Why is it important to used personalized greeting?

You always feel good when you are welcomed politely and courteously. Don’t you? And it’s the same for others too.

For a business, it’s crucial to look professional and make the customers feel valued at the same time. And greeting the inbound customers cordially can help businesses achieve that. 🏆

But things get different while greeting customers in person and through a phone call. Managing consistency in phone calls can often be challenging.

With customized phone greetings for incoming calls and voicemails, you can maintain uniformity. It also saves you from the trouble of answering all the calls to maintain a good customer experience.

🔑 KEY POINTS

• Custom phone greeting is a game changer for a business that receive a ton of calls every day.
• Having personalized greeting messages can help to improve your customer experience.
• KrispCall stands out by providing a free and flexible custom greeting feature.

But what is this customized greeting, and how exactly does it help? Let’s head over to the answers. 👇

What are Custom Phone Greetings for businesses?

Customer phone greetings are the recorded audio that plays automatically when a customer calls on your number. You can set the timing and conditions on when to play these kinds of messages. You can set it for all the calls you receive on your phone or just the away message when you are unavailable.

Based on the telephony you choose; custom messages can be set in a number of ways. You can set it up by uploading a pre-recorded audio clip or giving text inputs, which the telephony converts into speech.

Customized greeting messages can help you convey messages to the customers without putting in much effort. It also prevents the need for dedicated personnel just to answer the calls and deliver the information. At the same time, it gives your business a more professional look.

Here is an example of custom phone greetings for business:

“Hello and thank you for calling [Your Company Name]. We’re here to assist you. For sales, press 1; customer support, press 2; company information, press 3. For all other inquiries or to speak with an operator, press 0. Your call is important to us, and we appreciate your business.”

What are the key benefits of Customized Phone Greetings?

A greeting message may look like a simple pre-recorded audio playback, but the benefit of greetings are pretty huge. Some of the key benefits of having customized phone greetings are mentioned below:

1. Sound Professional and Make a Good First Impression

You may have a small business with congested office space. Your business can even be in turmoil and struggling to keep up. But when a customer calls you, they shouldn’t necessarily know all these details.

Instead of depicting mediocrity, you can sound confident and professional with customized greeting messages. No matter the type, size, and condition of the business, a personalized message helps to portray a professional image amongst the customers.

Also, through customized phone greetings, you can share information or convey a message. So, whenever a customer makes a call, they will get the information right away. And that’s always better than having the calls not answered.

So having personalized greeting messages can help to improve your customer experience. And if it’s good and welcoming, it also helps to create a good impression on your callers.

2. Efficient and Cost Saving

When you launch a new product or run a sales campaign, you will probably receive spikes in call volume. Most of such calls contain queries regarding the new product or your sales campaign.

If you have a small company with limited staff, you may have to hire new employees to address such calls. But answering all of such calls and providing the same information repetitively is no fun at all.

According to a survey, 60% of all incoming calls are less important than the work they interrupt. So answering every call you receive may not be fruitful after all.

Instead, you can set up a custom greeting message providing all the basic information about it. So whenever a lead makes a call, they will get the information right away.

As this feature is already available with the telephony services, you won’t have to pay extra for it. Also, it avoids the need to hire new staff to handle the call surge. So, with custom phone greetings, you can ensure efficient utilization of resources and greater cost savings.

3. Provide Essential Information Right Away

Customers hate to wait. But it’s not always possible to promptly answer customer calls. However, with customized phone greetings, you can give the basics about your company and its services right away.

If customers reach out to your business after office hours or during the holidays, you can inform your callers about your unavailability. You can also request them to leave a voicemail if you can commit to answering them later.

If you have different departments within the company, you can set up auto attendant or IVR alongside the custom phone greetings. So, by pressing a suitable button on their keypad, they can reach the right department straight away.

What are the types of Custom Phone Messages?

Based on the use cases, you can set up the following types of custom greeting messages on your business phone.

1. Welcome Greeting

Welcome message is the first message you hear when you call a business. If you hear messages like “Thank you for calling” followed by the company’s name, it’s probably a welcome greeting. This kind of message helps the callers to confirm that they’ve dialed the right number.

2. Interactive Voice Response (IVR) Greeting

If the destination number has incorporated IVR, they will hear these kinds of messages. IVR greetings give a glimpse of their phone tree, mentioning the numbers associated with each department.

Some of the most used scripts for IVR greeting messages look like this:

1. Press 1 for “English”, Presione 2 para “Español”
2. If you know the extension of the person you would like to reach, you may dial it any time. Otherwise, press 1 for Finance, 2 for Sales, 3 for Technical, and 0 for Customer Care.

3. Routing to Available Agents Greeting

You can hear these kinds of messages when the call is routed to a different agent. This kind of message alerts the callers about the transition. It also helps them understand that their call is being taken seriously, and their queries will ultimately be answered.

4. Waiting Message

While making a call, callers want to get their queries answered right away. But it’s not always possible to answer all the calls promptly. So sometimes, they are to be put on a waiting list.

Being put in a queue can be frustrating. But what’s even frustrating is not knowing how long you will have to wait up. With a call waiting message, you can let the callers know that your agents are currently busy, and their calls will be answered in a short while.

5. Delay Announcement

The purpose of the waiting message is to stall the caller for a while and get back to them when the ongoing call is over. But sometimes, the call waiting queue can be long. And sometimes, the ongoing calls can go longer than you expected.

