Co-founder
Probably the biggest irony of today’s constant connectivity is that it takes so much longer for customers to make decisions.
Unfettered access to the internet might have shrunk the gap between you and your customer, yet they still keep you at arm’s length.
They might have browsed your website. They might even have put some items into a cart.
But if today’s average online conversion rate of 2.63% is any indication, getting website traffic is one thing; getting conversions is a whole different story.
Is there something that can upend the numbers in your favor? 🤔🤔🤔
The answer to that: call-back systems!
Let’s explore the benefits of a call-back system for your business.
If what you’re selling requires a bigger investment or involves more research on the part of your customer, it’s natural for their buyer’s journey between idea and decision to extend indefinitely.
Think high-value items such as enterprise-tier solutions or even purchasing a home.
A longer timeframe for your buyer’s journey also exposes your customer to more factors that might influence their decision-making. And we mean negatively — for you.
But with an intelligent call-back system seamlessly integrated into your website, you’re capturing your customer at the very peak of their interest.
Here are four benefits of a call-back system to boost your business like no other.
Consider this: 19% of customers want to connect with a sales consultant when they’re first learning about their desired product. After they’re done researching and have made a shortlist of options, this number shoots up to 60%.
And while your staff’s availability to talk won’t always align with that of your customers, having no one to attend to a customer right at the moment they want to further their buyer’s journey is almost criminal.
You don’t want to leave your customer hanging or push them to consider your competitors. In a survey of 1,100 respondents, 63% of customers stated they preferred scheduling a call back at a later time, while 60% would hang up if they were put on hold for even 1 minute.
Take the experience of Loola Adventure Resort in Indonesia. Historically, the hotel averaged an entire day for lead response time. What they found was when they finally communicated with the customer, they were typically informed that due to the slow responses, the customer had chosen another option for their holiday.
“We needed a faster lead response time, and a friction-less way to engage our customers when they chance upon our site,” says Satnam, sustainability director of Loola Adventure Resort.
After establishing a call-back system, Loola saw its lead response time nosedive from 24 hours to 30 seconds, its total daily calls shooting up by 40 percent.
Many believe that live chats have the potential to seal website traffic leaks and that it effectively prevents bounces or cart abandonments. For Polish water treatment engineering company Klarsan however, this proved otherwise.
Turns out, one thing live chats attract is a lot of spam. Dealing with scores of uninterested users who abuse the website’s live chat responses for amusement, Team Klarsan suffered from low productivity, on top of a high bounce rate.
The sales benefits of a call-back system became quickly apparent after implementation. Apart from an 80% call success rate, they began seeing a monthly average of 100 calls.
“This translates to 100 more sales opportunities each month, and a significant improvement in web conversion rates,” reports Klarsan marketing manager Piotr Leśniak.
In a study on 1,850 customers from 6 countries, 68% preferred being entertained via phone for addressing concerns and support issues.,
If, say, your customer had the following choices:
Without a doubt, your customer will always choose to talk with a sales professional who can advise them on their buyer concerns properly, even if they had to schedule the call at a different time. Novocall’s call-back system makes this possible.
Similarly, Singapore-based travel agency EU Holidays, noticed that their customer inquiries would be made after business hours. “working people call in after working hours, like 11 PM, and they had to leave messages to reschedule a call. It was very manual,” shares EU Holidays digital marketing manager Kevin Cheng.
Because of this timing mismatch between service hours and buyer behavior, EU Holidays saw both numbers for their average monthly requests for call-backs and missed calls continually soar. Their website-to-call conversion rate, on the other hand, tracked a steep downward incline.
After embracing a call-back system for digital customer re-engagement, EU Holidays made touching base with their prospects drastically simple. Customers appreciated being in control of scheduling consultations with their tour representatives.
The results? More than 100 successful calls generated, over 200 WhatsApp messages and new leads, and a whopping 20 percent sales increase.
Given the advancements in technology in recent years, every choice and move we make online is indexed as user data to better inform goods and service providers about our behavior.
Likewise, a sophisticated call-back system tracking digital user information can serve as a rich source of market intelligence for businesses who advertise using key call-based metrics.
Aside from caller demographics, call duration, and dropped calls, a call-back system can give your business access to deep call metrics such as IP address, UTM source, keywords, and campaign source.
What marketing campaign triggered your most recent convert’s interest? What is the average call duration for your successful call-backs?
This kind of insight is exactly what your growth, marketing, and sales teams will need in order to learn more about your customers. Why are they calling, and how can you best provide what they need?
In a survey of 505 global consumers, 45% preferred sales representatives doing research about them. In the same study, 62% thought that the ability of sales consultants to listen to and understand their needs was critical to their purchase decision.
Not only do call details and demographics help you build a relationship with your callers they also inform your next steps and help you fuel creative, effective strategies for increasing traffic-to-call conversions and closed-won contacts.
One of the deadliest sins you could ever commit against your customers is to make them wait. Whether you answered within 5 or 25 seconds into the ring, in your customer’s head, you took 11.5 minutes to pick up their call.
Think about it: time is one of the most valuable resources known to man. Consequently, every second you delay giving your full attention will feel like an eternity to your customer.
Any lag, no matter how small, is the perfect recipe for call abandonment. And you can’t really blame customers for not wanting to waste their time, either!
The benefit of a call-back system is that you can keep your traffic-to-call leads in the funnel by capturing and rescheduling their missed calls. Say they happen to call you outside of business hours, a widget will appear giving them the option to “schedule call tomorrow.”
For calls placed during business hours, but at a time no one is available to engage with the caller, an automated call-back system can trigger an SMS to the caller, asking them to reschedule a call at a time most suitable for them.
Such call-back system features reduce your call abandonment rate by at least 32%. They put the ball in the caller’s court, ultimately bridging the gap between your business and your customer.
The customers of today are a demanding lot, especially when it comes to making purchasing decisions. Time to a buyer, is money, and that factors in as an invisible cost in their decision making. The customer experience is also an extension of your product today.
In spite of all its benefits, a digital-only process of attending to a customer remains cumbersome and slow. Perhaps the solution is simply to marry “old” traditional calls with the (not so) “new” digital-first customer behaviour.
After all, we’re all customers too, and we know that we’re demanding, impatient. and consequently unwilling to part with legacy methods that give us immediate resolutions. So please, make it easier for us to call your business.
JJ is the Co-Founder of Novocall. When he’s not busy building the Novocall brand, he spends his time watching crime shows and documentaries.
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