How Many of Your Customer-Facing Numbers Are Failing?

Josh O’Farrell of Spearline discusses the danger of assuming that your global contact centre numbers are working for all of your customers.

You probably assume that your company’s global contact numbers are just working. Why wouldn’t they be?

There’s a common global belief that your company’s global contact numbers are always working smoothly, not an issue in sight. And by right, they should be; you are paying for them after all, so why wouldn’t they be?

However, in our experience, with an impressive data set to work with, about 1 in 25 calls fail and you may not even know it’s happening. But the customer does, and that’s where the problem is. The customer is always right, after all.

That could be numerous potential customers calling to buy your product that just got a ‘busy’ tone and went elsewhere, or worse, existing customers calling for technical support that couldn’t hear the agent, got frustrated and hung up without resolution. Will they buy from you again? They more than likely won’t.

Contact number failures cost businesses millions of revenue every day, most of which stems from customer churn, and without regular monitoring, you have no idea if it’s happening. Typically, this can happen in four ways:

Call fails to connect entirely (bad)
Call connects, but the poor audio quality makes conversation impossible (also bad)
Interactive voice response system (IVR) takes the caller to the wrong place (really bad, depending on where they go)
Line transfers to different company entirely (catastrophic if the call goes to your competitor)

Josh O’Farrel

No matter the reason, the main point to take from this is that your phone lines are one of your most important assets. They are too important to guess if they are working.