FastCall411 Finds Two-thirds of Businesses Not Responsive to Customer Calls

By Susan J. Campbell

TMCnet Contributing Editor

 

Time and time again we have acknowledged the importance of telephone communications for the workings of the business. After all, a company must be able to communicate with its customers in order to deliver its standard of customer service, as well as to drive revenues. However, what is the point of having an incoming line if the business doesn’t intend to respond to customers?

According to a major finding of a new survey of 5,000 local businesses, conducted in April in the Los Angeles area by FastCall411, nearly two-thirds of businesses listed in a typical Internet and mobile directory are not immediately responsive to consumers' requests for service.

FastCall411, a startup dedicated to improving the search experience for consumers in need of local service providers, announced these survey results at the 2007 Mobile Marketing Forum (MMF), held in New York in June.



To gather its information, FastCall411 completed telephone calls to a diverse population of service businesses, from attorneys to auto body shops, from restaurants to pest control services. Each was asked if they would accept a call from a consumer in need of immediate service. The prompt explained that the call was free to the business.

While 36 percent of those surveyed reported that they would accept such a call, 64 percent had disconnected numbers, busy signals, did not answer or otherwise did not respond. FastCall411 dialed 5,000 merchants during the middle of the business day.

"People who use the Internet for local search will almost always go 'offline' for their transaction," said FastCall411 founder and CEO Richard Rosen, in a Tuesday statement. "For service businesses, contact is most often made by a phone call. However, the current user experience in local search falls short.

“Search providers have data challenges in terms of completeness, accuracy, and mostly importantly, relevancy of their underlying data,” Rosen added. “Search providers must still make a number of crucial improvements in the user interface (UI) and presentation of information. To truly satisfy a consumer’s local search - particularly on a mobile device - providers need to deliver merchants who are in business and available. That starts with answering consumers’ phone calls.”

“The FastCall411 survey results confirm both that there’s lots of inaccurate data out there about local businesses and the fact that many small businesses are slow or unresponsive to telephone-based customer inquires,” said Greg Sterling, principal, Sterling Market Intelligence, in Tuesday’s statement. “And for customers calling from mobile phones, there's often an added 'need it now' aspect of the inquiry that makes response time even more important.”

Rosen noted that the survey confirms that the majority of phone inquiries to local merchants initiated from mobile and Internet search do not generate good odds for service for the customer. Consumers searching locally from their mobile devices need a path to relevant, available local service providers.

In the FastCall411 model, the consumer searches ‘category’ and ‘geography’ from a mobile device, the Web or directory assistance and is offered a refined list of relevant local merchants. Each submitted request identifies the need of the consumer and enables the available business to accept the current customer. Merchants only accept calls when they are available to service the consumer.

A March 2006 report by the Kelsey Group and comScore revealed that local search is the fastest growing area of Web search. More than 70 percent of consumers report that they now use the Internet when shopping for products and services in their local area, and 54 percent say they substitute Internet search for the phone book.

Given the increased activity on the Internet, it stands to reason that businesses could significantly increase revenue potential by being responsive to consumers who contact them via local search services. Those that are failing to do so are losing the potential for market share growth and increased profits and risk obsolesce by handing customers to the competition.

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Susan J. Campbell is a contributing editor for TMC (News - Alert) and has also written for eastbiz.com. To see more of her articles, please visit Susan J. Campbell’s columnist page.

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