Keeping your customers close is more important than ever before. Missing customer calls won’t be the start to the year your business will be hoping for.
Most businesses offer customer care services online that take care of many client inquiries, but the internet has not eliminated the need for voice contact. In fact, voice is still one of the primary means of communication with consumers. Sadly, businesses often struggle with contacting leads and existing customers by phone because consumers have become wary due to robocalls and scammers. Another major culprit is poor customer service. Your own calling practices may be offending your customer base.
Unanswered Call Statistics
When customers call your company, they expect to reach someone who will manage their service expectations promptly. If their calls go unanswered, they may well cancel your service and give their business to a competitor. The following statistics on inbound calls show what consumers want and how they react to these unanswered calls.
In short, many customers are at their most frustrated when they have to wait on hold for too long. What should you be aiming for, you ask? Well, the industry-standard follows an 80/20 ratio, meaning that 80% of calls are answered in 20 seconds. That’s not very long at all, if you ask us – but it’s what your customers have come to expect and demand. You should try to bring your abandoned calls rate to a minimum, with a 10% abandon rate considered to be high across most industries.
Whether it is missed calls, abandoned calls or dropped calls, your business won’t want to be experiencing any of these. After all, every lost call is a lost opportunity for your business. Take for example a sales team – every time they lose a call, they could be losing out on a new customer. When your technical support team doesn’t pick up a call from that customer, they’ll be looking for help elsewhere… maybe your competitors? Sometimes your customers won’t be able to wait on hold or reschedule a call; sometimes their issue is too pressing. So, what can you do to make sure they can get through to an agent as soon as possible?
Things get even more serious if you’re a health or social service professional. Lost calls are a serious business to those in need and as a provider, you should do everything in your power to minimise them. The good news is that missed and abandoned calls can be avoided quite easily with the right strategy and tools.
Horizon Contact is the integrated business communication and customer contact centre solution that simplifies customer interaction. It is perfect for organisations who want to make it easier for customers to engage with them and unlike most Contact Centre solutions, Horizon Contact provides an easy to use, self-service feature set, for small to medium businesses, at a price point they can afford. Horizon Contact is a cloud-based contact centre solution that is designed specifically to work in conjunction with Horizon and Collaborate. It is a great way to ensure that your customers get what they need, when they need it most, from the most appropriate person.
While it’s impossible to eliminate lost calls from your contact centre, there are plenty of tools available to reduce that number to a minimum. Whether it’s by offering more communications channels, or simply adding some queue announcements while your customers are on hold, every little step will help deliver a better service and to ensure your customers get the help they need, when they need it. Gamma Horizon from Active Digital can give you: –
Agent Interface
Agents can view all the queues that they have been given access to view. Agents can take calls via a Horizon handset or via a softphone using the Horizon Contact portal.
Supervisor Interface
The Supervisor user has full agent functionality but can manage all agent users. Within the Horizon Contact Portal, the Supervisor’s main screen shows live data for both the queues
and the agents that they manage.
Admin Interface
Horizon Contact is managed using its own web interface, which provides information and management control to authenticated operations users.
The Administrator Portal part of the interface allows users who are logged in at the Administrator level to customise their Contact Centre features and functionality.
Wallboard
When an agent has classified an interaction, the classifications are logged and analysed by the Contact Centre for display via the wallboard and for inclusion in regular reports and much more.
The technology that powers landline telephones in the UK will be switched off in 2025, so it’s important to switch to a cloud-based telephony system as soon as possible. Over 2 million UK businesses will be affected by the switch off. The biggest impact will be felt by those who are still using fax machines or landline telephones.
Not sure where to start?
Book a 30-minute online, no obligation discovery call and ask for a demo. Discover how our solutions can help you improve your customer experience today.
Call: 01892 893000 or book a discovery call appointment online –https://calendly.com/active_digital
