If you believe that increasing sales require more (marketing) investment, you’re not alone. But you’re mistaken. The key is not a higher investment but smarter optimization of efforts. Most businesses fail to utilise their existing options completely, and depend on further investments to increase business sales.
One such example of an ‘unrealized way to increase sales is optimising your business calls (the current call volume).
Calls are potential business opportunities. If left unattended/unheard, you may miss on some valuable prospects.
Your current marketing budget could be sufficient to drive you your targeted number of leads but due to mismanagement of calls, you can end up losing potential leads. This is where work and efforts need to be put in.
Here’s how you can achieve it.
1. Save your business from missed calls
Answer the phone, every time!
Your missed calls are nothing less than missed business opportunities. Optimise them.
I understand, ensuring the answer to every call is difficult (thanks to your landline phone). Also, agents can’t be glued to their office desks round-the-clock to attend calls.
So what’s the solution here? A free virtual number.
The 10-digit toll free virtual number replaces the need for landline phones. It has multiple phone numbers mapped behind it. Calls are routed to the agent’s phone directly, eliminating the need to stick at a particular place to attend the customer calls. This brings mobility and ease for the agents to attend calls.
Hence, no missed calls >> no lost customers >> increase in business sales.
2. Get back to the missed ones.
You know what’s worse than unattended calls? Unattended customer queries.
If due to any reason your team misses its calls, no or delayed follow-up makes things worse.
Trust me when I say this, salespeople who don’t follow up are leaving a lot of money on the table.
I know, calling back is not the problem, getting the report of missed numbers is the real task.
Well, a landline phone can’t give you that report. But, a call management solution can.
It ensures timely Call Reporting along with your callers’ database. This further gives an insight about the business call volume viz. attended, received and missed calls. Therefore, this assists the agents in ensuring timely follow-up with potential customers on the missed numbers.
Hence, saving your ‘missed’ potential customers and resulting in increased sales for your business.
3. Reduce the on-hold duration
“Your call has been put on hold”― annoying, isn’t it?
Manually transferring the call from one agent to another while the caller awaits on-hold is definitely a deterrent. When the on-hold duration gets too long, most of the callers lose their patience and disconnect the call.
Let’s face it, we can’t expect our prospects to wait for so long to listen what we have to pitch them. We need them, not the vice-versa.
So, what’s the way out? 3 letters it is, I-V-R.
An Interactive Voice Response system is a telephony menu system that automatically attends and routes the calls to the agents. It has multiple agents/departments on its extension. Callers can automatically connect with their respective agent, basis their input in the telephonic menu.
It reduces the on-hold duration and helps in providing faster on-call resolution.
Therefore, this is how ‘press-1, press-2’ feature improves the customer calling experience, and can drive more sales for your business.
4. Get personalised and consistent
A lot of customers before conversion are frequent callers. Their experience at that time impacts their chances of getting converted or being churned outrightly. Herein few things are often noticed during on-call interactions, which push the leads towards getting churned:
- Making the callers repeat their issue several times
- Breaking the consistency by connecting them with different agent each time
- Asking for their details every time they call
Such things serve as a major turn-off for the callers, resulting in their displeasure and frustration.
Evidently, 33% of the customers get frustrated because they need to repeat their issues to multiple representatives.
How to avoid this for your valuable leads?
- Sticky agents: This ensures that a particular caller is connected with the respective agent every time they contact your business number.
- CRM integration: Integrating a CRM with the call management solution and cloud call center solution shows all the caller-related details to the agents in one window.
Hence, it ensures an upgraded calling experience, just the way your prospects expect.
5. Monitor (record) your customer conversations
At times, callers are mistreated by the agents on call. Be it with their rude tone, giving inaccurate resolutions, or charging unnecessarily.
This conveys a poor brand impression and obviously obstructs the callers from dealing with your business further. Not only this, it even results in negative word-of-mouth referrals among your potential customers.
Apparently, 13% of unsatisfied customers/callers will tell to 15 or even more people that they are unhappy.
Realising how this would be impacting your business sales?
Save the horror with Call Recording. Monitor your agent-customer conversation with their recorded calls. Keep a check on your customer queries and the way your agents handle them. Leverage required improvements, if any.
This is how recording and monitoring will improve your customer support quality, and your sales figures too.
Look at it this way, you can always get more leads with heavy marketing expenditure. But, isn’t it ideal to make the smarter efforts by optimising the existing leads’ calls first? You should be sure that you’re not losing on any potential customer (call) coming from your existing marketing investment.
Now, if that sounds like something you’d benefit from, start managing and optimizing your business calls with a Call Center Software Management System or pair it with financial management software to streamline every aspect of your business operations today
