|
|
|
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 stickiness.
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, 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 stickiness
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.
|
|
Effective |
|
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. |
|
Updates |
|
The phone bid scheduler was first added
in Auction Flex version 6.10 which was released on January
7th, 2009. In Auction Flex
version 7.10 (released 1/5/2011) the phone bid scheduler
algorithm has been significantly improved and now produces
an even better, more optimized schedule. |
|
Screen Shots |
|
Below you will find screen shots of each
step in the phone bid schedule creation process. From these
steps you can see just how simple it is to create your phone
bid schedule in Auction Flex.
 |
|
