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When people call home services businesses and contractors, their needs are often urgent. Leaky water heaters, busted furnaces in the middle of winter, a rat infestation taking over their home, bids needed to complete a remodel — you name it, it needs to be handled now. If you don’t answer the phone when they call, they won’t wait around to call you back. They’ll just call the competition.
Home services and construction businesses only have one chance to convert customers when they call. You’re not only missing that one job, you’re missing the opportunity to earn their trust and potentially create a customer for life. The result is lost revenue, wasted marketing spend, and even damage to your business’ reputation.
See how much missed calls cost your business and how you can answer more of them to drive revenue growth.
Home repairs, renovations, and construction projects are some of the most important and expensive purchases anyone can make. They literally have to live with the results every day, so consumers will choose the companies they work with carefully. While they do most of their research online, most will call to get more information, get quotes, and set appointments. This survey found that 62% will call before making a purchase. When it’s an emergency, you can expect this to be even higher.
We also found that 76% will stop doing business with a company after a single bad experience. Even more eye-opening is that over 60% will pay more for good customer service. If you answer when customers call, they are certain to appreciate it. If you don’t, they’ll take their business elsewhere. Here’s what missing those calls could be costing you.
It sounds obvious, but the first and most important step to capturing revenue from your inbound calls is to answer them. But this can be easier said than done since large home services businesses can receive thousands of sales calls per day to their locations, franchises, and service partners. Our research found that 27% of calls to home services businesses are not answered. That could amount to thousands of missed opportunities to convert leads and millions in lost revenue annually.
Here’s how much missed calls could cost your marketing team and how they impact your company’s revenue.
According to the latest industry statistics and Invoca platform data, missing calls cost home services businesses thousands of dollars per month in wasted marketing spend. And this is only wasted spend on paid search. In this example, we’ll assume the business drives 5,000 calls per month from paid search.
How much revenue are missed calls costing your business? In this example, we’ll use the $4,500 average cost for a furnace replacement at a 20% profit margin, so about $900, and the missed call and lead rate data from the example above. Your average profit per job will vary, of course. The result: hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in unrealized revenue.
Before you can figure out how to reduce your unanswered call rate, you must know if and when calls are going unanswered. This can be a challenge for home services companies that have hundreds of business locations. With Invoca’s revenue execution platform, you can track all of your inbound calls and their outcomes—including whether or not the call was answered.
Our solution gives your team a centralized view of how each business location performs, and how many phone calls they’re missing. You can then use this data to diagnose issues and determine the best next steps to increase call answer rates. Below is a sample report showing call handling by location:
Tracking your missed calls is the first step — Invoca’s real-time reports can give you granular data about which locations are underperforming, which IVRs are driving abandonment, and which times of day unanswered calls are occurring. Once you have that data, you can make optimizations to increase answer rates. Here are some common tactics you can use to increase answer rates:
These changes will ensure you’re not wasting media spend driving unanswered calls. You’ll get more bang for your marketing buck, convert more customers, and generate more revenue.
Don’t rely on voicemails to follow up on missed sales opportunities — our platform data shows that less than 3% of callers who get pushed to voicemail leave a message. Invoca’s Lost Sales Recovery and smart alerts can help you capture unanswered high-intent sales calls so you can follow up on them right away.
Lost Sales Recovery can identify whether or not calls are answered by an agent, if the call was sent to voicemail, or if a voicemail was left. Invoca Lost Sales Recovery can isolate the unanswered calls that were most likely to convert, for example, by defining “Quality Sales Calls,” with criteria like IVR keypresses (e.g., caller pressed 1 to speak to sales) or filter missed calls by hundreds of marketing criteria, such as if they called from a webpage or clicked an ad that shows high purchasing intent. This ability to automatically identify and prioritize what calls you need to follow up on is the key to recovering lost sales. When high-intent calls are not answered, you can also use Invoca smart alerts to send alerts via Slack, email, or SMS to business locations or individual sales agents so they can follow up with them right away.
Watch this video to see how it works.
Blog: How to Turn Missed Calls into Revenue Opportunities
Blog: How to Use Invoca Smart Alerts
Report: Invoca Named a Revenue Execution Platform Leader in Forrester Report
