No matter what answering service or call forwarding tool you’re using… there’s a 2-3 second delay.
Meaning, that after a lead dials your marketing phone number, the phone will ring for an extra 2-3 seconds before it actually connects with your forwarding—even if it’s a marketing number you’re using for tracking.
That can mean lost calls. Lost leads. Lost deals.
But no need to worry. There’s a solution to this. A solution that ensures you never miss a call. Let me first explain how call forwarding works…
Schedule Your Free Call Porter Demo!
What is Call Forwarding?
At Call Porter, we use forwarding numbers to ensure that our agents know who the call belongs to.
That way, they can speak on your behalf and book appointments on your calendar. How it works is, you give us your marketing phone numbers—you can have as little as 1 or 1,000 phone numbers (if you use that many marketing methods). We sync those numbers with our Call Porter offices. When a prospect responds to your marketing by calling your phone number, the call will be forward to one of our offices.
But as mentioned, that forwarding action has a 2-3 second delay. The prospect will hear a couple of extra rings on top of the usually ring time.
How we solve it.
This ring delay can be too long of a wait for some sellers.
So long in fact, that impatient callers will just hang up before they connect. Unfortunately, most answering services—or assistants, lead managers, and VA’s—will never call those numbers back.
But, at Call Porter, every call that comes in gets saved in our system. Even those that are abandoned before we get a chance to connect. Then, we continue calling back that number until he/she connects for the next 5 days.
That way no call is lost—even the impatient ones.
Fast answering time.
Abandoned calls are still a concern, however.
Because sometimes, prospects only do business with the first person who answers the phone. Fortunately, we have that covered as well. To reduce abandoned calls (due to delay), we have a system that instantly passes the call to the most readily-available answering agent. We also train our employees to answer calls immediately.
This gives us an average ring time of 5-7 seconds.
Compare that to the industry average of 10-15 seconds. On top of that, we ensure that we have enough answering agents to never miss a call during business hours. All that combined makes our abandoned call rate a measly 9% (for every 11 calls, 1 hangs up… that’s not bad at all!).
How to reduce the “impatietness”.
Today’s world is full of distractions that pull people in all sorts of directions. On top of that, people are overworked and constantly rushing.
So, that little 2-3 second delay in a ring time, just exacerbates their impatient mood when on the phone with your VA or your answering service. People are rushed If you’re still worried that the 2-3 second delay adding on to
Fortunately… there’s a way to deal with this too!
That’s by making sure that the person behind the phone (your VA, answering service, or lead manager) sounds legitimate, local, and professional.
Most answering services are sloppy.
They don’t have systems in place that ensure a fast answering time. They don’t have training in place to instruct answering agents to make the caller feel comfortable and relaxed. They don’t have tested and proven scripts to book quality appointments with real sellers.They don’t follow up (we follow up on all abandoned calls). They don’t understand real estate.
At Call Porter, we have all that.
Including English-native-speaking callers so your real estate company sounds local and legitimate (There’s nothing against international answering services BTW. It’s just that sellers feels more comfortable and open with US-based companies—that’s just how the cookie crumbles).
So, with all that, the 2-3 second delay (of “doom”) is actually nothing to be worried about given how Call Porter handles it.