you can't, may not have the time to handle them properly.
Kristi Anderson (VoiceNation):
Right, exactly, and that's what we do. We're there for you to capture all of those that otherwise you might miss.
Lance Hood (FranPro):
Right and not just on the phone. If you look at the live chat, then you also have you have where every you know the pages on your website can have somebody, a human, actually talking to people and doing the same thing, engaging them, because the last thing we want to do is go to a dead website and not actually bring them into the funnel and engage with them.
Kristi Anderson (VoiceNation):
Exactly. I mean, we're in an instantaneous society these days. I myself have been to websites before and if there was a chat engagement tool, I would definitely, and I have utilized that in order to communicate and get answers for my questions. Otherwise, you know, they just pass on by and you don't even know that they were there to visit. So, yeah, it's a great engagement tool.
Lance Hood (FranPro):
One of the most frustrating things I've experienced is I see the chat on the site and then I click on it and they're like leave a message and someone will email you back and I'm like what? What that's not chat, you know. Or the other thing is is like we'll catch up with you in the next few hours, like somebody will respond to the queue, and you know that can be, can be okay and can be useful service, but you know, especially with a high dollar transaction or an urgent lead, they're not going to wait for that. You know they need help now or they have a question now. So having that live human makes a big deal. What would you say makes voice nation different from other companies that might answer phones or provide live chat?
Kristi Anderson (VoiceNation):
Oh wow, there's so many things. There's there's no contracts, so we don't rope you into any long term commitment. It's a monthly service. We have flexible monthly plans. There's no activation fees, no setup fees. We provide the onboarding. We go through an onboarding process where we completely customize all of the scripting and call handling procedures based on your specifications. We're 100% HIPAA compliant, if that, if that matters. But you turn us on when you need us, turn us off when you don't. You don't have to let us know. We're just there for you. We have our people, our staff, the policies, procedures, auditing and so forth that we have in place, those mechanisms. That sets us apart as well. Our technology to monitor your account and all of your calls. That just separates us.
Lance Hood (FranPro):
Well, I would love to jump in before any more questions and give people, people a demo and let them see it.
Kristi Anderson (VoiceNation):
Oh sure, absolutely so. Each account comes with a dashboard and an app for your phone. It'll just come standard with our service. We give you complete and total transparency and visibility of every aspect of your account, so there are no secrets. With our service, you're going to see exactly where you are with your minutes, what plan you're in, your average call duration, all of your messages are here. You can get to them faster just by clicking on more your call volume per day. And just keep in mind, this is just a demo. It's not a live account, so it's not heavily populated. You'll see your usage per month here, and then any bookmark messages would appear here, so you can get to them much faster just by clicking here, and then I'll show you how to do that in just a second. There's a quick feedback mechanism here on the home screen where you can communicate directly with our Zendesk and our support team and offer feedback or if you have a question about your account or you need anything. And then, of course, there's a chat bubble down here where you can also chat with them directly, and the chat bubble will appear on every page of the dashboard so that you can ask questions or if you need anything at all. You're changing your billing or you need a non-boarding call or what have you Just going onto the left hand side is just an overview.
Kristi Anderson (VoiceNation):
It's going to give you each and every call that has come in and you have the ability to query a specific date range. You can filter by call type. If you would like, you can email these, you can bookmark them, you can download them to an Excel spreadsheet. So just to give you an example also, this notes field here on the right hand side that is for clients to enter notes for themselves or for their team members, so it's kind of like a mini CRM and it also translates. It's seamless, so it's in real time, so it translates directly to their app on their phone so they can see oh okay, well, tom's got this. I don't need to handle that, it's already been taken care of. But, as you can see, everything is date and time stamped when the call comes in.
Kristi Anderson (VoiceNation):
If this was a live call, the caller ID information would be populated here the link to the call, how the call was categorized and then, of course, all of the information that we collected during the call. Those are pushed out via text, via email, and then obviously they're going to be in real time here on the dashboard as well as the app for your phone. So you're going to get them four different ways. Talk about communication right, the same communication. And then, of course, under setup options, we had the capability here you just you can check this information if you should ever need to, but it's just always visible for you at any given time.
Kristi Anderson (VoiceNation):
And then, of course, employee setup. We make it super simple. It's so easy to navigate. If you have a list of employees on an Excel spreadsheet, you can simply upload that, or you can do this during the onboarding and we can populate that for you. So, once it's populated, then we can do call handling setup to who gets notified on call setup if there's a dispatching situation. And then, of course, there's a complete account summary where you can see every single individual call type that we have populated for you. So, like I said, there's no secrets with our service. And then, of course, there's reporting. You can query or you can run reports based on calls by month, by date, a distribution map. It's very, very intuitive.
