Missing the occasional call might seem like an expected eventuality for any business. Sometimes people call during very busy hours, or someone just slips through the cracks. If your customers are unnaturally tolerant this isn’t a problem, but most are very unlikely to call you back a second time. For many industries, losing out on a potential lead in this way can be very expensive. Sectors such as real estate and dentists can potentially lose thousands for every customer lost in a preventable way. It is vital then that businesses secure an efficient process for making sure that customer service teams can respond correctly.
Your communication system is the most important way to start. Both the technology you work with and the practices that you carry out can be tailored to avoid missed calls. At Netcomms we have spent 30 years refining our communication offering to give businesses the best chance for success; customer service is a huge part of that. With this in mind, we’ve compiled our top 4 tips for how to prevent missed customer calls. These should help you to better adapt your processes moving forward.
Identify Peak Times
For many businesses, the reason that customer calls are often missed is because there are often large amounts of calls that arrive at one time. For most teams this is usually sometime in the early morning, but it can be any time depending on your industry. Identifying this time is key to avoiding missed calls.
The easiest way to spot your busiest times is through call analytics software. These services often come built in to your system if you are using a more modern UC platform, but they can be acquired separately, such as with the brilliant Akixi Wallboard.
These services provide you with a hub of all your most important calling information. From call duration, your most efficient operators and crucially, missed calls. Using your analytics platform, you can spot when the most calls are coming and ensure that you have enough staff manning the phones to answer their calls.
Provide a Bespoke Service
Another way to guarantee that your customers keep calling back, even if one of their enquiries does slip through, is to provide them with a bespoke call experience. It feels great to call a business and have them remember you by name. This will help to retain a loyal customer base.
You can achieve this by integrating your communication systems with the customer databases your business likely already uses. This is called CRM integration. Many services offer it now, not least many of the great Unified Communications services that are now available.
CRM integration allows you to see customer details as they dial in. This allows you to both provide them with a great service, and speed up the call process so you are available for the next customer.
Train Your Staff
Training your staff to maximise both efficiency and customer care during calls is essential to improving your business efficacy. Staff who aren’t fully experienced in the dos and don’ts of customer service take much more time delivering a service that might be subpar, as will be revealed by your call statistics. So improving this situation is vital.
This is where call recording steps in. Call recording allows you to unobtrusively monitor and store staff calls. Call recording has a variety of uses, from protecting your team, to ensuring legal compliance but it has the most potential as a training tool.
You can record and analyse calls that are successful with both new hires and your existing staff to refine the call process. Whether it is asking the right questions to customers, providing new explanations, or simply speeding up the process, you can ensure that your calls are carried out the right way. Of course, you can also use this technology to demonstrate what not to do as well.
Improve Remote Working
All of these techniques can easily be put into practice while you and your staff are in the office. It’s important that customer processes are carried over into every environment. If your business is still missing customer calls while your staff are working from home or on the go, then you are still letting customers down. You need to have an effective plan in place to ensure that even away from their office, your team are still well-equipped. One of the best ways to do this is through a business mobile plan. If your team are equipped with smartphones that can connect back to your office through a UC system, then you have everything you need to operate an effective customer care process from home.
Through your UC system you can simply route calls from the office to a staff mobile. The customer won’t even know that their call is being handled via a mobile. You can even use the same number. This stops remote working from ever holding back your customer service.
We hope that these tips have given you some ideas on how you can reinvigorate your customer service processes. If you have any questions or would like to find out more, give us a call here at Netcomms on 0800 298 6022 or visit our website.