MarketingVOX: Eight of 10 Americans have little patience for merchants who don’t answer the phone.
For the key demographic for most home and professional services (adults 35-44) that figure rises to nearly 88 percent, according to a study conducted in August for FastCall411 by Synovate, writes MarketingCharts.
The implications of the study, according to Richard Rosen, founder and CEO of FastCall411, are two:
- “Voice mail, answering machines, unreturned calls, and unanswered ringing will send your customer straight to a competitor.”
- “The message to online local directories is equally clear: clean up your list. Your users have no patience with online searches that turn up six bad, disconnected or wrong numbers out of every 10.”
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According to the survey, four out of five Americans (82 percent) regard “immediate availability” by phone as an “important” or the “most important” consideration in selecting a local service provider (e.g., plumber, locksmith):
- 28 percent overall described immediate availability as the “most important” factor – 31 percent of women, 25 percent of men.
- 54 percent described immediate availability as “important, but other factors matter almost as much” – men more than women (57 percent to 51 percent).
- 13 percent of the sample said “other factors may be more important” – cited equally by men and women.
MarketingCharts provides additional findings, including those related to age, income and race.
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