Lance Hood (FranPro):
Very nice.
Kristi Anderson (VoiceNation):
Yeah. So everything right here at your fingertips, and I also wanted to show you what the receptionist sees on their side. So our technology has the capability to recognize a repeat caller. So if there was a caller that had called in before, the system would automatically recognize it. And this is what the receptionist sees. When a call comes in, it automatically populate, not this screen. It's taken just a second here. So there you go.
Kristi Anderson (VoiceNation):
So I'm just going to use an example of one of my franchise clients that I have. In the call, the screen would automatically populate the receptionist. Thank you for calling CERN Pro, charlotte. How may I help you? And so, basically, from there, the receptionist would follow the queues and the prompts and fill in the complete information here. And then obviously, there's several different decision trees that we can plug in. There we would be able to decide well, if it's water and flood, is that denoted as an emergency? Then they can dispatch that call. But if it were a repeat caller, a little posted note would pop up on the screen for the receptionist to let them know hey, this person's called in before. This is all their details. And what that's going to do is that's going to minimize talk time, that's going to deliver the warm and fuzzy to the caller and it's really enhancing that. It's just going to bring everything together and make them feel like, hey, they're part of the organization, they're part of the team, and it's going to just less frustrating for the caller.
Lance Hood (FranPro):
I would say yeah, I would say that if it was just, I would say that if this was something where you have someone who's calling a franchise location for services, that you would, you know they can handle all those important things, they can book and schedule things. It's all here and, like you said, if they're a repeat customer, they'll already know the story of that person and be able to answer and speak with them right out of the gate. If this is lead generation, so you're having people that are responding to a thing, they can easily gather that data and book them in with a consultant or representative of the company for future, future conversations about that.
Kristi Anderson (VoiceNation):
Right, definitely for follow up purposes, absolutely. And let me show you a little bit here on our live chat, which is on our money penny side. I've taken your website and put it into our visualizer so you can see what it would look like here and you can program this or we do the programming for you. But it's really, it's not techy, so it's really easy. We can put this chat box up here on the right hand corner, left hand corner, wherever you would like. We can make it just pop up. After so many seconds we can just have it down here in the corner. There's a multitude of different aspects that we would be able to create for you. And another thing too I did want to say that we are going to be offering, for all the Fran Pro viewers and listeners, a two week free trial for our live chat.
Lance Hood (FranPro):
Very nice.
Kristi Anderson (VoiceNation):
That's pretty exciting right there.
Lance Hood (FranPro):
Yeah, well, that's excellent, this is the engagement.
Kristi Anderson (VoiceNation):
So here's a little bit more here about our live chat, and the visualizer just enables you to see the coloring. I mean, we can set it up so many different ways. We can ask a specific question, but it's populated basically on the back end, the same way that the answering service would be, which would be you know, how would you like us to engage? What are the rules of engagement? Do we ask these questions and we gather this information and then that's all pushed out to them, and so this way we're going to be capturing exactly what their IP address is, what pages they visited, how long they stayed on the page, and so forth and so on. So it's very, very intuitive.
Lance Hood (FranPro):
I like the fact that you have that right on your website. That says that 46% of chats take place after hours and they wouldn't have anyone to speak with.
Kristi Anderson (VoiceNation):
Exactly Right. Yeah, we've done the polling, so we have that information at our fingertips. It is, it's quite astounding.
Lance Hood (FranPro):
That's so much missed opportunities until now. Well, excellent. I really like that because in that dashboard, people can they can take and customize all the conversations and give people everything they need, and that's just your tool, and then it just becomes an engagement tool. So it's like every website should have some sort of engagement tool to make the most of this traffic. So I think this is great.
Kristi Anderson (VoiceNation):
Yeah, something. Yeah, something. So simple but yet so satisfying in the end with the results.
Lance Hood (FranPro):
So All right, we'll go ahead and close that out and then have a few more questions for you here. So do you have any stories of some businesses that you guys have worked with that are using the phone service or chat that you're allowed to share? We don't have to go into names if you don't want to, but I'd like to give people an example of the difference of handling it on your own, because you know some people say, oh, someone's just going to answer the phone. There's so much more to it than that, and having quality, friendly, happy people that can handle that for you, I think is super important.
Kristi Anderson (VoiceNation):
Exactly, yeah. So one of my franchise groups they're in disaster recovery, we'll say so. They had a call come in I think it was about three o'clock in the morning for from a commercial business and this business had experienced a fire, and so there's significant fire damage, there's significant water damage, and we ended up obviously taking this call and dispatching it properly so so that they could act on it as quickly as possible, and it ended up being over a half a million dollar job for them. So you know the service more than pays for itself in so many different ways, because it's your reputation, it's your business, it's your livelihood and all these franchises they. That means everything right.
