Business has been very smart about recognising that customers relate a failure to answer the phone promptly with a reluctance to engage further down the line. Some areas of the public sector are lagging in this regard however, and gaining some unfortunate coverage as a result.
BT’s recent research showed that in the private sector, customers will only try to call a maximum of twice before taking their business elsewhere, with a fifth estimating they would call just once.
Is this a case of a customer’s definition of what is fast, and what is slow, having grown more extreme? Some organisations suggest, after customer complaints about waiting times for callers, that users make their enquiries using Twitter.
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One in four private sector customers use social media for service. As a policy, herding your customers onto social media if your telephony is not up to the job can ultimately backfire, as the use of Twitter in particular as a tool for accelerating customer response times has led to the public expecting a response to a social media query within a two hour window, according to research by digital media marketers The Social Habit. And, astonishingly, customers give companies no slack in this two-hour window even when the enquiry or complaint is made over a weekend or in the evening.
The way in which customers want to engage is undoubtedly changing. BT and Avaya’s research into the ‘Autonomous Customer’ (those that spurn brand loyalty and look to peers and the internet for their purchase guidance), show that for this hard to reach group, empowerment is everything. As a customer segment, the Autonomous Customer is generally cash rich but time poor and will ultimately buy from or work with whichever organisation makes it easiest to do so.
This is not simply the theory of customer buying patterns. For the private sector, there is a quantifiable cost involved with missed calls: BT Business’ research showed that the average SME lost £1,200 per missed call, which means the UK’s small and medium sized businesses could be losing out on a combined figure of around £90m by not being available to speak to potential customers. This was one of the factors behind BT’s decision to respond to the need for agile call routing, with products like BT One Phone.
The latest agile routing technologies, along with fixed to mobile convergence systems are helping organisations of all sizes, including large government agencies, reduce missed calls. In the meantime, demand for rapid response is only going to get higher and those organisations who can’t keep up are going to start counting the cost.