Businesses are keenly aware of the daily struggle to get their customers to answer the phone. Thank robocalls for that; Americans received nearly 76 billion of them over the past 12 months.
Erosion of trust in voice calling is evidenced by the fact that 75% of consumers will not answer calls from numbers they don’t recognize, according to TNS’ most recent survey. And while the voice channel has always been key to customer communications, it became essential as so many retail brands shifted to digital delivery and pickup operations.
The challenge is clear, and an increasing number of retailers are turning to branded calling solutions to solve it. 78% of consumers are more willing to answer the phone if the caller ID displays the logo and name of a brand they recognize*. In other words, the more information you can offer consumers on an incoming call screen, the more likely they are to answer. This is true in the retail space, where customers look to the voice channel for multiple aspects of the buyer’s journey such as purchase, order status, returns and unexpected issues.
Customer Engagement: A Keystone to Helping Business Success for Retailers
For retail brands trying to improve customer satisfaction and their brand reputation, it’s crucial to efficiently deliver products and services while consistently engaging their consumers.
Food delivery businesses – which provide over 60 million home deliveries a month across all 50 states – are perfect examples of businesses that rely on phone calls to reach their customers. With millions of deliveries happening daily, the need for real-time engagement via phone calls for directions, status updates, reminders, and customer service is imperative, not just for one successful delivery but to maximize the number of deliveries that employees can complete in one night. The more orders the employee can complete, the more potential revenue the organization can add to its bottom line.
At the same time, eCommerce and traditional retailers selling household products ranging from sofas to TVs require successful voice communications with customers to maximize the efficiency of delivery operations.
TNS Enterprise Branded Calling Can Help Increase Retail Customer Engagement
The reverberating effect of unanswered legitimate calls is that more customers are forced to call retailers’ customer support lines – which could lead to overwhelming call centers and longer wait times or for the call center to call the same subscriber multiple times making them less productive.
Many retailers and similar customer service departments now offer a callback or ‘virtual holding’ service that keeps a customers’ place in line without having to be physically on the phone for elongated periods. This automated callback service is a perfect example of the legitimate calls consumers want to receive but are often missed or ignored due to the distrust that stems from unknown numbers.
With consumer demand in place, retailers should seek partners with the branded calling track record, innovative capabilities and customer use cases.
Over the last decade, TNS has branded more than one billion calls, a milestone reflecting TNS’ unparalleled success in converting the promise of branded calling into reality.
To learn more about how TNS can positively help to impact your retail business’ bottom line, visit TNS Enterprise Branding Calling.
Jim Tyrrell is Vice President of Enterprise Product Management at TNS with specific responsibility for TNS’ Communications Market solutions.
*Kantar Survey – May 2022
