What to say on the phone when you have no car
The call is already lost. What you decide in those twenty seconds is whether you have lost the customer too.
It happens to every operator, in every town, and it will happen again tomorrow. The difference between losing a job and losing a customer is in what gets said in those twenty seconds.
Do not just say “there are none”
It is true but it is useless: the caller is left with the same problem as before and no information at all. On top of that it sounds like a closed door, and next time they ring somebody else.
The three answers that work
- “I have nobody now, but in twenty minutes I will”: if it is true, it is the best answer, because it turns the call into a booking.
- “I have a car but it is twenty minutes away, is that all right?”: the customer decides, and often says yes.
- “I have nothing now, I will ring you back as soon as I have a car”: only worth saying if you really do ring back.
The first two need you to know when somebody frees up. It is the information that separates an operator who knows what is going on from one who answers from memory.
Log the call anyway
Even when it ends in a no, that call is data: where, what time, going where. It is the requests you could not serve that tell you where you are short of cars, and it is the only way to stop finding out by feel.