But unfortunately, too many businesses treat their phones as an afterthought, or just a necessary business expense. Instead, you should see your phones as another avenue for boosting revenue, delighting customers, and facilitating upsells. The best way to make your phones work harder for you is by removing areas that drive your customers crazy. Your phone systems should get your callers to the right person and get the answers they need as quickly as possible without confusion.

Read these 3 things everyone hates about calling businesses – and learn how you can fix them:

1. Silent holds
2. Busy signals
3. Too many transfers

Silent holds

All businesses, and especially smaller businesses, can get overwhelmed with callers if just a few more than usual call at once. Have you considered your customer’s experience when they are put on hold? AT&T found that the average customer will hang up after just 90 seconds on hold. However, people listening to hold music thought they were waiting for half as much time as they actually were.

Music and other recordings both lets the caller know that they haven’t been disconnected and helps make the wait feel less long. Missed calls mean missed business or frustrated customers, so it’s vital to do everything you can to keep people on the line until you’re able to reach them.

How to fix it: Add music or custom messages to customer holds. Messages can convey upcoming events, specials, helpful information, or just thank the customer for remaining on hold.  Another option is to set up a callback feature. In this case, instead of having to stay on the phone, your caller can hang up and you call them when it’s their turn in line. Almost two-thirds of customers prefer this option over waiting on hold. But, keep in mind that most callers will be expecting that callback within an hour.

Busy signals

At a time when VoIP makes unlimited lines possible, busy signals are even more jarring than they once were. Busy signals can indicate that a number is wrong, the company is no longer in business, or that they aren’t big enough to handle the calls coming in, causing distrust in your callers. Aside from these issues, one-third of callers who get a busy signal won’t try to call back. That means you’re losing 1/3 of calls that you don’t even know you missed!

How to fix it: Switch to a VoIP solution that offers more lines so your team never misses a call. You can also set it up so that your customers can access different numbers for sales, customer service, and billing – even if they actually all ring to the same place. That way, you know exactly why someone is calling when you pick up the phone.

Too many transfers

Your callers want to talk to a person and get an answer as quickly as possible. This extends to after their call has been connected as well. There’s nothing more frustrating than telling a receptionist what you need, being transferred and repeating your issue, only to transferred again and having to rehash your problem. Streamlining the calling experience will raise satisfaction and help free up agents to answer the next call.

How to fix it: Set up an IVR menu for callers to choose from. IVR stands for interactive voice response; it’s a menu which and has callers state which department they need before they even talk to anyone, alleviating the load that your office manager may be managing with transferring calls. And even if you’re a small business with just one phone, these menus will make you seem larger and more professional.

It’s a common misconception that customers today prefer to do everything online. A majority of people would rather talk to someone in order to get faster answers and be able to ask follow-up or specific questions. By reducing holds, busy signals, and transfers, you’ll increase the number of callers you help with pre-sales questions and support issues. This results in more sales and happier customers.

Learn about our business voice solutions to find all the features you can access when you make the switch to Vonix.

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Great customer support is intentional, not an accident. Here are four customer service areas to focus on to build a support strategy that keeps customers coming back.

1. Tone: How You Say It

Too many companies train their teams on their products and solutions but don’t talk about tone. Your brand voice refers to the personality and emotion imbued by your company communications. Brand voice is often discussed in terms of website content and social media posting, but it should extend to live chat, email communications, and phone service you provide.

For instance, a law firm may want to sound more professional while a bakery may be more chipper. Review how your agents greet people, provide answers, and sign off to make sure that they’re staying true to your brand.

2. Timing: How Quickly You Respond

Your customers are busier than ever. In fact, 20% of them won’t continue doing business with you if you take too long to respond to their requests! First, you need to ensure that every message is being answered. Then, focus on speed. You need to cut down on the time it takes for the customer to be acknowledged and responded to. This will keep them from dropping out of the call, text, or message chain and make them more likely to purchase or return.

Invest in tools offering group inboxes, so that whoever is available can help the next customer. Additionally, agents will be able respond to multiple messages at a time as they come in. You can also update your phone system’s features to provide common answers quickly in a custom menu. You’ll receive fewer repetitive calls and free up your team to handle the bigger issues.

