What is everyone’s least favorite part when dealing with a business? Having to contact the company several times for the same problem. Long hold times and having to repeat their issue to many reps come in as a close second and third on the annoyance scale.
Most business owners recognize that effective communication with clients is an essential part of running a business. Whether an existing client is calling about an issue or a prospect is contacting with questions, every call must be returned.
Missing a call communicates to the client and potential customer that they are not a top priority in your company. You may believe that allowing anything to slip here and there is no big deal, but the consequences can be disastrous.
To help you understand this better, we will discuss some major reasons why companies miss important calls and also provide you with 3 proven strategies for overcoming them.
What Causes Business Missed Calls?
Calls might be missed for a variety of reasons. It is critical to identify the cause of the problem so that you can fix it as quickly as feasible. Here are a few frequent reasons why your company may be missing calls.
- Sometimes providing excellent customer service is put on the back burner and customer satisfaction is not a top priority.
- Other critical tasks such as strengthening internal processes and lead generation are prioritized more. They fail to understand that a poor customer service experience can cost them revenue and harm their reputation.
- Neglecting to update or invest in modern communication systems can lead to inefficient call handling which results in missed opportunities.
- If there is no effective system or protocol for following up on missed calls, they might remain unattended.
- If staff members are occupied with other tasks or are unavailable during specific hours, it can result in missed calls.
- If calls aren’t routed properly within the organization, they might end up unanswered or in the wrong department.
When a customer has a bad experience with your company or believes their business is unimportant to you, they will feel undervalued. This may cause them to move their business elsewhere – somewhere where they will feel more comfortable.
So how to go about it? Here are 3 ways you can ensure you never miss an important business call ever again.
1. Using A Virtual Assistant
Having a virtual assistant ensures you never miss an important call ever again because you have round-the-clock assistance in handling calls. Virtual assistants can handle all kinds of queries a client may have on behalf of the business, ensuring prompt replies and coordinated effort in delivering answers.
The virtual assistant also takes the workload off the current customer support staff so they can handle existing customers and business operations. This frees them so they can proactively attend important clients’ calls, resulting in productivity skyrocketing, and leading to more streamlined operations.
A business relying on a virtual assistant manages its time and productivity more efficiently while ensuring no important call slips through the cracks. They can focus on other areas of improvement such as client reachout, research and development, marketing, employee satisfaction, and procuring new recruits.
Furthermore, virtual assistants with phone answering experience are skilled at managing requests and responding quickly. This ensures that no lead or client query is unanswered, hence increasing customer satisfaction.
2. Email Alerts
Email notifications and phone calls are completely separate communication methodologies, and email notifications are not generally used to ensure that you never miss phone calls. However, there are ways you can use email notifications in conjunction with other tools to stay informed about missed calls your business might have experienced.
Email alerts are, generally speaking, an easier way to manage important calls because people in the corporate sector usually are most active on email platforms since they are the official method of communication for any work-related issues.
Plus, they are quick to set up and easy to use, and in any case of emergency, such as power going out or phone lines being down, the client can send a quick email to get their issues resolved.
You can also now use most phone systems that allow you to receive voicemail notifications via email. When someone leaves a voicemail, you receive an email containing a transcription or a notification about the missed call.
Some phone systems also allow you to set up VoIP call routing to another number or service. You can forward calls to another phone number or a virtual phone service that sends you email notifications for missed calls.
Some third-party applications and services integrate with corporate phone networks and can send email notifications for missed calls. These apps often provide additional features like call logging, call analytics, and voicemail transcriptions.
3. Axvoice
The third and most reliable way to never miss important calls is to use a dependable VoIP service. This is where Axvoice comes in. It is a highly affordable, fully compatible, and secure VoIP system that has several advanced features. And many of these features ensure your business never misses a call no matter how high the volume of incoming calls is.
This is why more and more businesses are switching to the service every day. Meanwhile, traditional call networks remain expensive due to the setup and maintenance fees, as well as the additional hidden costs involved with each connection.
Plus. traditional landline networks are prone to failure and they rarely offer any failsafe to rectify network issues. While traditional phone lines can cost businesses hundreds of dollars every month, in comparison, AXvoice’s business setup costs only $15 per month which
supports multiple connections with no further fees linked with the service.
AXvoice has considerably better functionality than traditional networks and is far more robust and practical. It also offers conference and emergency calls, in addition to more robust connections and sophisticated call control functions such as blacklisting and call filtering.
The Axvoice feature list is packed with many functionalities that will make sure you never miss a call again. Some of the major ones include the Find Me/Follow Me feature, Voicemail, and Softphone. All of these help reroute calls in one way or another so no call goes unanswered. Let’s look at each of them in detail.
Find Me/ Follow Me
Find Me/ Follow Me is a great feature built into Axvoice by default. If you receive a high volume of incoming calls and ensure none of them go unanswered and want to respond to them timely, or if you want to monitor after-hours business calls, then Find Me/Follow Me is tailor-made for you.
With this call routing feature, you get sequential call ringing on multiple devices in the order set by you. AXvoice’s Find Me/Follow Me is your doorway to exceptional customer service by ensuring prompt responses to business calls.
The best thing about this feature is that you have three fail-safe numbers that you can rely on. These can be custom numbers that you can assign and each of them has their separate priority level.
This means that the order of the numbers added on the control panel will determine the routing preferences for the incoming calls, so a number 3 line will only get a call after it’s not picked up by the first or second number.
Voicemail
When you miss any call, they go directly to voicemail and you can answer them later at your convenience. This is great for small businesses that have a limited number of resources but a huge demand and large clientele.
It eases the burden off your support agents while still handling your customers’ needs and queries. AXvoice Enhanced Voicemail service lets you access your voicemail from anywhere and anytime using any web browser-based device.
The best part? When you receive a voice call and you cannot attend it, you will get an email alert so you can reply immediately, without wasting your customers’ precious time.
AXvoice Enhanced Voicemail feature is included in every AXvoice Residential and Business VoIP Plan, free of charge. You can change the wait time to answer time anywhere between 1 and 60 seconds.
To configure your email ID on which to receive voicemail alerts, on your control panel’s voicemail page, open the “Set Preference” tab. On the proceeding page, provide an email address in the field “Email address to send message to” and click “Update Preferences”.
Softphone
Softphone is another great feature that makes life easier. It is the perfect solution to answer any missed calls immediately. This is because Softphone creates an Axvoice app on your mobile device or tablet.
This means you can get back to answering calls on the fly and use other Axvoice features while you are on the move. It utilizes your current Axvoice plan and there is no additional hardware or setup required with using a softphone software.
There are many reliable third-party websites from where you can download a softphone software for free and you can set it up by contacting Axvoice’s customer support.
Never Miss a Call Ever Again
With these features, I assure you you will never miss an important call ever again. And to take your business to the next level, I advise you to use all three strategies to ensure during peak calls, you are still able to handle them promptly.
Your clientele will surely appreciate the extra effort you have put in and will gladly do business with you in the future.
