Matt Lurie - Leveraging Ruby’s Call Trends Report for Growth - PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION

Editor's note: The following is the transcript of a live interview with Ruby Senior Content Strategist Matt Lurie. You can read the interview below or listen to the podcast. 

Intro/Outro: Welcome to Roofing Road Trips with Heidi. Explore the roofing industry through the eyes of a long-term professional within the trade. Listen for insights, interviews, and exciting news in the roofing industry today.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Hello and welcome to another Roofing Road Trips from Roofers Coffee Shop. This is Heidi Ellsworth, and we're here today to talk about something that may seem old but really is new, and that is the importance of the phone call. The phone, please pick up the phone and just call me, this is the kind of stuff that kind of has gotten a little bit lost, but we're finding it's not, it's incredibly important. So we asked the experts from Ruby if they could come talk to us, and so we invited Matt Laurie here to talk to us about their recent call trends report, and talk a little bit about the importance of the phone. Matt, welcome to the show.

Matt Lurie: Thank you so much for having me, Heidi.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: So glad you're here. Can you tell us, introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about you and Ruby?

Matt Lurie: Sure. My name is Matt Laurie, I am senior content strategist at Ruby. I've been with the company for about almost three years now. The company itself is a team of customer communication experts. We're about 700 people strong at this point. We do virtual receptionist and live chat solutions, and we've been doing this for going on 20 years. We actually celebrated our two decade birthday this past month. So yeah, supporting 14,000 plus small businesses across the US.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Wow. And you're a business out of Portland, Oregon, right?

Matt Lurie: Yes. We're now fully remote and we have receptionists working all over the United States. We're still 100% US based. We were founded though in Portland, Oregon, and that's where our headquarters are.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: I have a little bit of a prejudice, I love Oregon since I'm right across the mountains from you, and so it's really cool to have this kind of technology. 20 years, congratulations. Can you just tell us a little bit about Ruby itself, about the company, why it was formed, and a little bit of its history?

Matt Lurie: Sure. So we started off as a small business supporting other small businesses. It was about a four or five person team working out of a single office in Portland, in beautiful Portland, Oregon. I was going to say sunny, but I don't think it is all the time. And that quickly grew into a large team of, we were doing virtual receptionist services for most of our history, but started rolling out live chat in, I believe 2019, 2018, went 24/7 and fully remote around that time. And really we're that professional, empathetic, friendly voice on the other end of the phone or the website chat, making sure that people feel heard, that they're getting those really positive first impressions of the businesses that we are representing and that we're creating meaningful, memorable experiences.

We've always been a company that cares deeply about personal, meaningful connections, and we make those happen whenever and however we can. We're a company also that does everything we can to create every opportunity for small businesses because we know how important they are to our communities, our local economies. We just want to make sure that they have every opportunity they can to thrive and grow.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: I love it. There's nothing more important than that relationship. I mean, you can have the best technology in the world, you can have the best products in the world, but if you can't create a relationship where people feel valued and listened to, it just doesn't work. And really, that's what that friendly voice on the line is when people call, because a lot of times they're calling because they're a little frustrated.

Matt Lurie: Absolutely.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Or maybe they're looking for something.

Matt Lurie: Yes, absolutely. And I think we've all had that experience too, of calling and you just don't reach anybody for quite a long time, and when you do, they're maybe not the person you were hoping to talk to. They don't really know what they're talking about, or they don't seem like they're invested in the conversation. So we're out to change that.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Well, and the worst thing is when it takes you so many times, you have to hit so many numbers, hit one for this, hit two for that, and you start multitasking and then all of a sudden you're like, "Oh, what number was I supposed to hit? I totally forgot."

Matt Lurie: Yes.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: And you're kind of lost on the phone call. So what I love is that you have over 62 million calls tracked by Ruby. I mean, that is huge. And so you decided to pull together a call trends report to kind of really see what the trends were. Can you tell us about that report and how you put it all together?

Matt Lurie: Absolutely. So we released our first ever call trends report last year. I believe we talked about it back in October.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: We did.

Matt Lurie: It was a really fun conversation. And we were very proud of it, but in a lot of ways it was kind of a prototype. We were seeing, can we do something like this, what kind of impact does it have? And this is really our first fully fledged multi-year report where we're really tracking trends that small business owners should be aware of. So we tracked calls from January, 2018 to the end of 2022. We looked at not only what times of day and what days of the week are people getting the most calls, but what types of calls are those? What do people want on the other end of the phone? How are trends changing? Are certain caller types going up, going down? How does this impact different industries?