Waiting in a line feels like an eternity. And that’s more or less so with phone calls.

The waiting message can hold the callers in the line for a while. But if there is no feedback from your side, they will hang up eventually.

To avoid that, you can set up a delay announcement message. The delay announcement message alerts the callers in the queue they have to wait a little longer. Callers in the waiting queue can hear this kind of message every two minutes.

6. Full Waiting Queue Message

Sometimes, you may face a high volume of calls filling in all the call waiting slots. In such cases, you can alert your callers that your call waiting queue is full.

But letting go of such hard-earned leads just like that may not be fruitful for your business in the long run. So, in addition to alerting the callers about the call waiting queue being full, you can also tell them about your alternative contact details.

Giving an email address or encouraging them to chat to the online support on your website would be a better option. You can also encourage them to leave a message informing them that the concerned agent will get back to them when available.

7. Voicemail Message

A lot of important leads can slip through your fingers when you are unavailable. It can be due to connectivity issues or if the callers dial you outside of your office hours.

When done right, you can capitalize on such calls as well. With an engaging voicemail greeting message, you can encourage the callers to leave you a message through the voicemail.

Through the voicemail greeting, you can also promise to get back to them after receiving their messages. Such promises will assure the callers that their messages won’t go in vain and will be addressed eventually.

8. Outside Business Hours

To address the outside business hours calls, you can set up these kinds of messages. Through outside business hours messages, you can inform the callers about your working days and official business hours.

Such messages come in handy to request the callers to leave you a message through voicemail or call back again during business/working hours.

9. Maximum Wait Time Reached Message

When the caller waits for you for the maximum time, they can hear this kind of message. For such callers, you can request them to hang up the call and call back again.

4 elements of a great professional phone greeting

If you want to set up a professional phone greeting that works great with your callers, there are a few things to keep in mind. The essential elements of a professional phone greeting are discussed below.

1. Information

If you are setting up a custom greeting message, you should necessarily keep all the information your call might need. You shouldn’t skimp on important information like your company name, office hours, etc.

If you have recently launched a new product or sales campaign, you should give information about it right away. Also, needless to mention that you’ll have to provide information about the numbers and the associated department if you have implemented IVR or auto attendant feature.

2. Acknowledgment

A professional greeting always acknowledges customer effort. So it’s essential to thank the caller for making the call. And for some reason, if you cannot answer their calls, you need to apologize for missing it. Adding a tone of gratitude or regret makes a good professional impression on the callers.

3. Motivation

The message in your greeting should be good enough to motivate the callers to listen to your message. For that to happen, you need to start with a compelling opening line.

4. Length

Time is valuable. Customers don’t have all day to answer your greetings. So to make your greeting effective, you need to make it short, concise, and full of information.

Send customized phone greetings with KrispCall

Handling the customer calls is essential for a good user experience and maintaining a professional brand image. But during peak call times, answering every call might not be feasible. And ignoring excess calls can lead to a negative impression and a loss of potential leads.

However, by setting up customized phone greetings, you can make up for your unavailability. But not all telephony services offer this feature conveniently, and some may charge a heavy price for it.

But things are rather different with KrispCall. KrispCall stands out by providing a free and flexible custom greeting feature. Whether it’s for greetings, call holds, waiting, or voicemail, users can upload unique pre-recorded audio or convert text to speech.

KrispCall’s cloud telephony includes features like IVR, Automatic Call Distribution, and skill-based routing. all available in a budget-friendly package starting at $12/user/month.

If you are a first-time user, you can try it out without spending a penny. KrispCall is also offering a free demo.

Arun Chaudhary

Arun is SEO Analyst at KrispCall. He has written in extensively in the field of cloud telephony and call center solutions.

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The poet Maya Angelou once said, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel”.  In a school setting, the words of Maya Angelou greatly resonate with many of the day-to-day routines, including how we greet others. The way we start our interactions—through words and actions—can reveal a number of characteristics about us, such as our cultural or geographical background, comfort level, and interest in learning about others. Greetings can also help us build new connections with others and strengthen bonds, especially when we make sure that the other person knows they are important to us. 

In a classroom setting, personal greetings play an important role in creating a positive learning climate. Studies have shown that the way teachers greet students can influence student engagement level and behavior in class. According to one study, the effects of a personal greeting can be noticed within the first 10 minutes of instruction time (Allday and Pakurar 2007). When students receive personal recognition before class, they have been shown to engage in academic instruction and display on-task behavior more quickly than when they do not receive the same attention from their teacher (Allday et al 2011; Allday and Pakurar 2007; Weinstein et al. 2009).  Even in the postsecondary setting, implementing personal greetings were found to increase performance on quiz grades by almost 30% (Weinstein 2009). Greeting students with a personal recognition can also aid in building an atmosphere that fosters safe and supportive environments for students from different cultures and gender identities who may face discrimination outside of school (Dubois & Losoff, n.d; Alrubail, 2014). Particularly for transgender and gender non-conforming students, the recognition of their preferred social name is a key element in expressing support and acceptance of who they are (Dubois 2014; Lev & Alie 2012).

There are several ways to use the power of a personal greeting to strengthen bonding with your students and improve your classroom’s climate. Before implementing a greeting routine to the start of the day, take time to learn students’ names. Consider learning the pronunciations of names and learning social names that some students prefer to be named.  This task can feel overwhelming, given the number of students one encounters on a daily basis, however there are plenty of resources available to help you and your students will greatly appreciate your efforts for years to come.