Leave A Message...

So, there may be tens of you anxiously awaiting news of how we fared during our PJP Christmas Break.  For you, I offer the following highly informational pie chart:

And to be fair, in the "Wearing Yoga Pants & Drinking Wine" category, you can also include watching a lot of movies, sleeping in late, binge listening to Serial, eating cream cheese based dips in lieu of meals, and enjoying time with our people.  And as the stark realization came this weekend that our altered world could not continue and the whole world would return to work and school today, we decided to discuss some PJP business.

And if you want to get specific, Jeanne and I had a conversation best labeled "Areas Where We Suck".  We actually made a list of the areas that we can self-identify as areas where we fall short.  And I'm not entirely certain if making such a list is something to be proud of - as in, we realize we have so much room to grow - or something to be ashamed of - as in, we've been open 9 months and we are still really struggle with some things.  Even after making the list, I'm still not sure.

The list was actually sort of eye-opening...I think we both discovered things that the other one thought was ok.  But here is the first thing on the list of which we could both agree...VOICEMAIL.

If you know me in real life, then you know that even if you are calling to tell me I won the HGTV Dream Home, you probably shouldn't leave me a voicemail.  You could email me, text me, Tweet me, Facebook me, spell it out in buttery croutons from the Hyvee salad bar...all would likely be a better way to reach me than voicemail.  Jeanne fairs a bit better than I with the whole issue, but all that means is that she has to wade through the PJP voicemails and take notes and call people back and then usually leave voicemails for those people...and it is just a hamster wheel of a time suck.

During vacation, I read a great article about Coca-Cola terminating voicemail at their headquarters (Google it if you want to read...it is pretty interesting).  And after I read it, I thought "Rock On, Coke...I couldn't agree more."  And then I actually thought to myself, wait...if I own a business, then why do I have voicemail if I don't like it??  And when I relayed the entire story to Behind-The-Scenes-Tech-Guru Jason, he agreed and suggested just adding an auto attendant to give hours, directions, etc to incoming calls if we aren't available to answer.

HOLD THE PHONE.

Why didn't I ever consider that before?

We have had a few occasions of people stopping by to pick up a pie order that we don't have, only to find they left the information on voicemail and we haven't checked it yet that day.  We've also had people call and want information and when we return the call, the number is wrong.  We also have a lot of calls on Monday just to see if we are open, and when we aren't, the caller leaves a message asking for someone to call back with our hours (we had 4 of those today).

And we don't fault the callers...yay for you if you are a voicemail fan.  Seriously.  I'm sure they serve good in this world.  But we stink at them and so looking at the list of ways we can improve, removing the voicemail option appears the way to go.  And plus, isn't owning a business about not doing the stuff that you hated in your previous work life?

So one day in the next week or so, you might call PJP after hours and instead of finding the mechanical voice on our $8.97 Wal-Mart phone/answering machine combo, you'll find a nice option to learn more about our hours, our location, our pies, and our website.  And if you call when we are there, we will still answer just like a regular old phone.