So we have deep dives into home services, into manufacturing, legal, et cetera, in this report, to really understand, as you mentioned in the introduction, this is an old school channel in a lot of ways. This is technology that was invention in the 19th century that we're still using a version of, but still plays a really important role and arguably a more important role than ever for roofers and other small business owners who really need to make that personal connection with people.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: I think so too. I think in some ways it's more important than ever before. I mean, because when you're using the phone, it's kind of almost, I know this isn't the case for everyone, but it's almost like a last ditch. It's like, "Okay, I haven't been able to find it on the internet. I haven't been able to find the information I want. I really need to talk to these people." So in so many ways, phone calls, phone messages are more important than ever because they just need that attention, it's usually much more critical. But let's talk about some of the key trends that you did find. And so going with what we were just talking about, that the number one, I don't know if this is number one, but the first one on the list is phone calls are bringing in more leads for business. Kind of goes to what I was just talking about. How is that working?

Matt Lurie: Yes, absolutely. It's funny that you mentioned that sort of last ditch effort because I think we could flip that around too and say, you've done your research, you've looked at six, seven companies, you've read reviews, you've gone to their websites, talked to friends, and you're finally ready to see, okay, is this a legitimate business or not? Is this someone who's going to be able to take care of me? What we are finding is that more and more people are using the phone as that step in the process. So not only are they calling out when they maybe have an emergency or aren't able to get heard another way, but they're calling to take that next step in a sale or learning more, seeing if they're the right fit for a certain business. And we actually found that there was a 9% increase in the number of leads reaching out over the phone from 2018 to 2022.

So that's both, I think, a result of technology changing, that people have more options than ever to, as I was saying, research businesses, to look into different channels and check them out. And so they're not using the phone as that sort of general purpose channel as much to say, "Hey, what do you guys do and what services do you offer?" But to say, "No, I've looked at your website and I need to know more or make this human connection before I move forward." There's that. I think there's also, we can see a little bit of an effect of the pandemic happening there too, where maybe people would go in person or would think of the phone more as that like, well, I'll just pick up and we'll have a conversation at some point. But I think now it's like, a lot of people, my myself included, will do everything they can to avoid a phone call, and so when that's happening.

Because we get so many messages, we get so many calls from people we don't always want calls from, which we can get to in a second. But really when you're pressing that dial up a business button or whatever you're doing, it's that do or die moment in a lot of cases for the business and also for the caller. It's not unusual for people to have heightened emotions when they reach out. And in many cases, that's like that prime time to make that connection to give somebody peace of mind and to start moving forward.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: I'm with you. I think that's the moment, you're ready to do something. You definitely are action oriented. But let's talk about the second trend here that we have on our list, and that is these robocalls. I have to tell you, every other call on my phone, spam, potential spam. I mean, I'm just ... oh my gosh, what's happening there.

Matt Lurie: Yeah. That was a really interesting one for us to track because in our last call trends report, we saw, oh, robocall are on the decline. We're making headway against them. And this year we saw, oh no, they're back with a vengeance, it's worse than ever, unfortunately. And I think all of us have anecdotal experience there, many people don't even pick up their phones anymore because they just assume that it's fraudulent numbers calling them. But we saw a huge market increase in robocalls over the last year, and it's interesting, it shows that a lot of these robocall blocking solutions aren't really doing their jobs. I've downloaded several on my phone before I started working for Ruby, and you'd still get numbers coming through often, and it's like, why am I paying 4.99 per month for these different apps when they're not doing anything? It might sound like sort of a nuisance, but it's a really big problem for businesses. I mean, I believe it's the FCC estimates that it's something like $3 billion lost to robocalls annually per year, which is wild to me.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: It's wild.

Matt Lurie: But also it's that it has that sort of corrosive effect on a person using a phone for as the technology it's meant to be, which is to pick up and communicate with somebody. Robocallers, really, they're taking time and space away from those legitimate callers. And that's even more important now that we know that more people who are calling are likely to be potential customers. And so it's like how do you make sure that you're reducing, avoiding all of this noise and also making room for the legitimate people to come through.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Yeah, it's a huge problem. And even when you say, "Take me off the list," I mean, in Oregon, there's a law that they have to take you off the list, but I don't think it really works. It is frustrating because then you kind of put everything off and people don't want to pick up the phone, even receptionists, which really comes back to how many robocalls are your folks dealing with too, coming into the businesses. It takes time and effort to work through that. But let's talk about that, and we kind of talked about it earlier, about those challenging calls. Because of the robo, because just the way our world has gone with technology and everything, people really, a lot of times, like I said earlier, don't pick up the phone unless they have to or they're ready to buy. So it's two things that are really important. So talk about the increase in challenging calls, and it was only a slight increase.

