There’s a chance a customer phones your business, waits, leaves a message, and then goes somewhere else. Perhaps there isn’t even an opportunity for a complaint. No nasty emails. No frantic signs that anything went wrong. Only one momentary lapse in a potential sale, booking, partnership, or loyal customer.
We all too easily view calls as simply another form of administrative task. We hate having our work interrupted. We don’t like getting pulled into meetings. And we love seeing clean data in our dashboards and pretty webforms. However, there is a high probability that a phone call represents more intentionality than a website visitor. A caller generally wants to act within a specific timeframe. Whether it is making a decision, resolving a problem, addressing an urgent need, or finding some type of information, a caller typically wants to act now.
Therefore, the next competitive advantage may not arise through developing a new platform or launching a larger campaign. Rather, it may depend upon how well you answer.
Customers Still Want To Have Access To The Business Through One Route
Many companies have developed excellent customer experiences through the development of a highly polished website, great FAQs, a live chat capability, automated email campaigns, and a wide variety of social media inboxes. These may be good ways to further improve the customer experience. But when customers are stressed, short on time, and having problems with an important event, it seems that the shortest possible path to obtaining clarification is most likely preferred by those customers. A phone call will get them the shortest possible path. The connection to a business entity feels immediate to the customer.
But while many businesses make connecting to their sites fairly easy, when customers are able to contact the actual business (by phone), there are many times when they don’t get quick answers from the company. And this problem is especially common in service-based industries: health care, property, legal services, repair services, consulting, and local businesses where “timing” is critical.
You don’t need to convert every call into a long conversation. You just want to give callers the sense of being heard, of being pointed in a direction that makes sense to them, and supported throughout their interaction.
Missed Calls Create Quite A Loss
Lost calls are frequently hidden within the organisation. Lost calls may not appear as “lost sales” since there were no formal inquiries generated before the lost call. Behind each missed call, however, is a person who had sufficient interest to personally contact you via phone.
Whether it is a buyer confirming availability, a current customer resolving a small issue before it escalates into something bigger or simply someone looking for information on multiple businesses before deciding which company seems the most responsive, at the moment you connect with customers, the speed of response and the tone used matter greatly.
Although your employees are undoubtedly doing their jobs well, members of your team go off to other meetings than those they were originally assigned. Your employee’s lunches run longer than expected. Customers call during non-business hours. Only one person at a time can help each customer at your front desk. Even the best team in the world cannot answer every question all the time.
Whether or not calls are being lost by your firm is only half of the problem. What does losing those calls cost your firm long-term?
First Contact Creates Trust
When someone contacts your business by telephone and receives a calm, useful response, they perceive your business as organised. Conversely, when they are hurried along, passed from employee to employee, or forced to repeat themselves, they have the opposite perception. Small moments can establish the impression of your reliability.
Many organisations fail to realise that the telephone is much more than a convenient method of communicating. For the consumer, the telephone is part of your overall service offering.
What Is A Good Telephone Process?
Telephone processes that are useful to both parties will assist each in understanding what they can expect after the first call. Employees need to be provided with information about the caller (i.e., name, etc.), why the caller was calling your company, how urgent the problem is being addressed, how to contact them again, and any other agreements or commitments your employees may have made as part of resolving the customer’s issue.
Using Technology To Improve Customer Interaction
Automation technology offers opportunities for enhancing customer interactions via telephones when applied judiciously. Technology should not be used as a deterrent to consumers from interacting with your employees directly. Instead, technology should provide your employees additional “breathing space” while ensuring consumers have a clearly defined path forward.
Design Matters
Consumers can differentiate between automation systems that hinder interactions versus systems designed to facilitate interactions. Consumers can also recognise when technology assists them in receiving faster responses and clearer responses. A pleasant greeting, providing consumers with relevant choices, accurately recording messages received from consumers, and properly following up on consumer inquiries can contribute towards creating positive impressions regarding automation technology.
Human Elements Remain Important
An AI answering service for your VoIP system can help answer calls, collect details, manage common questions, and route important enquiries more consistently. Used well, it gives your staff more breathing room while still giving callers a clear path forward.
Each customer contact via phone is a reflection of how your organisation performed from the viewpoint of the customer. Customer contacts via phone will provide insight into what confuses customers, what kind of information is missing from your website, which problems continue to occurs, and where customers stop in their tracks prior to making a purchase. If you have multiple calls on the same topic, this could be an indication of larger issues concerning either content development, pricing structures, onboarding processes, or product clarity.
Looking at trends in communication through the telephone can help identify areas needing improvement in the organisation as a whole. You may find that many of your customers call in advance of a scheduled appointment because they do not understand the process involved in scheduling an appointment.
Smaller Improvements Can Yield Significant Advantages
It is not necessary that you totally redo all of your procedures in order to improve on your existing ones. Determine which area(s) of your operational process have the greatest potential for causing confusion or frustration for your customers. Improve the first contact(s) customers have with your company as it relates to timing, usefulness and overall demeanour.
