How to make customers reach you?
We are a large retail insurance agency, our customers are having a hard time reaching a "human" or hearing a live voice answer the phone when they call. They usually get voicemail. I need a solution to this and make sure when the phone rings that we are able to pick it up and they get a live voice.
Answer
Date: November 9th, 2007
Hello!
There can be a couple of reasons for your customers reaching the voice mail instead of a human:
- Personnel is not sitting at their desks. Most of the time this is because information they need is not readily available, so they must hunt for it elsewhere. So make sure they have all the information they need readily available.
- For the same reason, they could already be talking on the phone internally, making the customer's call go to the voicemail by default.
- After a number of rings, the voicemail kicks in. If this number is set too low, your employees may not reach the phone in time (setting a policy to answer the phone within 3 rings is nice, but then you have to take measures so your people can actually do that--see above).
- Capacity may be too low... if everyone is talking, there are no people left to reach. For this, you can make Erlang calculations, check out this site for free calculators
- If personnel doesn't answer the phone, thinking someone else will take it (I've seen people ignore anything and everything that could mean work for them!), then make it a part of their performance evaluation. Everybody must be willing to pull their weight. If not, get out!
I could go on and on speculating what the reason is... but the real answer lies with the people you want your customers to reach!
Tell your employees that it is important that customers can reach the department. Ask them why they don't manage to do that, and how you can help them so they can manage that.
At your service,
Erwin.
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