Why a customer who cannot reach you goes elsewhere

A call the customer makes to you is worth more than a call you make to them, so the investment that matters most is being easy to reach. And when people cannot get hold of you, they do not assume you are busy. They assume the business is gone.

Most business owners put their effort into the calls they make. This chapter is about the calls that come to them, and how many of those get lost without anyone noticing.

An inbound call starts in credit

The same policy document in the source that forbids selling on the phone also gives a permission. Selling over the phone is allowed when people ring you, provided you make sure their call does not hit an engaged line.

That turns things round. When you ring someone, you start in debt: you have broken into the middle of their day. When they ring you, the call starts in credit, because they have already decided they want something from you.

It also means that an inbound call that goes unanswered is not just a missed call. It is the best call you could have had, the one where the customer had already made up their mind.

So the important work is not only getting better at dialling. It is making sure that anyone who wants to reach you can do it easily.

Suppose a business owner checks what happens to people who ring him, and finds that three in every ten end up on voicemail. These are people who had already decided to get in touch, and were stopped at the door.

Now suppose a tradesman puts a clear phone number everywhere his business shows up. Nothing else changes, he spends nothing on advertising, and the calls coming in to him double.

The line you ring out on is closed to people ringing in

The source also points to a simple mechanical problem, one that is as true now as it ever was. A single line gets blocked too. If you are ringing out all the time, who can possibly ring in?

For a one-person business with one phone, that is exactly the situation. The hour you spend on outbound calls is the hour in which no customer can catch you.

Suppose an owner does all his outbound calling in the morning. That is precisely when his customers are free to call, and what they get is an engaged tone.

The opposite is a consultant who decides that for two fixed hours each morning he does not dial out at all. Those two hours turn into the time when his customers get through to him.

When they cannot reach you, they assume you have closed

The source puts the result harshly: “when people cannot get in touch with the organisation, they assume the organisation is dead.”

Not busy, not on holiday. Dead. And from the side of a small business's customer, that is a perfectly fair assumption. They cannot tell whether you are swamped or have vanished, and they have no reason to find out.

Suppose a customer rings twice, gets no answer, and turns to a competitor. The owner never learns that there was an enquiry at all. As far as he can tell, it was just a quiet week.

The source goes further. In its words, a failure to man the phone and to answer the mail can undo everything a group has worked for. Whatever you did to make people want to contact you stops at one point, the moment they try.

The opposite is an owner who calls everyone back the same day, even just to say that this job is not for him. From people he never worked with, he gets three referrals.

Being reachable does not mean all day

Here is the instruction that is most useful to someone working alone. The source writes it for exactly the person without staff, and it starts from a principle: the phone should be answered by someone who knows how to deal with callers, so that people are not lost simply because they found no way through.

If you have nobody to answer full time, you can answer at set hours, as long as the public knows what those hours are, and they are the hours when people find it easiest to call.

In other words, being reachable is not measured by how long you sit by the phone. It is measured by how far people can rely on the hours you gave them. A few fixed hours, when everyone knows you will pick up, beat a whole day of guesswork.

Suppose a studio owner puts on her page when she answers the phone. She stops feeling guilty about the rest of the day, and the calls gather into the hours she published.

Or a tradesman who tells a customer he is in the middle of a job and will ring back at a set time, and actually does. His cancellations go down.

The booklet has two exercises for this chapter, a check exercise and a do-it exercise, plus self-check questions.

A customer who could not reach you will never tell you about it. So the question is not how many calls you made this week, but how many came to you and went unanswered.