What are your calls doing?

Welcome to the world as PhoneSmart sees it on our self storage blog.

Today I had a customer call with questions about their call activity.

We answered only 13 calls for them and only generated one lead in June. We also missed 5 calls for the store. These were callers who hung up before we talked to them. But the average time to hang up was only 30 seconds, which is unusually short. Naturally the client wanted to know why there were so few leads generated. Here is part of what I told them.

“Yes, this is unusual that we would only send one lead out of 13 callers for a newer property. I would have expected more like 4-5 leads out of thirteen calls.

So far in July, we generated 3 leads out of 11 calls answered. This is still a little low for a new store, but closer to what I might expect.

I will pull whatever recordings we have for the store from the last few weeks and try to get a feel for the kinds of calls we are taking. It may be we are talking to a lot of current tenants or getting calls from ad sales reps who are trying to get business from the new property. These are likely scenarios.”

The client asked in return:

“Thanks, can you also tell me if it is unusual for you to only handle 13 calls when 18 are offered? It indicates 5 are hang-ups but after long waits?”

After some more investigation I replied:

“Yes. This is unusually high hang-up or lost call rate. We usually average about 92-94% answer rate. It is also unusual that we would see so many lost calls with such a short “time to abandon”. “Time to abandon” Is the average time someone waits on hold before hanging up. Usually if we see many lost calls, you also see a “time to abandon” of mre like 1 to 1.5 minutes. 30 second average time to abandon, means most people hung up very quickly. Normally when we see a 30 second average time to abandon, you see very few lost calls and an answer rate closer to 94 or 95%.

We listened to the three calls we had recorded since July 21. In the busy season, we sometimes only keep recordings a week or two to free up recording space. We often handle about a thousand calls a day, which eats a lot of computer storage space. This is usually long enough, as discrepencies normally surface within a few days of a call. Two were rental inquiries and one was a current tenant. This doesn’t tell us much. I will poll call center reps to see if any of them have any impression of your phone calls one way or another. With so few phone calls, no one may have noticed anything unusual.”

Many times our call center reps get a “feel” for a store based on the types of calls and types of callers they experience. But with 20 plus call reps, it is possible that no one took more than one call a piece for the month of June for this store. That doesn’t give us much to go on.

It is quite likely that we talked to several ad reps and several current tenants and a rental inquiry or tow who did not think the location was convenient. That would widdle us down to maybe three to four workable inquiries. One lead still doesn’t seem like enough. But if that one lead rents, then we have paid for ourselves for the month.

It is also possible that since the store is new and the staff is busy putting on the finishing touches, that we talked to more current tenants thatn you might think. Usully about half the people we talk to are rental inquiries. You would think that at a new store it might be higher and closer to 75% rental inquiries, since there are not that many tenants renting yet.

THese are the kinds of exchanges and investigations that go into knowing your business inside and out.

bye for now, Tron

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Disclamer: This entry is intended to promote our partner StorageMart and some or all participants received compensation.

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