What I learned about effective phone greetings from analyzing 10,000 calls

How much do customer service phone greetings really matter? It turns out they matter a lot. New research reveals phone greetings have a big impact on the rest of the call.

Here are two examples from real calls. Try to imagine which greeting gives the call a better start.

Example 1: "Thank you for calling, where every day is a great and wonderful day. My name is Joy. How can I make your day great and wonderful today?"

Example 2: "Hi, this is Becky in Boise. Who do I have the pleasure of speaking with?"

The second example clearly wins. The first greeting is weirdly clunky, as if it was written by someone who doesn't actually talk on the phone.

The second greeting feels more genuine. You immediately feel like this will be a conversation, not an interrogation. Becky is here to help.

Your boss probably wants more proof before your greeting gets changed.

That's why I partnered with Prosodica, a voice analytics firm, to analyze over 10,000 customer service phone calls. Our goal was to identify how greetings affected the rest of the call.

It turns, Becky in Boise was on to something big.

About the phone greeting study

Prosodica used its proprietary AI software to review 10,005 inbound customer service calls from four clients. The companies represented a diverse set of industries: business financing, apparel, telecommunications and plumbing.

The data answered two questions:

1. Do certain greetings improve first call resolution?
2. How do greetings affect call duration (a.k.a. talk time)?

First call resolution was measured by analyzing call transcripts and each customer's contact history. A call was marked fully resolved if the customer indicated on the call they felt the issue was fully resolved and they didn't call back a second time.

The human-supervised AI software examined the start of each call to identify how the customer service agent greeted the customer.

Results of the phone greeting study

The most impactful greetings asked for the customer's name at the start of the call. This type of greeting correlated with positive results in three areas:

• First contact resolution: 12% higher
• Call escalations: 11% lower
• Unresolved issues: 33% lower

Exchanging names at the start of the call is the first step towards building rapport. This helps customers relax and become more open to the agent's assistance.

An earlier study of in-person greetings showed that warm, friendly greetings produce a physical change in customer demeanor. Customers relaxed their body language and were more likely to smile.

Prosodica's data also revealed a potential trade-off between asking customers for their name at the start of the call and talk time. Asking for names correlated with lowered average talk time in two industries while talk time increased in two others.

Financing: 3% lower

Telecom: .4 % lower

Apparel: 8.3% higher

Plumbing: 13.5% higher

A more granular analysis is required to understand the relationship between greetings and talk time. While this was beyond the scope of the study, the data suggests that it could depend on the industry and company.

For instance, the plumbing company's higher talk time was at least partially explained by a high percentage of unresolved calls (16.3% vs. the study average of 8.9%). These are calls where the customer received no resolution to their issue, not even a partial one. The plumbing company's unresolved calls were 50% shorter than average, and 99% of those unresolved calls started with greetings where the agent did not ask the customer for their name.