For plumbing contractors, missed calls equal missed revenue.
After all, this industry is often driven by emergencies. If a homeowner has a backed-up sewer line or burst waterline at midnight, or a restaurant needs an emergency grease trap cleaning on a Sunday morning, they are not willing to leave voicemails and wait for callbacks. If a live person at your company doesn’t pick up the phone, they’ll keep searching Google and calling other companies until someone does.
On top of that, if the caller speaks Spanish and your call taker doesn’t, that business will likely be lost to you no matter what. And according to recent U.S. Census Bureau data, nearly 42 million people in the United States speak Spanish at home. Additionally, Spanish-speaking households are currently one of the fastest-growing groups of new homeowners in the country. At a time when the cost of acquiring new customers keeps rising, it doesn’t make sense to lose out on this market.
The key to capturing the growing Spanish-speaking market is to offer 24/7 bilingual (English/Spanish) call answering. The problem is that many small- and medium-sized businesses in this sector simply don’t have the money to hire full-time, bilingual receptionists and dispatchers. Nor do they want to hire an outside agency whose employees are on the other side of the world, and whose telephone mannerisms make this fact all too clear.
ServiceForge aims to help with that. It is a U.S.-based company that provides 24/7 answering, scheduling, and bilingual dispatch specifically for home service businesses. Jane Blanchard, ServiceForge’s head of brand and marketing, spoke with Plumber magazine about how the company’s 24/7 live, human-based bilingual call answering helps contractors impress and retain both English- and Spanish-speaking clients.
Don’t hang a "Closed” sign on a growing market
In states with large Spanish-speaking populations, failing to offer bilingual call answering isn’t only a turn-off for Spanish-speaking customers, but also a direct hit to a contractor's bottom line. When so many potential customers are calling your business looking for help, it makes no sense to send them to the competition.
“Spanish-speaking people are such a huge market, especially across the southern states," Blanchard says. “In places like California, Texas, New Mexico and Florida, upward of 20% of the population is Spanish-speaking. By not offering bilingual answering and customer service, you're really just ignoring over 20% of the population in those states. Can you really afford to do that, especially in today’s economy?
“I think by not offering even the option for bilingual answering, you're essentially putting a ‘Closed’ sign on one of the fastest-growing homeowner segments in the country. I wouldn't ever want to put a ‘Closed’ sign on my business if it was bringing in jobs and revenue.”
High-school Spanish isn't enough
Many companies try to cope with Spanish-speaking callers by using the little bit of Spanish their employees remember from high school, or by hoping the customer speaks enough English to muddle through. But when dealing with sewer backups or complex trenchless pipe repairs, details matter. Miscommunication due to language barriers can lead to dispatching the wrong equipment, quoting the wrong price, or showing up at the wrong address.
“When it comes to plumbing emergencies and after-hours calls, those are not the times where you want things to be lost in translation," Blanchard says. "Having a true bilingual speaker answer the call, take the message, book the job in, and then have the ability to translate that into English if you need it just means that there's nothing slipping through the cracks.”
Using an outsourced call-answering service like ServiceForge can handle the translation, keeping costly confusion to a minimum. The customer speaks to a representative in their native language, but the contractor receives the job notes in English, directly in their CRM or dispatch software. The result is that the service crew gets the right details, and the customer gets the service they need.
Keeping it human
One of the biggest issues contractors have with outsourcing their phone lines is the fear of sounding like a massive, impersonal corporation that uses AI bots or an overseas boiler-room call center. Customers don’t like either of these options, and either scenario can motivate them to drop the call and go elsewhere. ServiceForge tackles this issue by using remote workers located in North America.
“Our big selling point is that we're 100% human, with real people answering the phones across the United States and into Canada,” Blanchard says.
From the customer's perspective, the transition between English and Spanish service is seamless.
“You don't need to have Spanish answering turned on 100% of the time, but if someone does call and they say, 'Hola’ instead of ‘Hello', or they request to speak to a Spanish receptionist, we can make the switch quickly," Blanchard says. “Additionally, we work with you on a script that asks all the questions you need to help the customer book the job properly and accurately."
ServiceForge's base plan for live answering starts at about $389 a month for 300 minutes of call time. If clients want ServiceForge to handle their lines 24/7, the company can do that too.
The bottom line: There is no reason to miss out on Spanish-speaking clients and the business they bring to the table. Bilingual call-answering companies like ServiceForge make it possible to offer truly bilingual service, even if no one in your company speaks anything more than fragments of ninth-grade Spanish.
