How Unanswered Calls Impact Your Business

Managing a business means that you must juggle quite a few jobs at the same time. Often when your business is overwhelmed with demands coming from all directions, you may miss a call or two. On the surface, it may not seem like a big deal, but you’d be surprised at just how much a missed call could affect your business’ reputation and damage your bottom line. It is important to note that as much as 80% of your business communications won’t happen face-to-face but will happen over the phone. That means that you could be losing quite a bit of business with each unanswered call.

Where Do They Go?

The telephone is slowly beginning to fade into the sunset along with their predecessors the pay phones, but they’re not gone yet. As a society, we are still very attached to our communication devices. With mobile devices always at our fingertips, it means that customers want answers quicker than ever before. In this fast-moving digital age, nearly 85% of customers whose call is not answered will never call back. This figure could represent a significant amount of lost business. If the customer had concerns, interests, or a question, your inability to answer means that you were unable to meet his needs and he is now chatting it up with one of your competitors. That should be enough of an incentive to consider getting a qualified phone answering service to help you keep up.

Lost Revenue

Regularly missing calls gives the impression that your business has poor customer service, which automatically translates into lost business. You can market in a wide variety of areas but if you miss the calls when they come in the odds of turning that interest into a customer becomes very slim. Unanswered calls usually are the forerunners of a bad reputation and reduced customer interest. This means lost sales and loss of valuable revenue that could keep your business solvent. Missing calls usually is good news for your competition.

Lost Credibility

This wouldn’t be very damaging to any business if you could be sure that you would lose just that one customer, but it is very likely that the disappointed caller will talk about your business to others, thus tarnishing your business reputation with their bad experiences. When a customer has a positive experience with a business, they will happily tell others about it. However, when their call is never answered, it is quite likely they will tell even more people about their dissatisfaction. With a host of social media sites, review sites, and blogs your bad reputation can spread to thousands of potential customers before you even realize it.

Retards Business Growth

Every business needs to grow. While you may have your own customer base, this does not allow you to sit back and rest on your laurels. Without a steady stream of growth over the years, even if you can maintain your regular customers you could still be losing market share without new business coming in. At the same time, if your marketing campaign is geared towards bringing in new leads but you’re not there to answer the call, you lose all that energy committed to your campaign and the revenue you invested on it too.

There is no question that if your business is not able to pick up all of its calls in a timely manner that it is impacting you in ways you may not yet realize. The damages can be far reaching and it could take years to recover from the losses. If you’re in this position, the best strategy is to analyze your current situation to determine the actual cause, then develop a strategy to fix the problem to stop the losses. Keep in mind that the sooner you tackle this challenge, the easier it will be to start generating new business and revenue not just for the moment but for the long haul.