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You’ve got a beautiful website and your messaging is on point. You’ve also set up a digital buying journey that’s damn near a work of art. And when the customers start calling, your sales reps know how to close the deals. But one thing remains unanswered — about 25% of your sales calls.
Even in optimal situations like yours with a fully-staffed contact center or business locations, well-trained reps, and Hemingway-esque scripts, there are still lots of deals that aren’t getting closed because the calls aren’t getting answered. We know what you’re thinking — you’re doing all the right things and there’s no way calls aren’t getting answered. Many of our customers made the same assumption, until we showed them their own platform data. When we examined our customer platform data, we found about 26% of sales calls don’t get answered. In some industries, that number is much higher.
Simply not knowing your unanswered call rate is shrinking your bottom line, but it also causes other issues. Not knowing your unanswered call rate:
But just how much are these missed calls impacting your business’ revenue? Check out these examples.
If we look at what you might be losing on paid search alone, the numbers are pretty staggering. This Invoca automotive customer gets 1.2 million calls per month, with about 70% attributable to paid search. The average CPC in automotive is $2.46. And on average, 23% of the calls they drive go unanswered. That’s $53,000 dollars a month down the tubes just on Google Ads. Any and all attributable advertising and customer acquisition costs that precede a phone call will make this number significantly higher. Now, taking these numbers into account, let’s see what this customer could be losing in revenue.
The potential revenue cost is even more eye-opening. With an average profit of $2,337 per vehicle according to NADA data, they’re missing out on 1,876 potential sales, that’s $4.4 million a month in unrealized profits. $4.4 million. A month.
Of course, that might be on the high end because of the high average ticket price in automotive sales, but you get the picture. If tens of thousands of high-intent calls slip through the cracks, millions in revenue will be lost. Guaranteed.
To put this in perspective, we have a customer that’s a large automotive repair and tire retailer with 1,200 locations across North America. They get over 670,000 calls per month and there’s tons of potential in every one of the calls they get.
They were previously unaware of the volume of calls that were going unanswered across all their locations, and using Invoca, they found that they were missing over 8,000 calls per month. With an average $220 ticket value per call, it was a huge leak in the funnel. Using Lost Sales Recovery, they reduced failed calls by 75%, which helped them realize $1.3 million in additional revenue per month.
Of course, we wouldn’t be telling you this if we didn’t have a solution. Invoca’s new Lost Sales Recovery feature enables revenue teams to see exactly how many calls are being answered by agents so they can diagnose and fix issues that cause calls to go unanswered.
Realistically, even in the tightest-running ships, some sales calls will still slip through the cracks. Whether it’s because of calls coming in after hours, a sudden surge in calls, or technical issues with your phone system, you can’t answer every single call. That’s why Lost Sales Recovery also provides the insight you need to follow up on the calls that are most likely to result in sales. Here’s how it works.
By using heuristic voice energy detections, (okay, I had to look up heuristic, too) these Lost Sales Recovery Signals can identify whether or not the calls were answered by an agent, if the call was sent to voicemail, or if a voicemail was left. It can detect these events with over 90% accuracy right out of the gate.
Because it uses voice energy to detect call outcomes, there’s no need for call recordings or transcription to enable this feature to work. However, having recording and transcription enabled can provide additional insights. Lost Sales Recovery is powered by four new Signals that can detect whether a call was:
Not all missed calls are created equal, and for most businesses, following up on every one is not feasible or beneficial. On that, an inbox full of generic “missed sales call” alerts isn’t particularly helpful. This is how Invoca differentiates itself from other solutions: we give you the transparency you need to prioritize your unanswered sales calls so that you can respond intelligently, appropriately and at scale.
Invoca Lost Sales Recovery gives you the deepest level of insight so that you can appropriately respond to the lost sales calls that matter most. You 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.
Of course, marketing might also be involved with following up on missed calls via retargeting and they can even reduce budget-wasting unanswered calls by optimizing campaigns and bidding schedules to match the capabilities and hours of the contact center or individual business locations.
For example, you can isolate missed calls by campaign or marketing source:
Lost Sales Recovery isn’t just a tool for sales leaders to increase close rates, it’s also an invaluable tool for marketers to see how many quality calls their campaigns are driving and how increased answer rates and conversion rates can translate into better marketing performance.
Having visibility into unanswered calls makes it possible to troubleshoot and fix issues. Invoca’s reporting suite includes “Calls by Hour” and “Calls by Day of Week” reports that can be filtered by the new “Calls Not Answered by Agent” Signal.
This could uncover a staffing issue during business hours, an IVR that’s connecting calls during off hours, or a phone system that’s dropping calls. Once you know this, you can work to address the issue and reduce the volume of unanswered calls.
Businesses with more than one location, like franchises, chains, and dealers, get transparency into exactly how many calls are being answered by each location, region, or line of business. This metric can be used to track revenue performance over time in order to incentivize high-performing locations, or to make the case for staffing up or training at lower-performing locations.
Re-engaging and converting even a portion of your lost sales calls can have an extraordinary impact on your bottom line. This is where the ability to prioritize your missed sales calls comes into play. For healthcare providers this could be calls driven from the “book appointment” web page. For insurance providers it could be calls that originate from the “request a quote” form. The point is, once you know how to prioritize your lost sales calls you can put your strategy for re-engaging them into action:
Sometimes everything is aligned and a call goes off without a hitch, but for some reason the caller still doesn’t convert. Invoca helps you recover lost sales from these call types, too. One way to identify these calls is by the “Answered by Agent” Signal and the quality sales call criteria. For these lost sales, perhaps the best way to recapture them is retargeting with an incentive like a coupon. We make this easy through our integrations that enable automated digital retargeting.
Just because somebody wasn't calling to make a purchase and their concern isn't worthy of an immediate callback doesn’t mean you can’t show them a little love. Those lower-intent callers can be placed on the newsletter email list or in a drip campaign to maintain their engagement and interest. When you have the ability to understand the quality of each lost sales you can build a scalable and profitable way to interact with every lost sales opportunity.
Invoca Lost Sales Recovery is available now to all Invoca customers at no additional fee and your CSM can help you get started today. Not a customer yet? Click here to schedule a personalized demo and we’ll show you how Invoca’s conversation intelligence can deliver transformational growth to your business.