3. Method: How Customers Can Reach You

Are you still relying on a contact form on your website to field questions? If so, you need to diversify how many channels customers and prospects can reach you on. Customers prefer to use phone, email, and live chat in almost equal amounts. So, if you have a customer that doesn’t like email, they probably prefer the phone for quick questions. You don’t want to lose a potential buyer because you don’t offer the method they prefer.

Additionally, newer communication methods are actually better for your business. Updated VoIP phone systems help keep your customers on the line and to the department they need. Meanwhile, text and social media messaging will reach the customer even if they’ve already left your website, unlike live chat. Your customers will appreciate being able to use the method most convenient to them and will be more likely to remain loyal to your brand.

4. Improvements: How Can You Do Better?

Every customer service agent is too familiar with asking their customers to stay on the line for a brief survey. Often, the people who choose to answer these are extremely happy or disappointed; you lose a lot of the in-between data. Plus, the data could be skewed. Perhaps there was an issue that just couldn’t be solved, no matter how good of a job your agent did at handling it. Or, if a customer thinks that compensation and bonuses are tied to great service, they may feel pressured to just give all 5’s, regardless of how it was handled.

Self-reported data is always flawed. That’s why automatically recorded data will give you another layer of insight into the operations of your business. For instance, call times, speaking times, and call quantities can provide a lot of information into how your team is spending their time. With this data, you can determine goals that are based on real conversations instead of random industry metrics. If you need more detail about how something was handled, you can always review recorded calls and view text and message history with a client to see the full story. With all this information, you can better coach your team, provide helpful feedback, and catch great examples of service to strive towards.

Better customer service pays off in dividends for your company in terms of lifetime spend, increased loyalty, and referral potential. The core of a great customer service team is the tools they use to facilitate conversations. When your team can use one centralized program to manage all customer communications, they can spend more time focusing on helping your customers. Learn about Flex by Vonix, our all-in-one chat, messaging, and calling solution. 

The post The Anatomy of Great Customer Support appeared first on Vonix.

The way your company handles a support request has lasting impacts. Whether a customer has a routine question or is experiencing a more complicated issue, how you respond dictates their impression of you. This affects the rest of their lifecycle, including if they want to continue doing business with you and how likely they are to recommend you to others.

On the business side, access to advanced calls means that support agents are under more pressure than ever before to quickly manage calls. One of the most common metrics support teams are graded on is call time.

Remember that speed doesn’t necessarily equal better results. If your agents aren’t able to focus their attention on each customer and have meaningful conversations, then you could be sacrificing a great relationship. Relationship building can lead to referrals, repeat customers and increased lifetime.

Great customer support is intentional, not accidental. Here are three call statistics to focus on that have a bigger impact on your support strategy than call time.

1. First Call Resolution

When a customer calls your service line, they want their issue resolved the first time. Only 3 percent of your callers will churn when they receive the answers they need the first time. But a whopping 38 percent of customers will churn if their issue isn’t resolved the first time.

If your support team isn’t solving problems on the first call, there are a few areas for you to audit:

1. Training of support staff to handle issues without escalation
2. Product testing to eliminate ongoing issues for your customers
3. Developing troubleshooting steps to keep callers on the line until the issue is resolved

There are additional benefits to all three of these areas. By empowering your staff to completely resolve calls, you’ll free up your senior team to focus on bigger issues. And more product testing means all your customers’ experiences will improve – not just for those who call in.

Meanwhile, more thorough troubleshooting will cause your call time to increase. In other words, the amount of time spent on the phone shouldn’t carry so much weight.

2. Service Level Agreement (SLA)

In customer service, the SLA refers to the agreed upon response and resolution time for customers. When they have an issue, how long will it take for them to get it solved either through service tickets or phone calls?

One standard that is used across industries is commonly 80/20. This refers to the idea that 80 percent of phone calls are answered within 20 seconds. Instead of simply adopting this metric (which is decades old), it’s important to take the time to develop your own SLA for your business. It’s likely that your callers today have much less patience than those in the 1980’s.

