It’s a fact: the majority of people don’t answer calls from numbers they don’t recognise. While endless calls from unknown sources is undoubtedly a pain for consumers, the rippling repercussions for businesses trying to reach consumers can be even more troubling. In today’s saturated consumer market, it’s mission-critical for businesses to get customer service right, and unanswered calls are proving to be an enormous obstacle.
According to our recent survey, 87% of mobile users don’t answer calls from unknown numbers. Over 40% said they chose not to answer because their phone didn’t identify the call properly.
So how can businesses better equip customer service teams for success?
Revamp Your Outreach Strategies
Brands and customers have a chaotic relationship, one that’s changed drastically in the last five years. Largely due to social media involvement, consumers are more engaged with brands and are demanding personalised, customised experiences.
Customers already interact with your brand from their mobile device — through your app, website, chat, text — so why aren’t they answering your phone calls on this same device? What’s the disconnect? The answer is surprisingly straightforward — they simply don’t know it’s you calling. And the worst part? Your customers actually want to take your call; they often have a critical need to speak with you to address something that an email or text simply cannot handle.
From callbacks to appointment confirmations to correcting issues with a delivery order, businesses and service providers struggle to reach customers with vital and time-sensitive information. Because most people generally assume every unknown number is a scam call until they hear the voicemail, your current outreach strategy may be to leave a detailed voicemail and convince your customer that it’s important to call back. But often customers then have to call a different number, wait on hold for the right representative, risk getting disconnected, just to start the whole process over again.
For companies who pride themselves on delivering quality customer service, an endless game of phone tag is frustrating, inefficient and ineffective for both the customer and the company (not to mention costly).
Why not entice your customers to answer your call on the first attempt, while the phone is ringing? Less voicemails and fewer agent attempts by the dialler would drive higher customer satisfaction, improve customer retention, and even yield new business growth and profits.
The Future: Enhanced Calling Technology
Today, brands have the opportunity to innovate towards a phone call experience that increases first-call answer rates and pleases consumers. The future of business-to-consumer phone calling is a vivid, personalised, business calling screen — an “enhanced caller ID” — that provides visual, branded content plus context showing customers exactly who is calling and why.
Enhanced calling technology unlocks a previously-unbrandable channel in the customer experience ecosystem. Once they recognise your brand, customers will interact with your phone call in the same way they interact with your app, chat, text, or Twitter feed. They know it’s you, they trust your brand, and they will appreciate the candour.
Purposeful, transparent, and enhanced calling solutions equip your customers with all the information and assurance they need to decide whether or not to answer the phone.
Driving Customer Engagement
In business, metrics matter. And for many companies and their call centres, KPIs such as call answer rate, call duration, and conversion rates are crucial. Organisations employing branded calling technology are overcoming the challenges of unanswered calls, and in the process, achieving measurable financial and customer satisfaction benefits.
Early adopters using branded phone call technology to tell their customers who is calling have improved answer rates on first-call attempts by over 200%. And across delivery businesses, financial institutions, and essential service industries, branded phone calls not only increase contact rates but also reduce the risk associated with fraud and compliance, yielding more profitable calling solutions and substantial cost savings.
When a voice conversation is critical, businesses must strive to vanquish the phone tag cycle, resolve issues, and alert customers by embracing the branded phone call. Companies that aren’t exploring these kinds of enhanced engagement tools run the risk of disappointing their customers and lagging behind the competition. Instead, let’s increase trust in the phone call and break through to a more cooperative business-consumer relationship.
Guest Blog by Viki Zabala, Chief Product and Marketing Officer, First Orion