Lance Hood (FranPro):
Right, and sometimes having somebody who's responsible for answering the phone, like what I have seen people do, is they have a tech, that tech has a cell phone and things forward to that tech cell phone, but he, if he's busy or she is busy, they may not be paying attention to that and you know, sometimes people just roll to the next number. So you definitely want to be there to pick up right away and not miss those opportunities, especially after hours.
Kristi Anderson (VoiceNation):
Yeah, and with our technology we had the capability to assign a primary, a secondary, a tertiary on call individual, so that if that one's not available either via phone or via text, they're still going to get those messages and they're pushed out to everyone. But we can go down the list with our dispatching capabilities. Yes, absolutely yeah, and another franchise client that I have there in the credit removal and wildlife sector. So there was a client well, a new client actually that was quite harried after hours when a raccoon what this was a rabid raccoon in their attic had actually gotten into the house.
Kristi Anderson (VoiceNation):
So yeah, and so we took that call, dispatched it immediately, and so they were able to go out and solve the issue, save the day and remove that rabid critter.
Lance Hood (FranPro):
You know I have seen a rabid raccoon and yeah, I would be definitely. If I didn't have the tools to take care of that myself, I would definitely be freaking out and want someone out there immediately.
Kristi Anderson (VoiceNation):
Absolutely, yeah. So so, working under pressure, with very sensitive situations sometimes, yeah, you have to, you have to act, you have to move on those things and we're here to take those calls.
Lance Hood (FranPro):
Well, perfect. So when someone's introduced to you guys, let's just say people click the link. They want to grab that two weeks free service. What are the steps in the process from initially contacting you to were implemented, and and people are answering phone calls or answering chat messages.
Kristi Anderson (VoiceNation):
Yeah, so it's a rather expeditious process. We just need the participation on the other side. We collect some information and get them put through with a welcome call and onboarding, so forth. So I would say probably 48 hours we can instantaneously start the process, but about 48 hours and then the code is generated and it's just. It's a non techie piece of code that just goes in on the back end and automatically populates and communicate so that we can start taking their chats.
Lance Hood (FranPro):
Wow, and so does that. Is that like a code that's per page, or is it global for your domain?
Kristi Anderson (VoiceNation):
No, so so it's going to be for their website per page. If they have multiple pages, we can put it on multiple pages and and so forth. Yeah, we can set those parameters based on their requirements and specifications.
Lance Hood (FranPro):
And then what's the time, the timeframe it kind of takes generally to help people who are want call answering in in, inbound or outbound, because you guys can do outbound to correct.
Kristi Anderson (VoiceNation):
Yes, we can. Yes, very, very good question. So, so the activation process takes less than five minutes and I can do that over the phone. It's instantaneous. So they receive the activation setup wizard in their inbox instantaneously and then from there, once they complete that take, that takes less than five minutes they submit, it goes directly to their onboarding specialist to let them know they're ready to move forward with the build out customization. So within 24 business hours they will be receiving a column. Go through onboarding to complete the build out and customization of their scripting and call handling procedures and we'll be ready to rock and roll.
Lance Hood (FranPro):
Well, that's incredible. So anything people can do on their side, I would assume you're going to say just be responsive and answer the questions that come to you, but is there anything else people can do to kind of speed it up on their end?
Kristi Anderson (VoiceNation):
Just reaching out I reaching out to myself or my colleagues and just going to the process with us. We have a very streamlined process and it works effortlessly. But, yes, the engagement is a, is a requirement, but once it's set, it's done. So it's not, it's not an ongoing arduous task. From that moving forward, it's just that that will be fine. We'll get the onboarding complete. Unless you wanted to switch up your scripting in any way, shape or form, we're always available to do that as well.
Lance Hood (FranPro):
That's really great, because I've looked at services like this in the past and it was just the what do you say that? Oh, I don't know if I want to put in the time and effort to set that up, but I want it done for me. But you guys make it so simple. That's really great.
Kristi Anderson (VoiceNation):
So simple, very straightforward. Yes, our teams are on it. Superior excellence.
Lance Hood (FranPro):
Well, thank you. I appreciate you, Kristy. Thank you for joining us today. Anybody who wants that two weeks of free service you just click on the button by this video and they'll get you taken care of. Thanks again. https://Franpro. vip/GoVoiceNation.
Kristi Anderson (VoiceNation):
Absolutely. Thank you, lance. It's my pleasure Take care.
