Forum Moderators: buckworks
While we like the increased sales, we do not like the increased complaints. We are thinking about eliminating our phone lines and switching to an email/live support only. We are spending approx $6K + a month for phone lines and call center, so if we lose a few customers that cannot call it would balance out by the money we are saving.
Most of the people who call need shipping info, want to make a return, need technical help, etc.
I would like to hear some feedback from people that have been in this position and hear some answers.
Thank you in advance,
One of these "If you have a question regarding our products and services please press '1'. If you want to order please press '2'" lines.
if the pre-sales information that people need is clearly visible on your website, they generally won't need to phone in - many will simply buy online - you won't necessarily lose 100% of the phone sales
if the post-sales information they need is clearly visible on your website, in emails, packing slips etc, they generaly won't need to call anyone
start listening in to the phone calls now and make a list of the main issues people have - resolve them and you cut the need for the phone service
BradleyT : Good point you bring up.
You could do something like,
1) all calls hit a menu tree - split them into prospective customers and customers who already placed an order. Play brief most commonly asked questions messages on the prospective customer group and each sub-group while they are on hold - some will hang up when they hear what they want to know. This way people with shipping questions hear shipping related info while they are on hold, and so on.
2) give top priority to the 'i want to place an order' group. This maximizes your live operators' time to close sales.
3) during daytime hours, route your calls in-house, with say 4 or 5 rings, or a 60 second hold time, then if no-one answers, route to the call center as a backup for those calls you can't take quickly. (they will hear a recorded message during this time anyway.)
4) all afterhour calls go to call center, or to a sub-menu which only sends the important calls to a live person.
5) if you have the staff, you could just route everyone afterhours to voicemail and have someone reply by email to their questions. The problem with this though is that it is time-consuming and you will get a lot of 'Hi I'm Bob, call me back' useless messages.
Obviously the above are just rough ideas and you would need to really think about this as it applies to your business. We were in the same position as you. We sat down for about 5 hours and said, 'why do people call, what do they want' and then categorized each segment into different ROI categories. Then we designed our system according to that. If you are spending $6k per month on phone and customer service alone, this will be an exercise well worth doing.
If your tech people are up for it, you could buy a system and set it all up in-house. (There are open source and prorietary solutions available.) Otherwise, there are plenty of consultants that I am sure would love to charge you for this :) (no, I am not one of them)
Do your customers have any chance of being repeat customers? If so do you really think losing a few customers a day "balances out" after a year?
you may have missed the point in that it costs takeover just as much to get that handful of customers as takeover makes from them - it's (basically) zero profit - so yes, it will balance out (financially), whether over a week, month, year or decade.
dumping the phone lines has the added benefit of dumping a lot of hassles like complaints etc.
just common sense really .........
1. We used to have submenus, however they were not as detailed as you explained with FAQs on hold. What we found is; the customers calling about shipping would hit the shipping prompt and if somebody did not answer fast enough or they had to go through shipping submenus they would hang up. They would then call our toll free number again and hit 0 for the operator or sales dept. Our customers are very impatient and tech savy.
We are getting a lot of calls that could be handled much more efficiently if they emailed and it would cut down on a lot of complaints. I did a little brainstorming below and this is what I came up with
Why do people call? (listed in order by highest amount of calls to lowest)
Tracking #s
Tech help for past order
Whats the best widget
Talk to billing dept
Find out why they only got half of order
Find out ETA of backorder
Part broke on me, now what
Complain about late order
Warranty issues
Returning a part
Get installation instructions cause they were not included from manufacturer
Call from vendor
Stock question
Find out why they did not get a response to email they sent 20 seconds ago
Customer wants prices on 100 items clearly listed online and then says they will call back.
Place an order
Why do people get angry and complain?
Person they dealt with is not an expert in every field such as billing, technical help, order taking, politeness, etc.
They were mad because they had to leave a message and wait for a call back
Person could not answer on the spot tech help
We issue a refund for a returned or cancelled order and it takes customers bank 2+ weeks to post on his card and they call everyday wanting to know where is my money.
Customer calls and he is irrate for whatever reason, and he gets the call center and they try to calm down and let him know problem will be fixed and somebody will call back with a solution shortly. It is not good or fast enough and they want a manager to hear the same thing.
Long hold times
Part was damaged and they want a new part overnighted super sonic shipped
Customer calls our call center late at night or during the weekend and they want immediate results to a small problem. When the call center advises they will have somebody call back next business day, customer flips out because they want service now!
-------end of brainstorming------------------
Does anybody know of any companies that specialize in helping companies like ours fix these problems or advise us?
thanks in advance
I'm really stuck between a rock and a hardplace. I would really like to dump the phone lines, but Im not sure how my customers would react not being able to call. But those same customers that would complain, will complain about long hold times, employees attitudes, rude voice on other end of the phone, no call back, you use a call center etc, etc.
I would love to hear any feedback, thanks in advance
in any case i would suggest revising your pre- and post- sales advise to reduce the number of calls etc
work on your FAQs pages, put a small note in with every order saying "if you have problems, check our website" etc
Is a minimum order possible?
About a year ago I closed the office for a month and outsourced all calls to a US call center. We had lots of emailed complaints, racked up large bills, and didn't really solve customer's problems. The next month I got rid of the call center, put up a massive FAQ section, added easy to use pages to query service order related info and put clear LINKS to all of these things in an outbound order email all new customers receive, and then took the customer service number off the website completely. Peace of mind went way up, sales did not drop, and I was happy.
A few months later we revisited the issue again because my gut feeling was that we must be losing on something, even just a boost of sales from seeing a toll-free number (and not calling it) and we also decided that some things are just faster to handle by phone...I don't want customers who are having purchasing trouble or concerns to send an email, wait 24 hours, etc...and that's if they even send us an email in the first place.
We designed an IVR system, added the toll-free number page on a small selection of pages where phone contact would probably be helpful. (inside the shopping cart, for example) and have found a happy medium in that. Average call volume dropped by about 70%. Most of the calls we get now are high-spenders.
Did you get any complaints when you removed your phone number completely? Or concerned customers emailing and asking what is your phone #?
Also when you removed your phone # from your site what did you do if the customer already had your phone #, did you route them to a voice mail or busy line?
Also what I have discovered, is the people who call and complain for whatever reason, like to go from manager to manager and complain. They complain and want to try and get free stuff and if they do not get free stuff they do not want to get off the phone and want to speak to the next higher up in line, some of these phone calls are a piece of work.
Did customers continue to email their concerns?
Absolutely. We installed a ticket system to cope with the increased emails. We force customers to see a complete FAQ section in order to email us. (FAQ links on top half, email section on bottom half.) This cut down on emails somewhat as well.
Or original support page said "call us, here's the number, or email us using this form." That was great until we grew. We did not kill the phone lines. We just wanted to clean it up. We kept the phone number at the bottom of a long order confirmation email that contains everything they need to know, and links to everything else they might want to know. We removed the phone number from the places a lazy customer would go to find it. We put FAQs in all the places where lazy people would look for the phone number. We kept the phone number visible in places where it increases order conversions (checkout for example.)
The people who call us are the ones who have waded through this stuff and still need help. In this case, it is mainly because we screwed something up. (or shopping cart is giving them problems.) In these cases the phone is the faster way to fix it and keep the sale. It all depends on your business. You can't kill your phone lines and then say "well sales were great this month." You have to consider seasonality and so on as well.
