Only 60% of Businesses Answer Phone On First Call

“You never get a second chance to make a good first impression.” - Will Rogers

The secret to a successful business isn’t a secret: provide excellent customer service in every interaction, starting with the customer’s first point of contact. As a result, our team at Expertise.com was surprised to find that nearly 40% of businesses failed to answer their phone during regular business hours.

Mystery shopping is a core part of our selection process. To ensure that the businesses we list provide high-quality customer service, we call each of them up and ask the typical questions a consumer would want answered when hiring a company.

Our mystery shoppers grade businesses across four key criteria:

• Responsiveness: how easy is it to get a hold of someone to talk to at this business?

• Friendliness: what is it like talking to this person? Are they polite and welcoming?

• Helpfulness: how accommodating are they in answering questions about services? /referral e.g.

• Expertise/Detail: how thorough are they when answering questions?

After 5-10 minutes of conversation, we have a good idea of what it would be like to work with this particular attorney or that particular company.

In order for us — and consumers — to figure out if this company is someone we’d like to hire, we actually need to talk to them first.

Between September 2020 and January 2021, Expertise.com's mystery shopping team made 41,293 initial calls to providers in seven legal and home service categories. Of those, businesses only picked up 25,147 times on the first attempt — or 60.52% of the time.

Personal injury attorneys were by far the easiest to contact; two out of every three firms we called answered their phones on the first try. On the other end of the spectrum, roofing companies were the most difficult to reach; only half of those we contacted answered.

All of these industries rely on new customers contacting them. So what’s driving low call rates?