Transcript
Joe Troyer: How do you pay your Pay Per Call “call auditors”? And really the question was more like how do you pay the people that listen to your phone calls to see if they’re qualified or not qualified, are billable or not billable? We call them, I call them, I train people to call them auditors. Their job is to audit a call for intent. Was the call billable? So the question was like do you pay them per call, do you pay them per minute? What do you do?
Joe Troyer: So the way that I have always done this is we pay per hour for this. This is something where at the end of the day, this job of a pay per call call auditor, this job is uber important. This is our money. This is one, marking one job, or one call I’m sorry, as qualified versus not, could pay for that person for the day, for the week, for the month, or even more. Does that make sense to everybody? The difference of one call being qualified or not. So we pay these people per hour. And to be frank, we don’t just outsource this for the cheapest price that we can. It’s an important role in our company. So we pay actually pretty well for this job.
Joe Troyer: Then we pay per hour, we pay well, but then the way that we really do this, and what we’ve found is effective, is we like to, and again, this is with me running a pay per call business and this is the business that I grew from zero to $83,000 a month in recurring in four months. It was very important for us to process the calls as fast as possible because the faster we process them, the faster we get paid. When you run a business that big and you’re scaling as fast as I was, you need that money now. You don’t want that money in 30, 60, 90 days, right? You want every dollar that you are owed in that you can collect immediately.
Joe Troyer: So how often do you audit is up to you. For us, we were auditing every day. And so we had a morning shift and we had an evening shift. People would come on, and they would listen to phone calls and they would audit them based upon the criteria that I gave you guys here in this last video, or this last question. They’re in market, they’re in territory and it’s 30 seconds in duration. So we paid them per hour and then basically morning shifts and an evening shift.
Joe Troyer: As soon as we caught up and we audited all the calls, they were done for the shift. So if the evening shift comes on to work and it was a slow day and they only have 100 calls to audit, they only have 100 calls to audit. When they’re done, even if it was an hour into their shift, they can leave. We pay them per hour. Then the morning crew comes in and does the morning shift. Or they come back in the morning and complete their shift. So we’d have people that would sign up for one shift a day or some people that would show sign up for two shifts a day.
Joe Troyer: But I think at the end of the day, how often do you do your auditing really comes down to how many billable calls are you doing per day? And then thinking about as well how much money or how much liability is that? If you only process calls once a week, what’s your potential liability? Well, we got this site and it brings in this many calls. This is what we’re seeing for qualified, this is the price we pay. So then it’s a simple math equation. How far are you will to give your customers credit for so to speak before you catch back up with billing?
Joe Troyer: So for me, guys, I’m keeping my customers fair to me every single day. I’m not going to trust them for 90 days, especially when I’ve got a boatload of them. There’s no freaking way. If they stop performing and they don’t pay, I’m turning off the calls to them and I’m sending them to somebody else instead. And I’m downplaying as far as possible the liability that I have because I’m spending a lot of money on traffic and resources to build the company. Does that make sense to everybody? Give me a six if that makes sense for everybody joining me here live.
Joe Troyer: So the other tip that I can give you is if you’re using traditional call tracking to mark whether or not they’re billable, everybody’s got phone codes or some people call them tags, and where you can mark whether or not it was a good call or you could put in different criteria. So that’s how I would keep track of calls and how they were billable or not, is just with some type of tagging mechanism.
Joe Troyer: But then also if I were you, most call tracking platforms, again, will let you actually comment on a phone call. Then I would, if I were you, I would put in inside the comment, I would have whoever audited the call put in their name. Now I’ve got a paper trail. Now I’ve got a paper trail.
Joe Troyer: So one of the things that we did is we let our advertisers, and we would have our resellers and our pay per call agency, we would have them be able to dispute a call. So if they thought it wasn’t qualified, they’d tell us that they did and they’d tell us why. So whoever the auditor was that tagged the phone call as qualified, and then the call got pushed back or clawed back because the person said it wasn’t qualified and here’s the reason why, they would have to review that call and give the final decision on whether it was qualified or not.
Joe Troyer: So this is how we kept the auditors, how I would suggest that you guys keep the auditors true and honest to their job so to speak. This is how you hold them accountable.
