As a customer, we have all been there: you place a call to resolve an issue you have with a service or product, and you are put on hold. A pre-recorded voice tells you the lines are busy. Cue schmaltzy music and a long wait time. If it's too long, you abandon the call. If the issue is urgent, you may call again. Or you may not. The process wastes your time, as your issue has not been heard and the company you contacted has not registered your frustration.
For a company and its contact centre, the above is a recipe for a bad customer experience that can be measured in increased call abandonment rates that in turn contribute to repeat calls and lower customer satisfaction scores. Getting a handle on abandoned calls is the remedy to this situation, and the quickest, most effective way to do that is giving customers a call-back option.
It's a question of Return on Investment. As a contact centre, let's say you receive x number of customer calls per day, out of which some 45% abandon. If your contact centre is tasked with converting incoming calls into sales, that can come to almost half of potential business handled through that channel being lost.
We can map out this dynamic even with a simple formula:
Because if your customers' calls reach you, you will make them happy by resolving their issues through support or a sale. Right?
Of course, we can also digest the same formula, and reach the same conclusion by numbers:
These calculations of course vary by company and the price of the products and services they offer. There is no one-size-fits-all. However the basic parameters are certain: if a customer can't reach you, their call can't be converted into a sale. And if their abandoned call is measured only as abandoned, and not by issue type, etc., then you have no quick way to recover the lost opportunity.
Viewed from a customer's perspective, things are simple: If I call and cannot be helped immediately, I get the option being called back. I don't lose my place in line. My issue is guaranteed to be dealt with.
And for the contact centre: this means consistent, near 100% capture of all incoming call queries and their attendant issue types, complexity, resolution times, up sell opportunities, and customer satisfaction results.