First impressions: how BI can transform customer calls
Today’s modern voice platforms give you detailed insight into every point of the customer journey, including the journeys that never got started.
That information enables you to make real-time improvements that will improve the customer experience and your organisational efficiency, and it will also help you maximise every single sales opportunity.
Here’s how.
Introduce more points of contact
One of the simplest ways to improve interaction with your customers is to have and promote individual contact numbers for each discipline, department or division, with those numbers made prominent on your organisation’s website. This benefits you in four key ways:
1. A superb first impression
First-time callers, your future customers, have a knowledgeable and enthusiastic person as their very first point of contact within your organisation – and they get to speak to that person immediately. As first impressions go, that’s hard to beat.
2. Effortless advertising analysis
If you allocate numbers for specific geographical areas or to specific promotional activities, you can then easily identify the effectiveness of your marketing efforts – it’s easy to identify the call volumes and frequency for each number.
3. Easy monitoring of teams’ effectiveness
In addition to the big picture of your organisation’s call handling you can also get the granular detail, so you can analyse how well individual teams are handling calls. This makes it easy to identify any bottlenecks that you can then investigate and address to improve the customer experience.
4. A more streamlined customer journey
If you use an automated attendant to process and route incoming calls, dedicated numbers enable you to identify the options appropriate to the caller. This then enables you to remove the options that aren’t relevant to them, reducing the amount of time they need to spend listening before choosing the option that applies to their particular requirements.
Never miss a sales opportunity
One of the simplest ways to improve interaction with your customers is to have and promote individual contact numbers for each discipline, department or division, with those numbers made prominent on your organisation’s website. This benefits you in four key ways: Research by BT suggests UK SMEs lose £90m in potential sales through missed calls each year. Not only that, firms that spend huge sums on marketing effectively waste much of it by having inadequate provision for incoming calls.
Think of it this way. If the average value of a sale to your business is £1,000 and your sales team’s conversion rate from an initial lead to a closed deal is 40%, then every incoming call to your sales enquiry line is worth £400. You don’t need to miss many calls for that to become a serious amount of money.
Modern voice platforms do more than provide increased capacity. They can also provide Unreturned Missed Calls reporting, which means a business can centrally identify any callers who were not answered and whose calls have not been returned. That means your teams can contact missed callers before they go to your competitors instead.
Get rid of your hang-ups
One of the simplest ways to improve interaction with your customers is to have and promote individual contact numbers for each discipline, department or division, with those numbers made prominent on your organisation’s website. This benefits you in four key ways:
Modern voice platforms also enable you to understand and react to your customers’ “caller tolerance” – the amount of time they’re willing to stay on the line before hanging up. That information can be used to solve the issues that cause them to give up on the call. For example, you might play a comfort message more quickly, or update callers more frequently with their position in the queue. With business intelligence you can measure the effectiveness of such changes.
The power to do more
One of the simplest ways to improve interaction with your customers is to have and promote individual contact numbers for each discipline, department or division, with those numbers made prominent on your organisation’s website. This benefits you in four key ways:
So far we’ve concentrated on the things your customers can see and hear. But modern voice platforms can deliver benefits that are less immediately obvious but just as significant.
Benefits such as:
- The ability to scale rapidly during periods of unprecedented demand, without leaving organisations with redundant infrastructure during quieter periods.
- Smartphone and tablet integration that means the systems are just as empowering for remote and mobile workers as they are for those back at base.
- Collaboration and teamwork tools such as online conferencing and instant messaging.
- Instant security and feature updates.
- Improved operational efficiency, better resource allocation, and tighter cost control.
Key takeaways:
- Missed calls are costing UK SMEs an estimated £90 million in sales every year.
- Modern voice platforms can ensure that every caller’s first impression of your organisation is a positive and enthusiastic one.
- Intelligent reporting enables you to see and solve any obstacles on your customers’ journey.
- Missed calls reporting enables you to contact your customers before they pick up the phone to your rivals.
- The right solution enables you to maximise sales opportunities and to do more with the same resources.
Find out more about network and connectivity solutions suitable for your business needs.