Occasionally I’ll be asked to name the single most important thing a business can do to improve their offices communications…,
My reply to them is always the same;
“Simply answer your office phones in a way that they can easily get to a live person” Phone calls answered live increases sales!
This answer surprises people but if you think about it – it shouldn’t. Consider the following:
- In our experience up to 80% of folks calling a business for the first time and encounter a busy signal or voice-mail… call elsewhere
- Over 90% of those same folks won’t leave a message in voice mail.
- Up to 70% of repeat callers won’t leave a voice mail message.
- up to 75% feel they haven’t reached “a real business”
Even more interesting is that if you ask business owners or managers whose office don’t answer phones with a live person if they are looking to both grow their business and deliver excellent customer service -100% will say yes!
The biggest handicap to business fixing this problem is not money or resources but the simple mindset of denial. What I call the “yes but we’re different or special so this doesn’t apply to me or my company syndrome” Some of things I hear include :
- A lot of our customers communicate with us by email
- (one of my personal favorites) our customers are “used to” reaching us by leaving messages instead of speaking to us live…
- Our customers don’t really need to reach us by phone that often
My reply to them is the same, in the form of a simple question;
Would you agree that the best time to convince a customer or potential customer to invest in ones products and services is when that customer or prospect has the time to do so?
The answer to that question of course is always yes!
Well in that case it would seem your desire to offer excellent customer service as well as your plan grow your business.., is in conflict with your not finding a way to use the technology available to you to make sure your phones are answered by a live person!
The good news here is that any business that feels like “they are too busy” to answer their phones by a live person is probably a fairly successful business! The bad news is they are missing easy opportunities to grow their business and improve their customer service by implementing procedures to insure their incoming calls are answered by a live person!
Capabilities such as
– call queuing
– automatic call distribution
– delayed ring to mobile phones and
– phone system call apps for mobile phones
These are just some of the many very affordable capabilities that are available to help get business off answering machines, cell phone voice mails and many others so that they can enjoy the growth and excellent customer service that getting live people involved in answering their phones can provide!