Whether your business is making outbound calls for sales or customer service, you know that maintaining a base of happy customers is the best way to achieve revenue and profit goals. You also know that to track and analyze your contact centers’ efficiency, productivity, ROI, and customer experience to be able to identify areas of improvement, you can’t rely on answer rates alone.
With spam, scam, and fraud calls on the rise, customers are increasingly wary of answering a call from an unidentified number, negatively affecting customer satisfaction and business bottom lines. While you may be happy with your overall answer rate, when you have to make multiple attempts to reach a customer or a prospect to get them to answer, it affects all kinds of metrics: customer satisfaction, agent productivity, revenue, and more.
For the next two parts of the Beyond Answer Rate series, we’re exploring the metrics that are impacted by the number of attempts it takes to get a customer to answer their phone based on the type of call you are making and what you can do to remedy the issue.
We start with the impact of Call Attempts on Service and Support Calls. Catch us next week as we review the metrics sales call centers to care about to increase the metrics that matter to them.
The Impact of Call Attempts on Service & Support Calls
Businesses making outbound calls for service, scheduling, or notification purposes have a common goal: solve your customer's problems quickly (or even proactively!) while keeping employee satisfaction up and operational costs low. The number of calls you have to make to reach a customer doesn’t just affect one metric - it affects all kinds.
Whether a customer is expecting a call from a food delivery service letting them know their food has arrived, a callback from their cable company as they are experiencing issues with their internet, or their doctor’s office following up with them on test results from a recent appointment, they want you to call. But 79% of unidentified calls go unanswered - even the ones they expect. Even worse? When your number has been flagged as spam so your customer avoids it even more.
Service calls are the most frustrating for customers to miss, leading to decreased customer satisfaction, loyalty, and revenue. Additionally, the more times the call center agent or field service representative has to try to get their customer to pick up, employee satisfaction and operational efficiency decrease.
I see how many attempts it’s taking my team to reach customers…now what?
Every company with outbound call operations has different metrics that matter to them and will bring the greatest value to their organization. That said, some of the most common metrics that are affected every time a company has to make more dials to reach a customer include:
- CSAT / NPS / CES
- Callback rate
- First Call Resolution (FCR)
Once you know which metrics matter to your organization, analyze and identify strengths, weaknesses, and areas of improvement for your outbound call operations by asking questions of your data, including:
- Is there a pattern (specific geographic region, agent, number, time of day) that is making more attempts to reach the customer?
- If so - what are their calling behaviors?
- What are the top performers doing differently?
- How does this affect other metrics (spam ratio, overall answer rate,
- Is there a specific type of call that tends to have a higher or lower answer rate per attempt? (i.e.: the numbers from delivery drivers tend to have high answer rates per attempt but the numbers from the fulfillment center have low answer rates per attempt
The Takeaway? Less is more when we’re talking about the number of call attempts.
While the number of spam, spoof, and fraud calls are on the rise every year, there are steps you can take today to rise above them to get customers to answer the first time, keeping customer satisfaction up and operational costs down:
- Leverage your data to identify and inform training opportunities and process updates
- Register any number that makes outbound calls of freecallregistry.com
- Review your dialing practices to make sure you are following clean dialing practices. If you aren’t - adjust them so you don’t get flagged
- Constantly monitor your call center metrics and continue to make adjustments as needed
For companies that make more than 20,000 outbound calls a month, get a comprehensive reputation summary of all your outbound numbers with Hiya’s free Reputation Analysis service. Learn more: https://bit.ly/3BB5SIQ
