My small business was growing in almost every way imaginable. Every way except the bottom line, that is. My company primarily does business over the phone, with over ninety percent of our sales coming across our telephone lines. When our call volume started to increase late last year, I hired several new employees to man our existing phone system. We updated our computer software, desktops and server to make order processing substantially smoother. We redesigned our website for easy navigation and ordering for internet customers. We even integrated our shipping department to handle an increase in orders. The phones were ringing off the hook several times throughout the day as our business increased, and we started to see a slight shift in the right direction for our profits. Still, I wondered if we were losing calls because of a lack of response time.
Our phone system simply routed incoming calls to any available phone. If no one was available, the customer would hear the phone ring until someone eventually picked up or until they got tired of waiting. I decided to have a trunk study performed, which is a method of finding out how many calls we were losing for not...