If customers call your office then you have a call center.

Today I was calling an old friend at his new job. I dialed up the local business and was greeted by the Auto Attendant. Not knowing my old friends extension I simply hit "0", as instructed, to reach the operator and was looped back to the same main greeting. I first thought, I must have done something wrong, somehow I had mishandled dialing "0", so I tried it again and was looped back again to the main greeting. 

I was reaching a certain level of frustration so this time I listened to attendant's recording and dialed "2" as directed to reach sales, surely they would help me out. Sales people clammer to get to the phone right....wrong.  Instead a voicemail message answered the call and simply told me everyone was busy and to leave a message, someone would get back to me. 

The thing that made this experience shocking to me is they have a sales department, which means customers call them. The experience I had is the same experience they must go through every time they try to engage with them over the phone. As I said in 2004 when I was selling Inter-Tel Phone Systems in Orange County;

"If customers call your office then you have a call center"

It really is that simple. Every time a customer hangs up with out speaking to a person in your office then you have lost a chance to monetize that relationship, in short you have lost money. The worst part is there are tons of tools out there that can help you optimize your phone traffic and improve the customer experience and many of these tools no longer require expensive capital equipment (unlike in 2004).  

So if you run a business and customers call you then here are a few suggestions;

- Call your company and pretend to be a customer. See how many steps it takes for you to reach someone who can help you. Then ask yourself if the process was easy, did it make sense, are you able to get a hold of someone to help you in a reasonable amount of time? 

- Talk to your telecom or IT team about Automatic Call Distribution and how you can use queuing, log ins, and other features in your telecom platform to ensure better call routing. If your current system does not have these type of features then consider Cloud Call Center applications that can be utilized on a subscription basis. 

- Finally, what kind of tools for reporting do you have in place. Even the best set up will have hang ups, but was that hang up due to a long hold time or an impatient customer? Did you capture the number so someone can follow up? Again, if your current telecom platform does not offer this it might be time to look to the Cloud.

It is a highly competitive world out there and customers are looking for ease of use. A good first step is to make their phone calls easy.