How should you prioritise your incoming telephone calls?
It might seem a bit harsh, but the importance of a telephone call is often greater to the person making the call than to the organisation taking the call. Answering calls costs money so you should consider what return you are going to make from different types of calls and then target your resources accordingly.
You can prioritise different types of calls in a number of different ways:
• Consider using some sort of a IVR call platform before calls are answered e.g. press 1 for sales, press 2 for customer services etc.
• Use unique telephone numbers for different types of calls e.g. for sales, customer service and reception.
• If your telephone system allows it, set up ringing groups for each call type to present certain calls ahead of others.
• You could also use the routing facilities of “intelligent” telephone numbers to ensure your most important calls get picked up quickest.
But how should you rank your call types? Let’s look at some examples:
New Business Enquiries – Spending money on advertising and marketing without answering your calls is like trying to fill a bath up with water but forgetting to put the plug in. The leads will go down the plug hole – quite literally ‘money down the drain’. You can recognise companies that maybe haven’t considered this if you pick up a Sunday newspaper and telephone some of the advertisements. Those that don’t answer have forgotten to put the plug in the bath! It makes sense to answer new enquiry calls but ignore existing customers at your peril.
Customer Service Calls – Deciding what impact your handling of customer service calls will make on your business profitability is another complicated issue. How unique is your product or service? If you are the TV licensing authority then you can get away with answering 50% of your calls confident that people will call back but for most commercial organisations this level of poor service would be suicidal. Commercial realities play a part in deciding how much you should invest in telephone customer support. If you are in a very price sensitive market you may not be able to invest in post-sale support and even if you did would it encourage buyers to pay you 20% more when they are next in the market? It’s not for no reason that many PC manufacturers base telephone customer support offshore to reduce costs. The point to remember here is ‘how are my existing customers going to react if I don’t meet their customer service expectations?’
By Steve West
Marketing & Business Development Manager
I think that in today’s 24/7 consumer society, caller’s are becoming more frustrated with IVR options. More strategic forms of directing calls, for example, having different numbers allocated to different areas of your business seems to be the most sensible option in call prioritsation, caller satisfaction and obtaining key management information.