Two Ways Businesses Can Reduce Their Abandoned Calls

Whoever coined the phrase “Patience is a virtue” was never in charge of a contact center. Consumers are not as willing to wait on hold as they were even a few years ago. A 2017 survey by American Express revealed that 61% of consumers were willing to wait on hold for 5 minutes or more. However, a more recent survey showed those numbers had shifted significantly – nearly 66% of consumers are now only willing to wait on hold for 2 minutes or less.

85% of customers will not call back if they disconnect. They can quickly move on to a competitor. The few that do call back are likely not going to be happy about it. For each additional attempt to contact the business, customer satisfaction drops 15%.

What is Call Deflection?

Call deflection is a technique used by businesses to prevent customers from leaving or having poor experiences by directing them to less busy digital channels such as SMS and Chat. It provides the following benefits:

• Reduces call abandonment rates due to excessive wait times
• Offers self-service capability for basic information retrieval or frequently asked questions
• Allows service representatives to interact with multiple customers at once

Proactive Call Deflection

Many businesses have implemented proactive campaigns to inform customers of alternate methods available to resolve specific issues or perform simple tasks. The goal is to eliminate unnecessary phone calls before they happen. Example use cases include:

• Billing notifications with instructions on how to pay using automated methods such as a mobile app, an IVR payment system, or text messaging
• Text messages for service or appointment reminders that direct customers to self-service portals such as a website or mobile app

Reactive Call Deflection

As customers call in and queues get full, businesses can reactively offer alternatives to waiting on hold. There are three main methods used to implement reactive call deflection:

• Offer automatic callback
• Redirect to text message
• Send to voicemail

Automatic callback allows a customer to receive a phone call from the business based on when they entered the queue. For example, if the estimated wait time were 45 minutes, they would receive a call in approximately that long. Callback is a popular feature for the majority of customers, as it frees them for other activities rather than waiting on the phone. For the business, it can reduce call abandonment rate by 32%, while also reducing telephony costs.

Redirecting to a text message is another option to avoid long hold times. The customer can quickly move to the texting channel, allowing the conversation to continue. Texting enables self-help capability for low-complexity issues, and it also allows service representatives to address multiple conversations.

Voicemail should be considered as a last resort, since 80% of business callers do not leave a voicemail.

Enabling Call Deflection with Mobile Business Contact

Mobile Business Contact call deflection capabilities provide an ideal solution for businesses that want to reduce their call abandonment rates.

For proactive call deflection, the solution supports IVR Dialers and Outbound SMS campaigns. The business simply creates a campaign, configures the message content, uploads a contact list, and runs the campaign.

With features such as automatic callback and SMS campaigns, Mobile Business Contact provides reactive call deflection as well. Using the visual IVR Designer, an administrator can create custom call deflection rules based on estimated wait time or calls in queue.

Additionally, the rich APIs available with the platform allow more advanced businesses to build their own call deflection implementations with as much complexity or level of integration with their business processes as they want.

Without call deflection, businesses stand to miss out on a considerable amount of new clients while alienating existing ones. A modern contact center solution, such as Mavenir’s Mobile Business Contact, can help to keep customers engaged, reduce abandonment rates, and provide a better customer service experience.

Learn more about how Mobile Business Contact can enhance customer service operations at https://www.mavenir.com/contact-us/.