Here's a test that takes ninety seconds. Print your phone script, stand in an empty room, and read it out loud at normal volume. If you feel stupid saying it, the caller feels it too. Most scripts fall apart inside the first sentence.
Scripts sound like scripts because of who writes them and when. Usually the owner, at eleven at night, trying to cover every call that could ever come in, in the voice they think a business is supposed to have. What comes out is: "Thank you for calling ABC Plumbing, this is [NAME], how may I direct your call today?" Nobody has said the words "direct your call" in their own life, ever, to anyone.
"How may I direct your call?"
Direct it where? There are three of you and one is under a house with a flashlight in his teeth. Kill the line. A caller needs two things confirmed in the first four seconds: they dialed the right place, and something is now listening. "Bakersfield Mobile Welding, this is Dee." Seven words. Beats any greeting with the word "valued" in it.
Say the business name the way customers say it, not the way it's registered with the state. If everyone in town calls it Dee's, answer with Dee's. Full legal names on the phone sound like a collections call, and people brace for it.
The caller has one question, and it's rarely yours
Before you write a word, go back through your last thirty calls. Voicemails, texts, the notes app, whatever you've got. The same six questions keep turning up:
- Are you open right now?
- Do you come out to my area?
- Roughly what does this cost?
- Can somebody come today?
- Do you even do this kind of job?
- Are you the ones who did my neighbor's driveway?
That list is your script. A stack of answers, arranged in the order people actually ask for them. When someone asks how much, the script's only job is to have a number ready. Steering them toward a booking comes after they've got what they called for.
Say the price, or say why you can't
The most common failure I see is pricing, and it's usually on purpose. "It depends on the job" is a non-answer, and it costs you the call. If jetting a main line runs 290 to 340 on a normal single family house, say 290 to 340, then say what pushes it past that: roots, a second story, a cleanout somebody has to dig for. Callers know you can't quote a whole roof blind. What they can hear inside of two seconds is the difference between a business that genuinely needs to see the job and one that's holding the number back until it has your address.
Ask for the name once you've earned it
Scripts that open with "Can I get your name and number before we begin?" were written for the database. The caller hears a form and stiffens up. Answer one real question first, then hang the ask on something useful: "I can get someone out Thursday morning. What's the best number to text the arrival window to?" The reason sits inside the sentence, so it stops feeling like harvesting.
Think about the last time you called a dentist's office and the person said "let me see what she's got open," then went quiet for ten or eleven seconds while she scrolled. Dead air. And you didn't mind a bit, because you knew what the silence was for. That's the whole trick, which brings me to the next one.
One question at a time, then stop talking
Stacked questions are what people do when they're nervous. "Okay and what's the address and is it a house or an apartment and do you know roughly when it started?" The caller answers the last one, forgets the other two, and now you're circling back through all of it while they wonder whether you're writing any of this down. Ask one. Wait. If a pause runs past three seconds, say what you're doing in plain words: "Pulling up Thursday now."
Now write it knowing a machine might be reading it
A 411 Locals study of 85 small businesses found that 62 percent of calls to them went unanswered. That gap is why a lot of these scripts now get read out by software instead of a person, ours included. Rocketship's receptionist picks up on your own number, knows your hours and services and prices, answers what the caller actually asked, books into your Google Calendar, takes their details, and hands the call over when it needs a human.
The script you give it is the script it says. Feed it "thank you for calling, how may I direct your call" and you've built, at some expense, a robot that sounds exactly like a robot. Feed it Dee's seven words and callers settle inside a sentence. Same words, both sides of the wire. The human sound was coming from the writing all along, which is mildly annoying if you've spent a week auditioning voices.
Leave some of it rough
Don't polish the contractions out. Write "we're" and "you'll" and "I'll go check." Vary the line lengths the way you'd vary them standing at a counter with somebody. And put in at least one admission of ignorance, because every real business has a dozen: "I don't know that offhand. Let me find out and text you within ten minutes." A script where the business knows everything reads as fake, even when every fact in it is true.