8 mins read
We live in such a paradoxical world. It has never been easier for brands to get discovered, for brands to advertise, market, get themselves out there, and simply get some conversation going.
However, the easier the branding has become, the more difficult it is to get sales out of all this exposure. A free phone number can actually go a long way in solving this conundrum.
Despite more customers discovering businesses, these do not translate successfully into sales very often.
Why though?
This is simply owing to the sheer amount of friction involved in the process. What this means is that the customer experience isn’t optimal, it takes way more steps to accomplish a particular task than it should.
It often needs customers a lot of time to place a basic service request for example, or it may require a lot of approvals or filling up of information before a sale/service query can go through. All of these are examples of friction between the business and customers.
Customers today, especially the younger ones, are not very patient and barely make efforts to overcome multiple friction points to convert interest into sales.
They simply choose to walk away to something easier, more convenient, and take away their spending power with themselves. Reducing the multiple points of friction and bringing them down should be a stated goal for all businesses irrespective of the size or the scope or the sector involved.
This is where toll free numbers or free phone numbers come in. Commonly referred to as the 0800 number or the 0808 number, these are essentially dedicated channels available for customers that they can dial from anywhere to get their query resolved.
“It is no longer enough to make minor tweaks to your customer experience and service request handling process. What is needed is a complete reimagining of these processes in order to eliminate friction at all counts and make the process as seamless as possible.”
Free phone numbers help reduce friction between your business & customers:
The five most important ways in which free phone numbers can help reduce friction between the business and its customers are:
It is dedicated and customisable –
Free Phone Numbers are usually set up as dedicated contact identifiers for businesses, meaning a particular number will remain exclusive to a business and can be customised according to its needs, demands, etc.
This helps the company design its customer experience for the call accordingly giving it immense freedom of eliminating specific friction points.
Don’t play the waiting game –
Easily one of the biggest irritants and friction points for almost all customers. They hate being put on hold and being made to wait for a service call.
What a toll free number would allow a business to do is to set up the infrastructure and deploy agents instead of playing catch up with demand spurts and leaving customers waiting.
Ensuring a timely and responsive service with no delays actually matters a whole lot more to customers than what is usually attributed to them.
Stop transferring around –
Since the nature of service needed by customers has grown to be vastly more technical, complex and multi-vertical, it is increasingly the case that a call is transferred around multiple departments within the organisation before a service need is met. It introduces a major friction point for the customer and takes away a lot more time as well.
A cloud-based contact center solution essentially lets any of your verticals tune in to a call and solve the service needs on the spot!
Personalise the offering –
Over the years, most brands have settled for a very generic customer experience. It takes customers more time to spell out their details and then get into the service query, killing precious time.
Free phone numbers these days are interoperable with numerous management tools wherein all the existing customer data can be pre-fed for the executive, reducing multiple friction points for the customer and allowing them to directly jump into getting the service query addressed.
Integrate with all that’s useful –
An important aspect of advanced, free phone number solutions is that they don’t have to operate in isolation.
Modern Customer Relation Management (CRM) tools help cut down on friction. Moreover, they can be integrated with a large number of similarly advanced features like call forwarding, seamless transfer, scheduled calling, automatic recording, data capture, informational analysis, service registry, and so on.
This helps boost the customer experience as well as enhance the capabilities and productivity of the customer service vertical overall as well, resulting in a win-win.
Wrapping Up
The world that the pandemic is leaving behind in its wake will be one where brands compete for a relatively smaller wallet pie with even greater vigour. People aren’t spending as much as they used to, their financial habits have evolved and hence they’re a lot more demanding when it comes to customer satisfaction.
Moreover, people just know a lot more, they’ve access to a larger pool of information and they are not willing to put up with any friction at any stage of the buying process at all.
These are all hard realities that brands will have to account for and moreover strive to excel at. Free Phone Numbers from Acefone can become one vehicle of reducing customer friction and subsequently customer attrition as well. Come on board, now!