Once defined, your call SLA numbers can inform other areas of your business so you’re providing the best support for your clients. With a service level agreement, you’ll:

1. Learn if you have enough resources to keep up with demand (both people and tools)
2. Discover whether you need to update features such as IVR menus to connect callers to the right place faster
3. Increase customer satisfaction and reduce abandonment by setting and meeting expectations

By monitoring and meeting your SLA, you’ll be able to keep your customers happy and improve satisfaction. At the end of the day, customers want their problems resolved as quickly and easily as possible.

3. Customer Effort Score (CES)

The Customer Effort Score refers to how much effort a customer has to exert to get their request fulfilled. This can refer to getting problems solved, questions answered or products purchases. How easy or difficult was it for the customer to complete their task?

A lower customer effort score means that it was easy for your customer to complete the task they set out to do. Lower effort is related to higher retention, lower abandonment and increased spend over time.

CES is often measured through a survey after the customer’s request is fulfilled. The survey asks: “how easy was it to interact with this company?” Organizations can only learn  customer effort at a very high level through surveys, not to mention that this method relies on customers self-reporting data – which isn’t the most reliable gauge. Today, customers are so over-surveyed that  the last thing they want is another survey.

To get the most out of your customer effort score, it should be measured throughout the entirety of your customers interactions with you. That’s where AI listening comes in to uncover effort business insights. A few indicators of high customer effort include:

1. A customer expressing that they already tried to use another channel
2. An agent conveying uncertainty around resolving issues
3. A customer expressing frustration

Tethr uses over 200 independent variables and thousands of phrases to identify high effort calls and notify users on how they can make the customer experience better. Learn more about the Tethr Effort Index approach to CES.

Stop defining successful customer interactions by the speed of the call, and start evaluating them  based on the overall customer experience. By focusing on the metrics that matter to your end user, you’ll increase retention, cut down on abandonment, build lasting client relationships and learn more about your customers. This results in happier, more loyal clients.

The post 3 Call Statistics More Important Than Call Time appeared first on Vonix.

That means that even if you’re integrating live chat and email communication into your business, your phones are still incredibly important. Just as you regularly update your website and add new customer features, your business calling has to keep up with customer expectations.

How Technology is Changing Communication – and How it Isn’t

Today, customers have more avenues than ever to reach out to businesses – calling, email, social media messages, automated chat, and even texting. For younger generations that have grown up with all methods of communication, it can be annoying to have to call businesses for a quick answer. Meanwhile, older generations get frustrated with AI chat bots not understanding their needs and wish they could just call a human for a simple question.

Many businesses are relying on new communication technology to lessen their dependence on phone lines. But that’s not what your customers want.

No matter how many helpdesk articles you write or chatbot scripts you set up, you will always need to have a business phone line. Not everyone has reliable internet access or is computer literate enough to be able to navigate online support portals. And sometimes, people just want to talk to a person. To keep your customers happy and attract new business, you need to be able to proactively manage your business calling.

Business Calling Today

Many companies simply bundle a phone line with their internet service when they open a business location without realizing that all business phone services aren’t created equally. Studies show that 60% of callers placed on hold with silence for longer than 40 seconds hang up and 34% of those callers will never call back. That’s a lot of lost revenue that could have been saved with updated business calling features:

• Custom hold music: select high-quality music to give the caller confidence that they are still connected and make the hold feel less long.
• Custom hold messages: provide helpful information to the caller to either solve their issue before they connect or to keep them involved with the call
• Interactive voice response (IVR): allow the customer to choose the department they need to speak with to resolve calls faster instead of funneling all calls through one agent.
• Call reports: access reports to see call history in order to return dropped calls and reclaim lost business
• Callback: allow customers to hang up the phone and receive a call when their turn comes up instead of making them wait on hold
• Voicemail to email: get customer voicemails transcribed and emailed to you so that when you call back you can be prepared to provide excellent service

These are just a few ways that a dedicated phone company – not your internet and cable provider – can help you save lost business and provide customers with excellent service. Retain the customers you’ve earned and provide the level of service that earns referrals from your happy customers by updating your business calling.

Regardless of which additional avenues of communication you add to your business, one thing will always be constant: you need a business phone line. But more than that, you need business calling with features that help manage the calls coming in more efficiently. Customers are less patient with long wait times and you risk losing business by relying on outdated phone lines.

The post How Technology Is Changing The Way We Treat Business Calling appeared first on Vonix.