Call centers and contact centers that represent enterprise businesses often struggle with building customer trust, especially when they use the voice channel. This is a difficult challenge, as voice is a highly effective – and preferred – way to reach customers and prospects, as our State of the Call 2022 report discovered.
We analyzed over 150 billion calls and surveyed 1,800 businesses and 1,200 consumers – and we discovered that over 40% of businesses prefer voice – and a similar number of consumers told us they want businesses to call them.
The consumer conundrum: Can I trust this call – or not?
Even though people prefer a phone call, they are extremely unlikely to answer. That is not surprising when you consider that in 2021, people received an average of 14 spam and fraud calls each month, many of which resulted in serious financial losses.
Quite the dichotomy, isn’t it? The truth is that the only way that people will answer calls from businesses – the calls they want – is if they can trust that the call is not from someone trying to scam them. Unfortunately, 94% of people think unidentified calls might be fraud, which is why 79% let those calls go unanswered.
This is where call labeling services come in, which is one of the top recommendations from the Federal Trade Commission for helping to stop unwanted calls on cell and home lines. Also known as a branded call, these kinds of services are a sure-fire way for call centers and contact centers to build consumer trust and get through to the people they want to chat with.
Enabling trust on the first ring of a call
With a branded call solution like Hiya Connect's Branded Call, the people you are trying to contact will know as soon as they glance down at their phone that you are a caller they can trust. They will see your company name – and even better, the reason for your call. They will immediately know that you are not a spammer, and they can trust their interaction with you.
Here’s the impact you can achieve when you build trust with branded calling:
- Build trust before the first ring. By immediately recognizing who you are and why you are calling, your call or contact center can start experiencing increased answer rates – and more of your calls will be answered on the very first attempt. In fact, it’s not unusual for our customers to experience increases in answer rates of between 80% to 100%, with between a 40% and 90% increase in calls answered on the first try.
- Reach more of the folks you want to talk to. Branded calling can also increase the number of people you want to reach. One customer of ours, a mortgage lender, actually increased the number of customers reached by 52%.
- Keep people on the phone longer. Because people can see what company you are calling from and why they are naturally inclined to stay on the call longer. Penske Truck Leasing has experienced tremendous success with Hiya Connect and is finding that 50% of people they call are staying on the phone longer.
- Engage in bigger sales. Trust is certainly pivotal in converting leads to sales– and it’s also key to having higher-quality conversations. Penske is discovering that its contact center has a considerable decrease in the time it takes to convert the people they reach into sales. Other customers are closing larger-sized sales, with more revenue being generated per lead.
Take the first step in rebuilding customer trust with Hiya Connect's Branded Call
Spam and fraud calls have certainly impacted how people answer the phone these days. With a branded call solution the company and reason for calling are identified; this can rebuild the trust that your customers have in answering reputable calls. Check out Hiya Connect today and see what else our customers are achieving with this trusted branded calling solution.
