Jun 21 2011

4 Ways to Stop Leaking New Business via Missed Telephone Enquiries

Category: Advice & Information, User Submitted Stories

This is a guest blog by Kieron at PackNet. For more information on guest posting opportunities on this blog, please contact Speciality Answering Service.

missed calls 4 Ways to Stop Leaking New Business via Missed Telephone EnquiriesIf you run a business and telephone enquiries are important to help you generate new clients, then you should be maximising each call you receive to ensure no opportunity is missed. Companies of a big enough size will typically have a sales team – or at least a sales person or an answering service – that will be used when a new telephone enquiry is received, and people may often think that is enough, but what about the calls that are being missed?

Nobody can be on hand 24/7 to take a call, so here we look at 4 ways you can stop leaking new potential business opportunities due to missing telephone enquiries.

1. Voicemail to Email

If an incoming call rings through to voicemail and the caller is willing to leave a message – then that is something you want to deal with as soon as possible. Even though the caller has acknowledged that you are unavailable, and has proceeded to leave their details, they will still expect to be contacted as soon as possible. As an alternate setup, if calls are routed directly to an answering service, they can usually provide a mix of voicemail + live operator service giving the caller the option to leave a message or speak with an operator.

You may check your telephone voicemails quite regularly, but to ensure you are notified as soon as any message is received, you should setup voicemail to email notifications so that you can be emailed each time a voicemail message is received (with the attached audio clip).

2. Out of Office Redirects

As with the email out of office notifications you can turn on, it’s a good idea to have a plan for when you’re physically out of office and unable to take telephone calls. This could be at the weekend or during a holiday period when nobody is in the office, but there is still the chance a potential client may call during this time wanting to speak to somebody.

A good idea to combat this is to set up call redirects for when nobody will be available to answer the office phone. Setup a redirect so that you can receive the calls directly to your mobile phone, landline, or calls automatically roll over to the service meaning that no incoming call will be missed.

3. Call Monitoring

Although not always an actionable process, it is wise for management-level employees to potentially have an overseeing eye on how the calls are being actioned within your business on a day-to-day basis. You may not currently be aware of it, but new business could be being missed as your employees are either taking too long to answer the phone, not spending enough time speaking to people, or redirecting callers to an inappropriate location.

Ideally set up call monitoring on your phone system so that you can receive statistics on all of the incoming and outgoing call data – to ensure your business is efficient as it can be when it comes to telephone activity.

4. Ring Patterns

If you have one main telephone receiver in your business in which all of the calls are sent to (ie. a receptionist), then this may become problematic if they are busy, away from the desk, or otherwise unavailable to take the call. Similarly, if a call is transferred to another area or department of the business and nobody is available to take it, the caller is likely to become frustrated and find their requirements elsewhere.

Set up logical call patterns, so that incoming calls can be diverted if nobody is available to take the initial incoming enquiry. For example:

  1. Call the receptionist
  2. If no answer after x amount of rings, forward to sales team
  3. If no answer after x amount of rings, forward to customer service team
  4. If no answer after x amount of rings, go to the answering service

The above process will ensure that each incoming call is answered, even if it isn’t by the most ideal person. As long as you can provide an initial point of contact for the incoming caller, they are likely to be satisfied (initially, at least).

Making Your Phone System More Efficient

A business telephone system shouldn’t simply be set up and then left to act as standard – it should be customised and tuned to suit your business requirements. An IP-based telephone system (ie. VoIP) provides the flexibility to manage all of the above, and for larger businesses, could help to save a substantial amount of money on voice data.

The above guest post was by PackNet – specialising in business VoIP systems for companies throughout the United Kingdom.

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One Response to “4 Ways to Stop Leaking New Business via Missed Telephone Enquiries”

  1. Attorney Answering Services Information | Answering Service Blog
    February 6th, 2012 @ 3:24 pm

    [...] go unanswered and communications may suffer because your staff is so busy. Long periods of missing phone calls can cause disorganization and strain client satisfaction. Attorney answering services may be your [...]

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