Death by Voicemail

Running a small business can be tough – people have to wear multiple hats, and often resources are stretched thin.

In your formative years, making a good first impression and building a client base is Priority #1 when you consider the sobering fact that 60% of small businesses fail within the first 3 years – you need to take every opportunity that comes your way.

So, shouldn’t you be picking up the phone?

According to the Office of National Statistics, a typical startup spends £22,756 in its first year. Of that, upwards of £1,000 is spent per month on websites and marketing. Despite that, we found 50% of calls resulted in hitting voicemails, in a recent competitor mystery shopping exercise we carried out for one of our clients. 

Of those that did pick up, we waited on average 54 seconds for our call to be picked up, which doesn’t bode well given the statistics we found. In a survey by Paperclip,

• 60% of people would hang up after 20 seconds
• Almost 25% wouldn’t wait more than 10 seconds
• 28% didn’t want to leave a voicemail

Looking at further studies, the figures only got worse. 411Locals in the US found that small and mid-sized businesses miss about 62% of their calls. Spread across 85 businesses over 30 days, only 38% of calls were answered, whilst 38% went to voicemail, and 24% of calls were unanswered with no option to leave a voicemail.

When did you last check your voicemail?

A lot of micro and small businesses are still heavily reliant on their mobiles, as they need to be on-site for jobs. As a result, its easy to miss a call. In fact, according to Sell Cell, 80% of all calls to mobile phones go to voicemail. Of these 80%, just 20% of callers will bother to leave a voicemail.

On average, most voicemails are left unplayed for an average of 3 days. Another survey by eVoice found that 67% of people don’t listen to voicemail from business contacts, and the average response rate to voicemails in just 4.8%. In other words, 95% of voicemails go completely unaddressed.

What kind of first impression do you leave?

Business voicemails are revealing, as they generally indicate that you are a small business, and likely a sole trader. In a risk adverse world, people are looking to rule out those that could let them down, and are often ruthlessly quick in their filtering.

Establishing trust is really important to convince people to do business with you, and in the research we did for our customer, we logged a variety of issues that could stop someone from choosing them. This included:

• Calls taken in noisy environments
• Calls taken from inside a vehicle
• Inability to answer questions as information wasn’t at hand
• Couldn’t answer questions without calling back

The upside? Those that did answer and provide the information to the set questions we asked had little competition – the rest struggled to establish rapport, or answer simple questions, or didn’t pick up at all.

So how’s your conversion rate? You can put yourself or a competitor to the test (for free!) by filling out our quick form.