This fall, a top analytics company released a report projecting nearly half of all calls placed in 2019 will be from scammers. As trends go, it’s pretty clear that our subsequent likelihood of answering the phone more often isn’t going to happen anytime soon.
As consumers, it’s pretty simple: if we don’t trust the call coming in, we let it go to voicemail. We expect if the call is from someone important or someone we actually know, the calling party will leave a message and we can call them back. No harm done.
But what happens if the phone never has a chance to ring? Or what if the call actually is from someone important, but the misrepresentation of their identity leads us to make an improper judgment on the nature of their call. What if, not only do we not answer the call or listen to the important voicemail, we block the caller from ever being able to contact us again, in error?
In 2018, Numeracle conducted an analysis across legal call originators representing a number of vertical markets such as retail, broadcast, healthcare, resort management, financial and more, and identified an average decline in contact rates of around 20–30% per enterprise. But what is truly lost when a contact rate declines? To identify this ‘cost,’ we need to explore the use of the voice channel across each of these vertical markets.
When you’re a retailer, the cost of unanswered calls manifests itself as merchandise never delivered, in-home installations never scheduled, customer service assistance never received, and in extreme cases, jobs lost and head counts reduced. When we’re talking about broadcast, such as calls being placed by your internet, television, or telephone service provider, a missed call means a struggle to schedule new service activation, no visibility into service interruptions, upgrades or scheduled maintenance, and negative customer experience.
From a healthcare perspective, missed calls mean missed appointments and lost time for both the patient and the healthcare professional trying to connect to discuss vital information. From a pharmacy point of view, missed calls equal confusion over prescription refills and a subsequent loss of revenue by the pharmaceutical company whose supply chain slows when the patient’s time to fill prescriptions increases.
Missed resort management calls mean you’re not receiving the news from your favorite timeshare or vacation property that you’ve finally saved up enough points to book that trip you’ve been looking forward to. And a missed call from your financial institute could mean you’re traveling in a foreign country and you’ll have to wait until your credit card is eventually denied at a hotel, restaurant or rest stop to find out that it’s been shut off due to a routine suspicious activity alert.
So what is the cost of a call failed to deliver? It could be that the cost is simply a perception of damages incurred across both parties due to the inability to transmit or receive an important, vital or necessary communication. This failure is manifested as dissatisfaction, lost time, loss of a job, lost revenue, significant inconvenience, negative customer experience, and the list goes on … the sum cost of which is perhaps unquantifiable.
If you’re on a mission to preserve the viability and identity of the voice channel too, get in touch today We’d love to hear from you as we work to protect this vital communications channel.
