Call Center Management Featured Article
A Warm Greeting to Customers Can Make a Huge Difference in Sales
We’ve all been there. We call a company looking for help with a problem, and the call is answered by someone whose voice and tone are so apathetic, they can barely manage to pronounce the name of the company properly. “HiThankYouForCallingAcmeWeValueYourCallHowMayIHelpYou” in a monotone voice may hit all the right script elements, but as a greeting, it leaves a lot to be desired. In an instant, the customer thinks, “This person couldn’t care less what my problem is, and probably cares even less about whether it gets revolved.”
A warm greeting, an enthusiastic tone and good listening skills can quite literally translate to a boost in revenue, according to a new report by mobile and data analytics company the Marchex Institute entitled “America’s Call Centers Revealed.” The results of the report were derived from conversations, hold times and call outcomes from a data set of more than two million phone calls placed by consumers to businesses across a wide variety of industries in 2015. The study concluded that showing a consumer basic courtesies during a phone call can have dramatic returns to a business’s bottom line by increasing the likelihood of a sale by up to 22 percent. This means that for a large call center, a warm greeting can equate to $20 million in additional revenue annually.
“We have all heard that being nice to your customer is good for business,” said John Busby, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Consumer Insights for Marchex. “This study clearly shows that putting the golden rule to work inside a call center can truly turn into gold for that business.”
In addition to cold or indifferent greetings, other factors that bring down sales are confusing interactive voice response (IVR) menus – 11 percent of customers simply hang up when faced with an IVR – and long hold times. Today, about half of Americans put on hold will hang up after only three minutes. Improved customer support, which comes from better training, more skilled and experienced workers, and technologies that make the support process fast and easy, will quite literally translate directly into higher sales for the companies that implement them.
“Consumers spend more than $1 trillion over the phone each year,” Busby added. "The good news for businesses from this study is that when they invest in better customer experiences it can lead to considerably higher revenues."
The study also found that while no-pressure sales tactics work the best – no one likes to feel like their arm is being twisted – an offer that is rooted in real value for the customer to act today goes a long way toward increasing sales, and may improve sales conversions by as much as 20 percent.
So what does this mean to you as a manager? For starters, ensure your agents have the right technologies to permit them to access the correct answers in as short amount of time as possible. Secondly, listen to their opening greetings when they answer the phone. If they’re hitting the right script elements but not conveying a sense of warm welcome to the customer, they may be driving business away. Build better schedules to ensure that customers aren’t waiting on hold for long, and ensure that agents are skilled enough to extend relevant, personalized offers to customers. Simply enabling agents to act like they care may be enough to show a visible bump in sales numbers.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi