We’re expanding our Inspection Call Center and adding Drew Simonovic as Director of Call Center Oper

We’re expanding our Inspection Call Center and adding Drew Simonovic as Director of Call Center Operations. More changes to come.

Inspection Call Center announces today, May 8th, 2021, the promotion of Drew Simonovic to Director of Call Center Operations.

Here’s what you need to know about Drew! Other than being a kickass Team Leader, one of the record holders for hours onsite out of all staff for 2020, one of the top booking agents when in that role, and then consistently the 1st or 2nd highest booking team lead for years, the thing I find most intriguing about Drew is his background.

Drew grew up in an entrepreneurial household and that comes with a very high level understanding of the commitment we make to our clients and the commitment they make to their clients. His father, like us, was in the B2B2C category. Once I learned of this, his commitment level made more sense than ever. While all of our staff is exceptionally committed, the decision making and urgency with which Drew handles even the smallest of issues makes him ideal for the position.

Drew was the obvious choice for this role. You’ll see a few familiar faces moving up soon into other innovative roles focused on streamlined training and remote management as we backfill leadership positions and continue to hire Call Center staff at a rapid pace including at our two newest locations in Carmel, Indiana and Dallas, Texas.

Delivering at a High Level.

Several years ago, The Inspection Call Center went to a model where we are open 24/7 for our inspection clients. It wasn’t something we did for higher profits or better margins, it was a move to improve the business of our inspection business owner clients and it resulted in massive growth in our Call Center. We went from being one of the largest call centers in the industry to being the largest by far in a matter of months. Delivering on this scale in this complex industry where each business owner within it runs things vastly different than others has always been a challenge – scaling it further while delivering on that small business-like tenacity will take a few modifications to our teams. Consider this the first of many.

The Importance of a Scalable, Low-Price, Flexible Model.

The Inspection Call Center from The Inspector Services Group has always delivered on two major promises to Home Inspectors:

1. Flexible, Part-Time Solutions.
2. A Low Rate that allows for Profitability.

In the Home Inspection industry, there are generally two types of inspection companies so far as call handling is concerned; small operations with an owner or single office staff member available for inbound calls much of the time and larger operations with an office staff consisting of a few people.

Either model is incapable of making certain all (or even close to all) calls are handled, necessitating an overflow solution. If this solution is set up properly, it allows for maximum efficiency in both cost and customer service levels. When inspection companies go into “full-time solutions”, formerly somewhat popular in our industry, it severely diminishes profit and creates communication issues.

The movement in the home inspection industry today and over the past few years has been to go to a strong part-time model with call centers where 40-70% of overall inspection orders are booked by an overflow solution ( https://inspectioncallcenter.com/ ). The best way to accomplish this is to set up a roll-over call feature where your backup call center is engaged in any of the following circumstances;

- Outside normal business hours
- Staff are on a break
- Staff are in a meeting
- During a power, phone, or internet outage
- When all staff are on a phone call
- When a call is not picked up within 30 seconds

For inspectors without office staff, this list could also include whenever you are in an inspection.

The Cost.

All of our clients pay under $35 per booked inspection, many pay as little as $17 per booked inspection with some of our bulk programs. Regardless of what price you pay, make sure you book enough of your inspections yourself (and when staff is available if you have an office team) that the overall cost blended with bookings you paid no fee on is under $15 per inspection.

The Process and Oversight.

Have a conversation with your Team Leader at Inspection Call Center about all your preferences and make sure all of your settings are properly set in the system. Beyond that, I highly recommended a regular routine with order reviews. It only takes a few moments, it makes sense, and it’s easy for you/your staff to see a deviation from your specific preferences. Remember when you find a mistake (usually a minor one) that the call center rep likely took 5-10 orders that hour and had hundreds of inspection companies they might have taken an order for that day.

Expectations and the Future of Home Inspection Call Centers

A properly run home inspection call center will NOT answer every call immediately. In order to do that, they’d have to charge over $100.00 per booked inspection and that wouldn’t work for a home inspection company. In an ideal circumstance, from a cost and people management perspective, a Call Center will answer within 2 minutes of the rollover call being initiated around 97% of the minutes that there are in a 24 hour period.

To be clear, this means that any Call Center at scale, with a reasonable client base, will have a cumulative period of around 45 minutes (could be 10 minutes here, 20 minutes there) per 24 hour period where wait times are beyond 10 minutes. This is one of the reasons that The Inspector Services Group is the choice of home inspectors – by engaging our staff in more than one duty (our call center reps review RecallChek reports in downtime) we are able to hire more staff than other call centers on the same volume, bringing that cue time in peak minutes of the day into the 5-10 minute range rather than 10+ minutes.

One of the tasks Drew will be charged with as he settles into his new role is figuring out a way to trigger notifications or at the very least report peak times on a per account basis.

Our Goal for 2021

It’s our goal to increase staffing by over 50% in 2021, and under the leadership of David Hardesty (the President of Residential Warranty Services), staffing growth has certainly accelerated. Between that and our two new spaces ready to go with over 60 more seats, we’ll set records once again.

My personal goal, one that Drew shares with me, is to implement a solution that never allows for a hold time of over 3 minutes. We’re working through details and believe we can have that accomplished prior to August 1, 2021.

welcome Drew, and looking forward to the time I have enough business to cover my own person on the phones and racking up the orders. Until then, I am totally confident in Team Red. They do a great job.

Since I made this post, we have added 5-6 new staff members per week and are very confidently the most staffed in the industry once again, pro rata.