For week 3 in our National Pest Awareness Month spotlight series, we’re discussing call abandonment rates and how to avoid losing business due to slow response times.
Tip #3 Reduce Abandoned Call Rates With Automation And Preparation
We all know that abandoned calls are a pain point for most pest control providers. In our own research, we’ve discovered that new customers will abandon a call 50% faster than existing customers. Leaving a customer waiting on hold for longer than 53 seconds could mean a loss of over $500 in potential revenue for each and every call. Without a strategy to reduce abandonment rates, you could be missing out on hundreds of new leads and thousands of dollars.
Automation Nation
Automation is king when looking for innovative solutions to common challenges related to customer communications in pest control. Automation ranked top of the list when we reached out to many of our clients asking about their strategies for both increasing close rates and reducing abandonment rates.
Solomon Airhart of Aruza Pest Control in North Carolina reiterated the importance of automation in capturing more calls during the busy season. He spoke of upgrading phone systems to ensure sales calls are prioritized and wont be left waiting on the line, but instead directed to a sales agent who can assist them right away. His team’s focus on automated follow ups through texting is also helping to recapture lost leads due to unavailability.
While there are many ways to implement automation when trying to lower the rate of abandoned calls and create more efficiency in your customer communications, upgrading phone systems to prioritize leads based on their requests and getting sales calls to a live agent quickly, can reduce wait times keeping customers engaged. Here are more automation opportunities:
- IVR-to-text when you get busy
- Automated callbacks or texts when you identify the call is not a customer
- Chatbots to qualify information first to free your CSRs time
Always Be Prepared
Employing modern systems that utilize automation is an important step in minimizing lost leads and closing more deals. Another helpful tool is recognizing trends with inbound traffic.
Will Haynes, VP of Marketing and Sales at Modern Pest Services, explains how observing the flow of inbound calls helps his team make smarter choices in staffing and outsourcing. “Abandonment rates are a struggle. We’ve seen an explosion in inbound phone traffic over the last year and because we want to take full advantage of new calls coming in, we rely on Slingshot to help out when call volume spikes.” Will continues, “We know when our busy times are, there aren’t really any surprises so we try to accommodate those calls with more staff, but If we can’t answer the call in 1 minute, it goes to Slingshot.”
Hiring a third party service that can work as an extension of your team means you’re always prepared and in control when it comes to when and how much support you need from them. The flexibility of a third-party answering service can help increase your response times.
With Slingshot, for example, you can assign our agents to answer your customer calls after so many seconds or minutes to ensure no customer is kept waiting. In times of an unexpected emergency that causes disruptions for your work, you can send all calls to Slingshot for a temporary amount of time… all with a few clicks in our online dashboard.
To Wrap It Up
As consumers, we often choose the service that delivers fastest whether that’s the wait time at a restaurant, drive time of a Lyft or Uber driver, or shipping dates on a delivery. New customers are also choosing a new pest control provider largely based on who responds the fastest. Upgraded phone systems that use automation, and employing a third party will reduce the risk of losing new customers and help you close more deals this summer.