Matt Lurie: Yes. Yes. And this is basically our frustrated callers statistic that we're looking at here, and we would love to be able to track more different kinds of caller sentiment, but right now, we know that this is the most important one for business owners to know about. And on our end, it's the one that just makes the most sense because they tend to be a certain kind of conversation. If you're talking to more frustrated people than ever, you're not alone. If you're feeling more frustrated than ever, you're not alone. I know that right now with just everything that's going on economically, socially, the past few years have had such a profound impact on so many people that I think a lot of people are having a hard time still, and they tend to take that out on businesses every now and then, unfortunately.

As you mentioned, it was just a slight increase. We're not talking about 100% more frustrated callers or twice the number really, unless you're maybe in the retail industry in some cases. But it is en enough that it was significant. And still we're talking about on average, one in 100 callers, which may not sound like a lot, that's maybe if you're getting 100 calls a week, that's one person that you're going to end up talking to, but that one person can have a very big impact on your business. It can be a really unfortunate conversation to have, of course. But also, if they don't get their issue resolved, they could leave a negative review, they could spread negative word of mouth. You might be losing a sale at the very least, or a loyal customer. And so you want to make sure that you're showing up and managing those difficult conversations as best as possible.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Yeah, I agree. And I think businesses, I hear this all the time from roofing and home improvement is they're also trying to stay ahead of it. So good communication on multi-channels, whether that's text, email, portals, along with phone, and staying in front of the customers can help bring that number down because people are only frustrated when they don't know what's going on, for the most part, or they don't like what they're getting.

Matt Lurie: Absolutely.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Okay. I really love this one, the work week is slowly shifting. Tell me about that.

Matt Lurie: Yeah, yeah. This was one of the ones that popped out to me first when we were initially building the report. Mondays have typically been, in terms of at least Ruby history, the busiest days of the week. People, I guess, are catching up on the stuff they missed over the weekend. They're saying, "I got to get my roof fixed. I have to put in a patch this week, so I'm just going to get it over with on Monday," and Monday morning especially. But that's started to change, and now Tuesdays are sort of the new Mondays.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Really?

Matt Lurie: Which is interesting. Yeah. So I think if you need some heads down time, you can probably claim more of that on Monday than you used to be able to, but be ready for higher call volumes on Tuesdays. And overall, we're seeing the workweek kind of even out where there's not huge dips or spikes from day to day. So Tuesdays are our busiest now, but I believe Wednesdays are close second, then it's Monday, Thursday, and Friday, call volume has gone up on Friday. So we can't really rely on, I'll take Friday afternoon off.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Yeah, no. What about Saturday and Sundays? I've been hearing a lot about that too, that people are doing their work on the weekends, they want to talk to businesses.

Matt Lurie: So we're a 24/7 operation, 365 days or 365.25 to account for leap years, and to make sure that we're answering on behalf of small businesses whenever people are calling. People do call on the weekends, they call on shoulder hours too, which is our term for the hours before and after the typical 9:00 to 6:00, 8:00 to 5:00, 8:00 to 6:00 workday. It's not a ton of people in many cases, it's maybe three, 4% in the highest impacted businesses, but even so, the majority of people are still calling during typical business hours for whatever reason.

But yes, you do want to make sure that you're able to pick up those calls that happen over the weekend, that happen in the early mornings or in the evenings. Those are important, it's people who might not have a chance to reach out to your business otherwise. And I think a lot of us are trained to wait until those normal times of day to call a business, but with the rise of self-service and just the amount of options that people have, it's becoming less and less unusual for people to just assume, "Oh, they'll pick up whenever I call."

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Yeah. I have to tell you, I'm really busy during the week. I can't always find the time to make those calls. And so I'm like, "Ooh, can I get it done before work or after work, or on a Saturday, can I make that phone call?" So I do think that will even increase, we may see it increase, we'll see. Next year we'll check the trends and see how that's working.

Matt Lurie: Yes.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: I know. Okay. So last trend that I wanted to talk about was the seasonality is changing across certain industries. How's that working?

