A February 2021 Insider survey conducted on SurveyMonkey Audience found that 46% of Americans reported receiving spam phone calls on their cell phone every day, with another 24% receiving them multiple times per week. 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 seeing “Potential Spam” 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?
What is really lost when the dealership loses its ability to connect with the customer?
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?
Within your dealership, missed calls not only mean lost time for your agents, it also is a lost investment on inbound leads. Most dealerships spend at least $100/lead, not reaching even 10% that you otherwise could reach is a huge missed opportunity.
Even for your existing customers it can cause headaches and confusion. If your calls are coming up as a “Potential Spam” call, you better hope your customers are listening to the voicemails you leave behind, otherwise, you’ll struggle to get people in the door for service appointments or to inform them of an important recall. You’ll miss getting a hold of people for lease portfolios and trade-ins.
So what is the cost of a call failing to deliver? At the minimum, it’s a potential customer you’ve failed to reach, or an existing customer who is expecting a call that they won’t get right away. This turns into dissatisfaction, lost time, loss of a sale, missed service or recall appointment, negative customer experience, and the list goes on … the sum cost of which is perhaps unquantifiable.
