How to test it properly
Almost everyone tests the same way: they ring their own number, ask their opening hours, hear the right answer and feel reassured. That call proved very little, because opening hours are the one thing every system gets right. Useful testing means deliberately looking for the failures.
Six calls worth making
The one your staff hedge on. If the answer is confident and wrong, you have found your most important gap in ninety seconds.
Ask for a service you have never offered. It should say no clearly, not improvise.
Then open your calendar and check it is there, on the right person, with the details attached.
Plenty of systems can book and cannot unbook. Find out now.
"I just wanted to ask about, um, the thing on your website." Real callers are like this far more often than demo scripts admit.
Your van, a speakerphone, somewhere noisy. This is where a real proportion of your calls come from.
What you are actually looking for
Not whether it answered, but what it did at the edges. Did it invent a price? Did it agree to something you do not offer? Did it keep going when it should have handed over? The middle of the range is uninteresting because everything works there. Your customers will find the edges within a fortnight, and it is much better that you find them first.
Test in the order your customers arrive
Make one of those calls at half seven in the evening and one on a Sunday. Out-of-hours behaviour is where most of the value is and the least of the attention — and it is the easiest thing to have configured wrongly without noticing, because you are never listening at the times it matters.
Then stop testing
Once the six calls are clean, go and run your business. Continuing to ring your own number weekly is a way of not trusting something while paying for it, and it produces anxiety rather than information. The summaries will show you a genuine problem faster than a test call will, because they are made of real customers.
Frequently asked
With the calls designed to fail: your most awkward price question, a service you do not offer, a full booking and then a cancellation, a deliberately vague enquiry, and one from a bad line.
Because every system gets that right. You learn nothing about what happens at the edges, which is where your customers will be within a fortnight.
At least one call at half seven in the evening and one on a Sunday. Out-of-hours behaviour carries most of the value and gets the least attention.
Stop once the six calls are clean. Weekly test calls produce anxiety rather than information — your call summaries will surface a real problem sooner.