Matt Lurie: Absolutely. So businesses, of course, know their seasons better than anybody. We're not going to sit here and say, "Hey, it's your busy time of the year." Because I think that that does matter so much by industry and location and the specific kinds of services you're offering. But by and large, I mean, calls are a great leading indicator of when a business is in demand or not. As we said, it's that moment when somebody is ready to become a buyer or when they're reaching out because they have an urgent issue. And typically, what we've seen in industries where roofers participate is that like the springtime, April, May, a little into June is a pretty busy time, and then it spikes again maybe in October, later in the year-

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Before the snow flies.

Matt Lurie: Yes. Absolutely. Basically at the turning of the seasons. What we've seen is that sort of narrative or that experience, it doesn't always line up with the actual volume of calls. And that, yes, December by and large, year after year, not the busiest month for roofers or other home services professionals. But really over the past couple years, we've seen spikes in the summer more than before. That could be related to, I know that here in California, we've had wildfires, in Oregon, wildfires too, unpredictable weather in a lot of cases, home improvement projects, a lot of people are moving, and summer's a great time to move or to renovate a house, and so I think we can see some of the effect of that. But it goes to show that you can't really rely on how other years have been for you to predict the year ahead or the year after that.

To say that just because you had a busy April last year, doesn't mean you're going to have the same experience this year. And just because you were able to take all of August off in 2019, you might not be able to do that again in 2023, and that can be a good thing and a bad thing. But really, this is one of the trends I enjoyed putting to together the most, and it's one that we really did, we did deep industry charts on every businesses season, and I think it's really fascinating information, points to, again, the impact of calls and the significance of calls.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Yeah. Yeah. Really interesting. Yeah, we've seen that in roofing. We've seen the seasonality change, is that it used to be things would get really quiet during the winter, not so much anymore. And during the summer, I can remember all the marketing people were like, "Well, everybody's roofing, so we get a little time off in the summer," not anymore. It's busy year round. So yeah, it is really interesting. So along that vein, how can roofing companies use this call trends report to help with their growth and to help them understand how it's affecting their business?

Matt Lurie: Absolutely. So the first piece of advice I always offer is pick up the phone. It could be a robocaller, but you know pretty much immediately if that's the case. And if you use the right technology, and we can talk more about that, you won't have to worry too much about robocalls. There are lots of great ways to block it these days. But don't ignore your phone, don't let people go to voicemail or just look at your list of missed calls and assume that it's the price of doing business these days. Those are important calls, and in many, many cases, those are legitimate customers or potential customers who want to reach out. And when they don't get through, they're not going to leave you a message, they're probably not going to try again. They're moving on to a competitor in many, many cases. So first and foremost, understand the importance of phone calls and do not ignore this as a lead channel for your business and a customer communication channel.

That's the first one. Second is think about what those calls are doing for your business. So take stock of how long are these conversations lasting? When are my busy days and times? How does that align with industry expectations in many cases? Can I attribute any current customers, potential customers to this channel? I believe more and more businesses are taking on advanced marketing and sales attribution, we do it here at Ruby, it's a big part of our process. But it's good practice to do, even if it's just a column in an Excel spreadsheet or your customer relationship management platform, to say, "This person reached out over the phone," to know basically what your phone is worth as a marketing channel for your business, and to be aware of what your own businesses trends are. Because we have this great report, this is thousands and thousands of businesses we've analyzed, and as you said, 62 million calls.

But every business is different, and so understanding who's calling when, what they're looking for and the impact that has is really important. And then when all those pieces are in place, make sure that those callers are getting the best possible experience when they're on the phone, because as we said, they could be frustrated. It's a one in 100 chance maybe, but it's a really big deal if they are. But regardless, they could be concerned, they might be worried about the amount of money that a project takes or have a lot of questions about it. They really need to feel like you're there to support them, and you're going to solve this quickly and cost effectively for them, because that's what they're looking for when they call your business and that you're just a decent person to do business with.

