Phone Bid Scheduler
What is a Phone Bid?
Phone bids are typically used by antique auction galleries, but can be used for any type of sale. When a bidder leaves a phone bid for a particular lot#, the auction house is agreeing to have an employee call the bidder when that lot comes on the block. During the phone call, the employee will relay the asking price from the auctioneer to the phone bidder and will relay bids from the phone bidder to the auctioneer.
Why Phone Bids?
Ideally, you would like your bidders to attend the auction, the benefits of which are myriad. Phone bids are ultimately a convenience offered to bidders that would otherwise not bid at your auction.
- Phone bids allow the phone bidder to bid “live” on the lot against all other bidders (floor, internet, phone, etc.). This preserves the excitement of bidding live .
- The phone bidder who is only interested in a few lots does not have to attend the auction waiting hours for their lot(s) to come up.
- Phone bids are a good alternative to ‘technologically challenged’ bidders who may refuse to bid live over the internet.
- Phone bidders avoid having to pay the extra buyer’s premium fees typically charged for live internet bidding.
- There is nothing to remember. The phone bidder will be automatically called when their lot(s) come up.
- Location, location, location. The phone bidder can bid from anywhere there is cell phone reception.
Why do I Need a Scheduler?
It is not uncommon for a high-end auction gallery to have hundreds of phone bidders per auction. Each phone bidder may, in turn, be interested in anywhere from one single lot to 20 or 30 different lots. All of these phone bids are not spread evenly through the catalog. Many lots in the catalog won’t have any phone bids, but some high-interest lots will have many, many phone bids. The challenge to the auction house is to build a phone bid schedule that addresses several desirable attributes:
- Use the fewest possible employees. The total number of employees required is loosely defined as the highest number of individual phone bids on any particular lot. So if lot 145 has 11 different phone bidders then we need at least 11 employees in our phone bank for this peak point in the auction.
- Preserve employee-phone bidder stickyness. We want phone bidder John Smith to talk to the same employee as often as possible. It can be confusing for the phone bidder to talk to a different employee for each phone call.
- Allow preferential phone bidder to employee assignations. We may want to ensure that a high-value phone bidder talks to a particular employee as much as possible. This may be the bidder’s preference or the auction house’s preference.
- Define some employees as overflow only, meaning, they should only be used during peak phone bid times.
- Language limitations. Some bidders may not speak English and can only be assigned to bilingual employees that speak their language.
- X lots between phone calls. An employee needs a certain amount of time to courteously end their phone call and place a new phone call.
What do I Get?
As you can see, the various criteria above can make for a daunting manual task that takes many hours and results in a sub-optimal schedule at best. The Auction Flex phone bid scheduler takes into account all the criteria above and automatically produces a schedule that optimizes both employee-to-phone bidder stickyness and lots between phone calls. When the phone bid scheduler has generated the schedule, it then produces:
- A master phone bid schedule with option to export to Excel.
- Individual employee phone bid schedules. This gives each employee all the information they need, lot-by-lot, including lot info, bidder info, and any special calling instructions.
- Employee phone bid cards with their phone bidder’s numbers. This allows the phone bidder to hold up the bidder number that they are bidding for during the auction.
Nirvana
Feedback from our customers on the phone bid scheduler has been great. We hear over-and-over that it saves many hours of arduous work for each and every auction. If you are manually creating your phone bid schedules now, do yourself a favor and start using this fantastic Auction Flex feature.
Special Thanks
I would like to specifically thank Dallas Auction Gallery for taking the time (18 months ago now) to help me understand the phone bid schedule process. Their insight was critical in making the phone bid scheduler feature a success from its initial introduction in January, 2009.
Confessions of an OCD Backup-Maker
Have you ever felt constrained by the limitations of a single display on your computer? Do you routinely find yourself switching back and forth between multiple applications? Maybe you’re working on a spreadsheet and an email at the same time and you are using data from the spreadsheet to emphasize a point in your email. So you bring your spreadsheet to the front, find the relevant data, copy it, then bring your email forward again, then paste it, then go back to your spreadsheet and yada, yada, yada. There is a capability built into your computer to support multiple monitors. So instead of having your spreadsheet and email on the same monitor, you can have two monitors and put your spreadsheet on one and your email on the other. Now you can see both of them at the same time. This capability has been built into Windows since at least Windows 98… if not Windows 95.
Safety, Security, & Serendipity
When sending email campaigns you have the option of composing your emails as HTML or plain text. With HTML you can have fancy formatting, embedded images, etc. With plain text emails you just have text. There are pros and cons to each format. I am a proponent of sending plain text emails, but rather than explain the reasons behind this preference, I’ll send you over to a great article written by Aaraon Traffas at his blog on AuctioneerTech.com:
A typical process for creating an auction catalog with images consists of 2 steps.
Let’s assume that you are dealing with a pasture full of larger items that don’t work well trying to capture the image as you describe, so you want yet a different alternative to the drag-and-drop dirge. To start, we need barcoded labels. Lucky for us, Auction Flex has the built in capability to print lot labels with barcodes. So as you describe the lots you stick a lot label on each item. When you’re done describing, every lot is tagged with a matching barcoded label. Here’s where the wizardry starts: Auction Flex can actually read those barcode labels from a picture! So, here’s the process: Start each lot by taking a relatively close-up picture of the lot label. Then, take as many pictures of the lot as you want. Now, with the next lot, again start with a picture of the barcoded lot label, then take pictures of the lot. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Now, open Auction Lots & Preview and go to the Advanced tab. Click the Import Images button, select the appropriate options and Auction Flex will read the barcodes from your images and automatically assign the images to the appropriate lots. Every camera is different and it takes a little practice, but you can achieve 80%+ accuracy using this process. For more information on this check the Auction Flex help file.