According to recent studies, nearly 4 out of 5 people calling into a small business who get voice mail do not leave a message. And it’s likely that this trend will only increase in the era of text and instant messaging features built into smart-phones.

Some of the psychological reasons that people don’t like to leave voice mails is that customers inherently understand that voice mail is not real-time, and not checked frequently. Yet we live in a world of increasing urgency where minutes today are the equivalent of tens of minutes in the pre-Internet age.

The other is that search engines have taught us that even for local businesses and professional services, competitors are just a mouse-click away. Rather than leave a voice mail and wait for a callback, many people will simply search for another vendor. Studies from Google and MarketingSherpa have shown this over and again.

For business owners as well, voice mail can be a hindrance. Honestly, who likes sifting through and listening to each voice mail message, scribbling down callback names and numbers,

having to hit the repeat button to clearly hear digits, and then to clear out the voice mail inbox?

IVR can help

An Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system can help funnel your calls so that customers who wish to speak to someone in sales can press, for example, [1] and have those calls forwarded to a cell phone (you probably don’t want to send those calls to voice mail), but those who have general inquiries such as directions or office hours can service themselves by pressing, say, [2].

Not only can such systems route the more urgent calls to the right person and phone number, but it also reduces the chances that someone looking for general information will abandon due to a voice mail greeting. For instance, if someone is calling to see if the local dentist down the block from their home is open on Saturdays, they could hear an option, “To hear our location and office hours, press 2,” instead of a general greeting—which gives them the opportunity to simply hang up and do a Google search for a dentist down the block from their office instead.

Think about sending your sales leads to an answering service off hours

A new trend in voice mail systems is speech to text translation. These systems attempt to convert the audio of a recorded message to text, sending you the message as an SMS or email. The problem is, with 80% of your callers hanging up when they hear the voice mail proompt, you’ve lost your sales lead. For the few that do leave a message, the accuracy of the translation leaves a lot to be desired.

That’s why Halloo came up with a new type of answering service, that you can subscribe to on demand. Send just your sales overflow to the Halloo live receptionist, or just your evening or weekend calls. You can prioritize your call routing to balance between cost and service level.

On-demand answering services like Halloo’s only charge a couple of dollars per answered call, so unless your product and service have razor thin margins (like the Dollar Store) think about making this investment. It’s easy to set-up and rarely does it not lead to positive ROI.