When are your customers most interested in your business?

After years of living and breathing telephone analysis, we never cease to be amazed at the useful and management changing information that call tracking data provides.

For example, we find that a lot of our clients’ ideas of when they think their consumer base is searching for their business and picking up the telephone, differs from what their call data actually shows. They’re missing out on leads.

Call tracking will tell you

For this blog, we’ve analysed a years’ worth of Mediahawk calls across a number of industries, including: financial services; legal sector; retail and the automotive industry. All sectors have shown that with a little optimisation, they can stop missing out on leads and target their consumer base at the right time.

When do customers call?

We analysed over five million phone calls over a one year period to understand what time of day people are likely to call into a business and also what day of the week is most popular. The results broken down by percentages are as follows:

Calls by hour

The interesting point about this graph is that it shows that customers are conditioned to call into businesses during traditional working hours.

Often a business has a debate (especially in retail) about whether to extend working hours to try and gain extra business. However, by analysing call data, you can find out whether opportunities are being missed or whether a business would be creating unnecessary extra cost and management time without a commensurate reward.

Calls by day

We always enjoy looking at this figure because it neatly shows the trends. Monday is consistently the most popular day for calling into a business. Yet this is when business people are having internal meetings, so they’re not making themselves available to provide customer service for the surge in inbound calls!

Missed calls by day

The other interesting issue is Sunday. There are only 2% of the calls but the average missed call rate increases dramatically as the following graph shows:

Although there are fewer calls on a Sunday there is an opportunity to put in place systems to improve call handling. This can be done using clever cloud based solutions such as voicemail boxes which send emails with a message. Or the calls can be automatically diverted to a virtual answerphone message which involves an actual human being answering in a company name.

Case study: Comparing telephone calls to web searches

We recently conducted a large survey with AutoTrader and Google to compare their used car searches against phone calls to a major automotive retailer with over 100 sites. We wanted to find out whether there are any discrepancies between when people are searching for used cars and when they’ll actually call the car traders. Here are the results:

The conclusion that can be reached from this example of comparing search data with call data is that there is a significant gap between when customers search (in the evening) for cars compared to when they will ring for them (during the day). As a result successful dealers need to look at using online tools in the evening engage potential customers before their competitors do.

If you were to do this same analysis on your call and search data what nuggets of info would this throw up?

Conclusion

As you can see, you can pull out extremely useful trends from call data. You might find that you need to alter your team’s schedule to meet inbound call demand. You might find that extending call centre hours is justified based upon your call volume in the evening. You might also find that a Friday lunchtime is when web searches for your products peak, so you might want to target these searches via your Pay Per Click campaigns.

If you want to optimise your business based upon your consumers’ interactions with your site and business, try call tracking for an all-round lead generation picture.