Even with the advent of the Internet, studies show that when customers want to contact a retail business operation, they still reach for the phone. In fact, according to Dimension Data’s 2005 Merchants Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report, 80 percent of all customer interactions happen by telephone.
When phoning a retail store, the customer’s expectations for a timely and relevant response are just as high as if he were standing in aisle five. If the caller is subjected to long wait times or bounced from one transfer to the next, it’s not long before the customer hangs up and heads to a competitor.
“Revenue on Line One!”
From big box stores to specialty shops, research indicates that retailers are under-prepared for the everyday, inbound calls that customers make. According to the Dimension Data study, the industry’s overall call abandonment rate stands at 13 percent.[i] In the US, the UK and Canada, retailers are dropping anywhere from 15 percent to 25 percent, making for a lot of missed revenue.
A Loyalty Perspective
A poor customer experience may be a one-time event, but it can also hit your bottom line long after the event.
Here’s a typical scenario: It’s Christmas time, and a customer is looking for one of the hottest toys on the market. Wanting to avoid holiday traffic, she calls your store. She gets bumped to the toy department, where, after about 10 rings, a harried staff member picks up. Following a brief and uninformative conversation, she asks to speak to a manager. But after three minutes on hold, she hangs up frustrated.
Apart from the lost revenue, the likelihood of you losing a long term customer to a competitor just went up, and the probability of her buying from you again just went down.
The Big Upside
For retailers who manage the customer experience well—and cut down on call abandonment—the rewards can be impressive. In the case of one big-box retailer, customers who called the store and followed it up with a visit spent three to five times the amount of an average walk-in customer.
What You Can Do
There’s no easy way for tackling call abandonment but there are some approaches that can help. If you aren’t yet tracking call abandonment in your retail locations, start doing so. And ask questions like:
-
Why are customers calling? Which products or departments get the most inquiries and why?
-
What compels customers to abandon calls? Are wait times to blame, call routing capabilities, or antiquated Interactive Voice Response (IVR
) systems?
-
When customers abandon their calls, what do they do? How many visit the store anyway? Communicate through another channel like the web or go to a competitor?
The answers can set the direction of your call abandonment strategy.
Rethinking VoIP
Rectifying this situation doesn’t mean having to tear down a store’s existing telephone infrastructure. Mitel (News - Alert) Customer Interaction Solutions software can be implemented as a complete IP solution or integrated into any existing legacy environment. The Customer Interaction Solutions portfolio includes multiple applications such as Mitel Automatic Call Distribution (ACD), which quickly routes a caller to the right employee, even if that employee is nowhere near a desk phone or in the store the caller originally called.
Other Mitel IP features that extend “sales associate reach” is the ability to page multiple associates simultaneously, reducing wait times and the number of call transfers—two of the most pernicious drivers behind abandoned calls.
When putting customers on hold is unavoidable, Mitel makes better use of their time with Mitel Intelligent Queue; which instead of on-hold music, plays a promotional message suited to the caller’s preferences, cueing up a potentially more profitable interaction when the call takes place or when a store visit ensues.
More Than Just a Call
As retailers get better at tackling abandonment, they also start uncovering new benefits. The
Mitel Contact Center Management module can assist managers in identifying customer service levels, their most frequently-contacted departments or product inquiries and provides insights for improving operations, i.e., does a department need to be expanded or stock increased?
Quick call response and first call customer resolution are the holy grails of customer calls. Mitel is helping retailers succeed with a suite of powerful solutions that combine voice, video and data over IP to improve retailers’ responsiveness to those 80 percent of customers who still prefer picking up the telephone.
Sandy Janes is Director of Vertical Solutions Marketing at Mitel. Mitel is a leading global provider of business communications solutions and services. For more information, please visit www.mitel.com.
i Ibid
Interactive Voice Response (IVR) | X |
| A hardware- or software-based computer system that enables incoming callers to interact with voice prompts or verbal commands....more |
Automated Call Distribution (ACD) | X |
| A device used to distribute incoming calls to specific sets of users based on pre-determined criteria....more |
Internet Protocol (IP) | X |
| IP stands for Internet Protocol, a data-networking protocol developed throughout the 1980s. It is the established standard protocol for transmitting and receiving data
in packets over the Internet. I...more |
Voice over IP (VoIP) | X |
| A real-time communications system that converts voice into digital packets containing media and signaling data that travel over networks using Internet Protocol....more |
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