What 15 Years of Client Projects Teach Us About Phone Communication

Every business phone line tells a story.
Some tell callers that the company is organised,
welcoming and easy to deal with.
Others tell them the opposite,
usually without anyone inside the business realising it.

For more than 15 years we have worked with everyone from independent retailers to national brands, and the patterns are remarkably consistent.

Below are six lessons taken directly from our client case studies, along with what they mean for your own phone system.

1. Consistency across locations matters more than polish in one location

When a business grows from a handful of sites to dozens, the phone experience tends to fragment. One branch has a professional greeting, another has whatever someone recorded on a handset in 2014.

We saw this play out with Hobbycraft. They came to us wanting a single, coherent standard across 45 branches. That standard scaled with them as the business grew to 124 branches. The lesson is not that big companies need big systems. It is that a repeatable template, applied properly, beats ad hoc recordings at any size.

2. A shorter caller journey beats a clever one

There is a temptation to put everything into an IVR menu. Resist it. Excel Healthcare approached us specifically to shorten the caller journey, getting people to the right department as quickly as possible.

Good IVR menu options are short, use plain language, and put the most-requested option first. If your menu takes 40 seconds to get through, callers will start pressing zero or hanging up.

3. Silence on hold is the most expensive sound in business

Callers held in silence routinely assume they have been cut off. Even a few seconds of dead air creates doubt. Well-produced on hold messages do two jobs at once: they reassure the caller that the line is live, and they use waiting time to say something useful about your services.

One practical point that catches businesses out. If you are using commercial music on your phone system, you need the correct licences from PRS for Music and PPL. Using royalty free on hold music avoids the issue entirely.

4. Cover is a strategy, not an emergency measure

DT&G Limited needed their phone line covered while their management team travelled abroad for meetings. Rather than letting calls go unanswered for two separate weeks, they used our Customer Support Centre to keep orders flowing and supplier queries moving.

Planned cover, arranged in advance, is far cheaper than the lost enquiries that follow an unattended phone line.

5. Audio and video solve the same problem in different places

Excel Healthcare came to us for phone messaging, then returned for instructional videos explaining how to operate their autoclave ovens. Both projects served the same goal: answering common questions before a customer needs to phone about them.

If your support team answers the same question 30 times a week, that question belongs in a video, an on hold message, or both.

6. Brand consistency is audible

Customers notice when your website, your printed materials and your phone line feel like three different companies. The Haven Home Interiors is a good example of the alternative: brand identity, e-commerce website, print materials and on hold messaging all designed to sit together.

The common thread

None of these lessons are technically complex.
They are about deciding that the caller experience is worth designing rather than leaving to chance.