Why do you need to improve your internal call handling?
According to a recent American Express survey, 78% of customers have terminated a purchase they were going to make because of poor customer service. 96% of customers won’t report bad service, choosing to buy from someone else instead. On average loyal customers are worth up to 10 times their original purchase and a key factor in keeping a customer loyal is their satisfaction when they contact you. These statistics raise the important of effective call handling to help retain and build loyal customers. With this in mind we have compiled 5 ways to improve business call handling as follows:
1. Set a target for answering calls – of course it would be easy to answer all calls within two rings just by hiring more staff but this is probably not commercially feasible. The industry standard target for business to business call centres is 80% of calls answered within 20 seconds with the best performing above 90%. Balance what your customers expect against what is affordable and make sure everyone understands these targets.
2. Set a target for abandoned calls – decide what an abandoned call is. You may not want to count callers that give up within 20 seconds unless you have particularly demanding customers in which case you may want to revise your target in point 1. For calls that you do count you should aim to never have more than 5% of calls abandoned and the best companies target 1%. Best practice these days it to have your call centre operatives call-back abandoned calls during quiet periods – usually at the end of the day/shift.
3. Monitor call queues – to understand common busy periods so you can add additional agents to critical call queues at busy times to retain your call answering targets. Review these statistics regularly against operational costs to make decisions on shift rotations and recruitment.
4. Install a screen for everyone to see – include your key metrics e.g. Wait times, calls in the queue and have them change colour with performance. This can help agents visualise the number of callers in the queue and may help to motivate agents to better call handling and customer service standards. It is a great way to report on the day’s activity in the team meeting and to discuss future shift rotations gathering input from the front line.
5. Consider recording your calls – for training purposes so you can train key staff on common call types and responses but also to protect your business so you can prove what was said by whom on a call if required. Financial institutions use call recording solutions to comply with a variety of government and industry related regulations.
Large enterprises have enjoyed these features as part of their traditional phone systems for years but with the introduction of cloud-hosted telephony, you can get real-time call statistics and call recording for only a few pounds per month per extension with no upfront CAPEX.
Do you have customers looking to improve they way they handle calls? For more about partnering with Jola.