I think a lot of us, when we press dial, we're like, "What is this experience going to be [inaudible 00:23:19] the third of the phone? Am I going to be waiting for two hours? Am I going to talk to somebody who doesn't know what they're talking about? Is this going to be an awkward conversation?" We get a little bit of that phone phobia feeling. And just answering with a friendly response, deescalating the situation if you need to, making a joke, doesn't have to be a funny joke, just any kind of human response. It really goes a long way towards creating that positive first impression and setting a really great foundation for a long-term customer relationship.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: It really does. And I want to go back to your point about how important it's to track calls and to have that relationship. Doing marketing in the roofing industry now going on 30 years, I really have always told people, even if it's a yellow notepad and you're tracking every call, was it a lead? Was it a complaint? How did they hear about you? That kind of data is just critical for any business and definitely for roofing companies out there. So I'm glad you mentioned that, about being sure to track where it's coming from, what it's about, and just being that person that they want to talk to. I mean, when I get somebody nice on the phone, I'm just so happy and you talk to them and you get your stuff handled and you kind of form a friendship right in that moment.

So for those companies out there, roofing companies, that maybe ... I mean right now, skilled labor, labor overall, unemployment is very low, it's hard to hire people. So for those people out there who really realize, hey, we need to have a stronger phone presence. We don't have anyone right now to handle it. Or they're kind of letting them go to voicemail and then picking them up. How do they work with Ruby? How can they incorporate this in a way that maybe is going to be a little bit easier than hiring a full-time person on the phone?

Matt Lurie: Absolutely. Yeah. So as you mentioned, we work with a lot of very skilled, brilliant business owners, people who do things I can never imagine doing and who have those skillsets, but creating that great customer experience, answering the phone, believe it or not, is a specialized skillset unto itself. We take that very, very seriously. So we're completely dedicated to customer communication. Everything we do is in service of creating those exceptional experiences of informing people, providing empathetic service, making sure that everyone feels supported and heard, and has that day making experience you just mentioned, because it is a powerful moment, that moment of communication. So we recruit people who have lots of experience, not only in the industries we serve, but customer service, customer communication experience. We have a rigorous hiring and onboarding process with, I believe it's 120 hours of initial training for our receptionists.

And we really empower people to deliver service as the individual human people they are, rather than robots. We don't use scripts. We try to give all of our receptionists the tools to make that positive personal connection. And we take a lot of information from the customers we serve. So we're great at getting set up quickly and answering your phones within a day. We have many people who come to us and are looking to sign up that day, and we can do that, absolutely, but we're really best used as an extension of your team. So if you have frequently asked questions, if you have certain kinds of customer profiles that you want to serve, if there's important value propositions, differentiators about your business that you want to get out over the phone, or a branded experience, a personality that you want to get through, we are experts at bringing that to life.

Our combination of technology and training basically empowers anyone of our hundreds of receptionists to be that personal voice for your business. So when you sign up for Ruby, you don't just get one person, three people, you get hundreds and hundreds of receptionists who all create that same experience. We often hear from customers who say that their callers had no idea that they're using a service like ours. They're like, "Hey, can I speak to Brenda?" It's like, "Oh no, Brenda's one of several hundred receptionists who are at Ruby who answer for us." But really, if you want your callers to have the experience of they call your business and within one ring, they're reaching a real person who's going to make their day, that's what Ruby does.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: It's awesome. And I have to say to everybody out there, Ruby's involved, Ruby's involved in associations in roofing, they're involved in the industry. We love having you all on Roofers Coffee Shop. So there is a full directory for Ruby on Roofers Coffee Shop where you can get all this information, you can download the call trends report, you can listen to past podcasts and this podcast. I mean, there's just so much information. So if you're looking to try to make that decision, do your research on Roofers Coffee Shop, and then pick up the phone and call Ruby, because this is the kind of stuff that really does make a huge difference to your marketing program and to your business overall and customer satisfaction. So Matt, thank you so much for being on here today and sharing all of your insights. I loved it.

Matt Lurie: Yeah, it was my absolute pleasure, Heidi. Thank you so much for having me.

Heidi J. Ellsworth: Thank you. And thank you all for listening. Another nugget for your business on really how to incorporate the phone into your overall marketing and customer satisfaction, reviews, testimonials, that's with the phone, it does it all. So be sure to, again, to check out Ruby's directory on Roofers Coffee Shop, and check out all of our podcasts under the read list and watch navigation, under podcasts, Roofing Road Trips. And be sure to subscribe to your favorite podcast channel with Roofers Coffee Shop, so you get every notification about all of the podcasts, upcoming and that are already out there. We will be seeing you next time on Roofing Road Trips.

Intro/Outro: Make sure to subscribe to our channel and leave a review. Thanks for listening. This has been Roofing Road Trips with Heidi from the rooferscoffeeshop.com.