Dedicated Office Solutions
2023-10-26T19:45:13.807Z
We used Dedicated office for our business. I’ll start by saying there are a few good things about Dedicated but overall they were a real train wreck for our business.
First the Good, Kelly is an amazing person through and through, super helpful friendly and she really is the only reason we stayed as long as we did. The phone operators are extremely friendly and nice.
Unfortunately, the issue started right at the beginning, there was tons of trouble just getting our service Titan integrated into their phone system, we have used other outside call centers and on the tech Dedicated really fell short almost day one. We never quite got it right, there was always an echo that lots of folks complained about and they just said it was our older iPhone, never really solving the issue.
They are a per minute charge service and we use a answering scrip which we provided and paid for the 2 week training period for. However, they rarely used the script and just riffed when our customers had questions. It was absolute rubbish they would come up, they would quote erroneous pricing, services, and really just make it up as they went along. Then we kept seeing our abandoned calls skyrocket. I don’t think they understood that our system is always tracking abandon calls, no answers, hang ups, number of rings before answer, hold time, and we recorded every call.
What they would do is allow 6-8 rings before answering on 85% of the calls, then once answered it would go directly to hold music, sometimes for 3-4 minutes then a very friendly voice would answer… typically not following our scrip, and start collecting data, name, address, phone number, often forgot the email, and a description of the reason for the call. The strange thing we saw right away was that these calls were lasting 15-20 min. With industry averages around 3 min to set an appointment in our industry. So, we listened and found the operators asking the clients to spell even easy names like Robert or john, spell the street names like elm and oak, ask again what zip code the clients were calling from even though it auto populates when the address is typed in, and then of course the rouge off script riffing. It felt kind of like they were trying to artificially increase the call times.
We had multiple calls to try to instruct and coach and make training changes with the staff. And, as soon as the meeting was ended it was right back to off script and what seems to be a blatant call time increase tactic that was costing me over $2000 a month. On top of all of this they would call me on just about every 3 call to help answer clients questions. But, the questions were always were just trying to schedule an appointment! But, they charged me even for the transfers of calls and for them explaining that there was a customer with a made up issue.
Needless to say we only scheduled 4% of the incoming calls down nearly 90% from the previous year with another company. And once we switched away from dedicated our rate climbed almost 95% instantly.
Not only did we waste time, spend way too much, and make existing customers angry, they lost business for me. We estimated that with our poor amount booking to scheduled appointments, we lost around $250,000 -$350,000 dollars of business just because of the call center. Once I switched, the first month with a new call center, our revenue went up 57%. We haven’t received a complaint since switching and I’m not getting calls from the call center 3-4 times a day. Our first month with the new call center I was at $800 down from over $2000 in call center cost, with the incoming call volume about 2% higher.
At the end of all this Adi treated me like I was the problem! Like I told her if your customers are the main problem… maybe it’s time for a new career.
I sincerely hope they can figure it out and I hope Kelly smartens up because she really is a super star, but her company is a train wreck, at least it was for me.
If you’re a home services company, Do NOT hire Dedicated Office. Trust me.
We used Dedicated office for our business. I’ll start by saying there are a few good things about Dedicated but overall they were a real train wreck f... More