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Calls are so important for businesses. Lost calls mean lost sales, lost revenue and frustrated customers and prospects. This article will explain 10 steps your business can take to minimise your lost calls.
Call queuing does exactly what it says on the tin: it queues up callers, according to when they rang you. Using call queues can significantly reduce lost calls. This is because callers never ‘drop off’, they’re always on the line until one of your staff can talk to them.
Not only do call queues provide you with the ability to keep your callers on the line, but you can also play music and promo messages to them while they’re waiting. This can help your business upsell services and products and makes the call as professional and productive as possible.
Call menus, also known as Interactive Voice Response (IVR) menus are another great tool for minimising lost calls. These call menu’s offer your callers a list of options for them to choose from when they call. You’ve probably heard somewhere: ‘Press 1 for sales, Press 2 for Engineering, or Press 3 for accounts’.
These voice menus help minimise lost calls by freeing up lines and handling incoming traffic more effectively. Having a call menu also means that you reduce call time, by directing the caller to the department they need to get to, as quickly as possible.
Hunt groups, often called ‘ring groups’ or ‘DDI groups’ are a selection of extensions set to call at once. For example, you may wish to group people according to their department, so that everyone in sales will be called simultaneously, or everyone in support.
These hunt groups are 100% customisable, you can even have people in multiple hunt groups if required. Hunt groups can also be configured to ‘spill over’ into another group. So if all of your sales team are busy, you won’t need to worry about losing the call - because it can be picked up by another hunt group.
We often hear of our clients missing out on calls because their office is closed. With night mode, you can set your system to automatically switch functionality when the office is closed. Perhaps a message, detailing your office opening hours, followed by the option to leave a voice mail?
Night mode can even redirect calls to a specific mobile number or DDI. When your office or store closes, you can automatically have calls forwarded to voicemail, or your mobile; meaning that people can still get hold of you and further reducing those costly lost calls.
Voicemail to email is a software that sends all of your voicemail messages, right to your email inbox. It works by sending you an attached media file to each email, with a recording of the whole voicemail.
Voicemail to email allows you to keep on top of any missed calls quickly and easily, with no tools other than your email inbox. You could even forward emails onto the relevant members of staff so that voicemails are dealt with more efficiently.
Call logging can prevent calls from ‘slipping under the radar’. By keeping a record of all of your incoming and outgoing calls, you make it harder than ever for staff to miss calls, especially during busy periods.
Logging calls also enables you to go back and find busy periods, and make adjustments to call plans based on the time of day. You can also use call log data to expand hunt groups or move agents between groups if you find that calls are going unanswered.
Having a wallboard allows you to display all of your call statistics to staff. Wallboards can have alerts to let staff know if a call has been waiting on hold for too long. You can also show how many calls have been missed, how many have been answered, average wait time and more.
These statistics all help your employees to make better time management decisions, to ensure that they don’t go miss calls. It also provides good motivation, with sales targets or call volume targets displayed for everyone to see.
You may have heard of VoIP and SIP Trunks. Traditionally a business has multiple telephone lines. These lines can only handle one call at once; so if your business makes 4 calls at any one time, then you would normally have 5/6 telephone lines. However, VoIP removes the requirement for multiple telephone lines; and instead uses your broadband connection for voice.
Using VoIP won’t necessarily stop you missing calls, but it will almost certainly decrease your line charges and call costs. Because you only pay for one line, it keeps running costs low. VoIP also gives you the ability to add some pretty great call packages, helping you further reduce costs.
Another great way to stop losing calls is to use built in availability and scheduling tools. These tools come as standard with out Hosted VoIP telephone system. With availability, you can set your phone system to automatically divert calls, or forward to voicemail. You can even program your availability to change in advance with availability scheduling.
Our smart phone systems will integrate directly with your Microsoft Outlook and Exchange calendar. They can pull data right from your diary, and adjust your availability accordingly. So if you go on holiday, your phone can divert to voicemail. If you’re in a meeting, then you can divert to a co-worker. It’s that simple.
Why not integrate your phone system with your CRM database. You can use this CRM integration to help your business minimise lost calls. When a customer or prospect calls up, it will automatically identify the caller with a small ‘screen-pop’ window showing you all of their information.
This helps your business minimise lost calls as you’ll be able to divert them to the right department quickly. You can also set up an alert if the caller is a prospect so that you can answer that call as quickly as possible so as not to lose business.
I hope theses 10 tips for minimising your businesses lost calls. For a business, answering as many calls as possible is important. Whilst this list does give you some good tips, the ultimate deciding factor is: Can your phone system handle your call volume?
If you’re finding that lots of calls are going unanswered, it may be time to look at an upgrade to your telephone system. Feel free to give our team a call on 01934 882200 or email sales@commsplus.co.uk for a free, no obligations chat about your telecoms.
