Introduction
If you are a service-based company or a small business, you must have your phone ringing all day long. That is a good problem to have as you know that you have a strong growth potential to tap. But if you are missing those calls, then you must know that you’re potentially losing out on a lot, especially in this highly competitive business landscape.
What Impact Does a Missed Call Have On Your Business?
Imagine that your customer has some personal requirements, related to their health or any other service. What is the first thing that they will do? They’ll do a quick google search and then pick the service provider that matches their expectations and has good reviews. Let’s say that they find your business to be aligned with their needs. They’ll fetch your contact details and dial you up. What if their calls don’t get answered? What if their calls go to voicemail? What do they do then? It’s simple. They will direct their focus toward the ‘next best choice’.
Fun fact: With 32.5 million small businesses in the USA, they together receive a whopping 400 million calls on a daily basis. Nearly 62 percent of those phonecalls made to small businesses are left unanswered.
Given the heavy service nature of most businesses, it is natural for them to miss calls. But what matters is what you do with those missed phone calls. Do you let go of those opportunities or do something to convert the missed phone calls?
What Does a Missed Call Mean For Your Business?
A missed call not only means that you lost a potential customer, but you also lose a lot more every time you miss a call. Most small businesses spend a lot of dollars on building a website, advertising, SEO, and other forms of marketing. In addition, small businesses work very hard to channel these customers to a virtual door and more than a quarter of these calls never get answered. So how much damage does it cause your business?
A Missed Call Results In a Loss of Potential Revenue
Did you know that about 60 percent of consumers call a local business after discovering them on Google? If you have a healthy business, then it won’t be difficult for your potential customers to find you on Google search results. But when they call you and don’t receive a response, it is obvious that you have stumbled at the initial step of connecting with the consumer. So, as a business, a missed call translates to a missed opportunity. One missed call means a missed prospect for a sale, and further, a loss of revenue.
A Missed Call Affects Your Online Reputation
It takes years’ worth of effort to build a strong online reputation, and when you display ignorance with respect to responding to calls, then you are causing harm to your online reputation. You cannot expect new prospects to call you again and again. If there is no response from your end, they’ll dial the next best alternative.
A Missed Call Restricts Further Growth
Suppose you make an average of $1000 from each customer. If you miss 50 calls a month, assuming all of those were business-related; you are losing out on $50,000 monthly! Such losses inevitably show up and affect your overall growth trajectory. This means that all your SEO and marketing efforts have been wasted with those missed calls.
If you know your conversion ratio for inbound calls, then you can work out how much that missed call just cost you in purely financial terms. Either way, with pay-per-click prices going through the roof and so much marketing noise out there, each and every call should be nurtured, cosseted, and treated as your number one priority, but it is not always possible, how much ever you may try. We are humans and we can miss out on calls just like other finer details. It’s a given.
How do you protect your business from losing revenue then? How do you solve this good-to-have problem, without actually involving another human being?
It’s not just the ROI of new sales. Although this in itself is reason enough to sit up and gawk at those stats. Nothing is more infuriating than calling a company with a question or issue and having the phone ring out or go to voicemail. It feels unprofessional and your faith in that company rapidly declines. Your company is then on the back foot and we all know what happens next. So if you think that missing calls isn’t that big a deal, then it is time that you broaden your perspective and set measures to reduce the percentage of missed phone calls.
Tips to Reduce Missed Calls For Your Business
#1: Analyze the volume and frequency of the calls received. Understand which number the customers are using the most and what is the source of those calls.
#2: Set up a pipeline to minimize the number of missed calls. If you feel that the call overload is too much, then hire more resources to manage those calls.
#3: Switch to VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) to take calls in an informed manner and maintain operational efficiency. VoIP will benefit you in unimaginable ways.
#4: Transform phone calls to text. Investing in such a capability will help you respond to missed calls immediately.
For instance, with Emitrr’s missed-call-to-text feature, you can easily respond to the customers in the case of a missed call. Whenever you miss a call, the feature will enable you to send a direct message to the consumer such as “Hey, sorry we missed your call. How can we be of assistance to you?” Doing so will restrict the customer from switching to an alternate service and will also reduce the customer churn rate.
One of our customers, Dr. Mary Tilak and Associates were having a hard time managing the missed calls and were losing considerable potential revenue. See how they transformed their business operations with Emitrr’s missed-call-to-text capability.
Frequently Asked Questions
You can apologize for missing a customer call by apologizing, acknowledging the missed call with a brief explanation, and then assisting the caller with their queries.
You can implement VoIP software such as Emitrr in your organization. Emitrr comes with features like missed-call-to-text, automated messages, etc, that can help you in turning a missed call into a business opportunity.
It is considered courteous to pick up calls promptly and leaves a good impression on the customer when you do not make them wait to pick up the call.
Conclusion
All in all, no matter how much you believe in SEO or online advertising, the first thing that you need to do for customer acquisition is get your calls in order. Reduce the amount of missed calls that you receive. Learn to convert missed calls into rewarding opportunities. Your business acumen, coupled with the assistance of a customer communication and engagement software like Emitrr will help you thrive in this cutting-edge competitive business environment. So, book a demo and get ready to enhance your services.
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