Building A Missed Inbound Phone Lead Follow-Up Process

Current market conditions are driving strong customer refinancing demand and at the same time banks are not waiting around for calls. Banks are marketing like mad and driving phone leads through the roof. This demand plus lead generation frenzy is creating the highest call volumes Qortel has ever managed and sadly, missed call volume is also at an all-time high. Qortel’s best phone handling client is missing 20% of their calls. At the high side we see banks missing a whopping 50% of their calls! Missed calls are a reality that cannot be eradicated and at the same time, a missed call is no less of a qualified lead than a connected call. Our clients challenge is not in answering every call, they are never going to. Further, our clients are not going to call back every missed call back either. The best reality we can create for ourselves is to understand our missed calls and re-engage missed calls in the order that creates the most business.

Not all missed calls are equal and some missed calls are invalid altogether. We are all too familiar with robo-calls and spam calls. The compounded issue of these dirty calls is that they distract our efforts in calling missed calls back. A clean process that uses your call meta data, caller stated data and includes omni channel communications will yield the missed calls that need to be called back.

Making Sense of Call Data

Let’s start by looking at your missed call meta data, principally date and time of call, caller phone number and call duration. Your marketing works is 24/7 but your loan officers most likely do not. Make sure your Google listing and marketing messages convey your hours of operation. Customers pay close attention to open hours attempting to call just a little before you open and just a little after you close and seldom on Sundays regardless of your hours. Some marketers consider publishing open hours a possible deterrent from maximizing calls and prefer to use an answering service. Qortel conducted a study of calling back customers who left messages with answering services and found that only 20% of customers were contacted within 24 hours of leaving their message. There is nothing better than guiding callers to call when you are properly staffed.

There are two key pieces of call data to consider when staffing: Daily and hourly call volume. Marketing absolutely effects daily call volume, but all things equal Mondays are the busiest call volume days followed by Tuesdays and so through the week until calls almost stop on Sundays. As for the busiest hours of the day, it is the lunch hours. Encourage your team to not schedule follow-up calls over lunch hours. Work to keep your phone lines open during this 3 hour lunch window. Follow-up calls are best at the beginning and end of the day.

Caller phone numbers provide some insight to valid missed opportunities. Let’s consider publishing toll-free or local numbers for your customers to call. Toll free numbers offer an advantage for local businesses like car dealerships in that spammers do not know what local area code to spoof and thus most out of state area code caller numbers are spam and can be blocked. If you use toll-free numbers nationally you lose this advantage. On the other hand, if you publish local numbers nationally, spammers will typically match the area code and even the prefix of the number you publish creating a pool of missed calls to deprioritize call backs to. 

Carefully review the missed call occurrence and frequency as well.  Callers often call back after their original call is missed. If they connect on their second attempt, then good for you- missed opportunity averted! If you see a caller phone number call twice in a row and quickly hang-up both times, they are dialing the number they intended but not reaching the business or person they expected to reach. They dialed a retired number of another business or perhaps a misprinted number and when they hear your greeting, “Thank you for calling ABC Lending…” they quickly hang-up. Label “repeat short calls” as low priority. When you see a caller call multiple times but hang-up after holding for 30 seconds- meaning they heard your greeting and willingly held and then called back but not immediately, they are a qualified customer. 50% of all on-hold hang-ups occur at the 30 second mark. Work your overflow routing at precisely 30 seconds with a compelling message that buys you 10 more seconds (an eternity for a new customer to wait!) and transfer the call to an answering service or sales support team. Lastly there are the callers that call only once. If the call is short in duration, less than 13 seconds this creates a small special pool of callers. No meaningful conversation can be had in under 13 seconds, nor do robo-calls typically end in less than 13 seconds. Marketing dependent, many callers dial a number they see on a mailer and quickly hang-up to save the number on their mobile phone with the intention of calling later in the day. Perhaps they are planning to call on their commute or they are working from home and on an online meeting. These customers want to talk with your team but they are not in position to at the moment- but they can text, so we encourage immediate text follow-up. 27% of these callers opt-in for one-to-one texting about your offer. Consult your lawyer with any TCPA concerns you have with this practice.

Learning from Caller Stated Data

We have all dialed a phone number and heard “This call is being recorded for quality assurance…” but is it really being recorded? And if it is, is anyone listening to the recording? I mean who is listening to hundreds of millions of calls to banks every year? Her name is Qori and she is Qortel’s bot that uses machine learning to make sense of caller stated data including when callers are on hold. When callers say things on hold like “This is not our bank…” we know it is a valid lead. When we hear callers state to an answering service “I left a message 2 days ago…” this is a valid and qualified lead. Today’s digital assistants can go beyond listening to calls, they can barge into a missed call and ask qualifying questions like the caller’s current loan balance and interest rate. These are key data points to help you craft your call back priority list. Caller stated data is 99% accurate and the best data to base a strategy on.

Omni Channel Strategy

The final review of your missed calls are text messages to the same phone numbers your customers dial. Like ourselves as consumers and our habits, customers don’t call or text, they call and text especially after their call is missed. Have you ever called someone and upon them not answering, texted them? We all have, as do our customers. Make sure every phone number you have on your marketing messages are text enabled and monitored whether you promote texting or not. Should you promote “call or text” on your marketing pieces you won’t necessarily have a lift in response rate, but you will in connection rate by 5%. This begs the question, “Why not text back all missed calls?” TCPA is the concern- right? Talk with your attorney but these text messages are in the safest zone when considering two key points: the customer initiated the communication thread which crosses channels and you are sending a single personalized one-to-one message, not a generic blast to many phones.  And even in this single message, always offer a STOP option.

On the point of texting, let’s transition for a moment to outbound calling and texting. Make sure your outbound calling phone numbers are text enabled as well. The average connection rate on outbound calls is around to 20% with most call attempts being sent to voicemail. Customers often reply to an inbound call with a text, for example: “I can’t talk right now. Please text me.” or “Who is this?” With texting enabled on the lines you call out on, the average connection rate grows by 10 points. This means you can increase your connection rate by 50% by text enabling all of your phone numbers regardless of who manages them, your local phone company or a soft phone solution.

Action List

• Promote customer calls during well-staffed business hours for a 4% lift
• Encourage loan officers to keep lunch hours open for inbound calls to prevent another 10 points of missed calls
• Trigger missed calls <13 seconds to be auto texted back for 27% response
• Ignore short repat callers and focus on callers that call back over hours or days.
• Use a digital assistant to barge into calls exceeding 30 seconds of hold time and use 99% accurate caller stated data to capture customer contact information and obtain prequalification details
• Text enable all lines, inbound and outbound and crawl, walk, run into a complete texting strategy

Summary

Crafting and executing on an inbound phone lead follow-up strategy is the single most effective way to maximize your marketing ROI. If you research one more data point on your caller phone numbers, search how many times your potential customers have called your office over the months and years. Callers calling and being transferred to your office spanning months means you are paying top dollar to have what was a missed call 3 months ago into another premium paid lead calling today. Work your missed calls.