It’s about last week at work, I thought of meeting my friends from sales.
They were expressing how wrong numbers usually annoy them; times when they come across real ‘tough’ customers; and of course some hilarious incidents.
Few statements later, we drove towards real conversation about dealing with business owners, especially the startups when discussing call management or cloud telephony. They had more or less similar things to say about their experiences with startup clients and the kind of questions they put.
However, there was one question I noticed stood common amongst all.
“I own a startup, do I really need to manage my calls?”
I was keen to know what and how the sales agents answer to it. Our discussion went further while I tended to explore the reasons (actual answers) to that one question.
If you’re having the same question in your mind right now, here I am with real reasons on why a startup should really manage its daily business calls.
Reason #1: You have to sound professional to customers
When we think startups, diverse images flash in our minds. Say startups operating from a small office, some from a co-working space, or some just making business on-the-go.
However, irrespective of their operating location, startups have to ensure they sound professional and credible whenever they talk with prospects/customers. And, the way how startups communicate conveys everything about the two.
So, making your calls and communication work for you becomes the need-of-the-hour.
How do I do it?
With an IVR.
It is a telephone system that allows a recorded voice to interact with your callers and route your calls to the right department/agent. It ensures:
- customized welcome greeting
- convenience to speak with the right person directly
- real-time on-call resolutions
Reason #2: You cannot afford to blindly invest in marketing
Performing marketing is on priority list of startups. But then, cost and effectiveness are always a matter of concern. Aren’t they?
They are worrisome due to ‘untracked’ marketing (something which most businesses do). They remain unaware of their marketing ROI in terms of which sources are most ripe and bring in maximum customer calls, and which ones are just rotting with passing days.
Consequently, ending up in unworthy marketing investments.
How to avoid this?
Call tracking is the key.
It lets you know the source of your incoming calls (eg. PPC, SMM, email, or offline) and help you decipher which campaign/source yielded best results.
Having all the facts clear, call tracking empowers you to make lucrative decisions and craft better marketing strategies.
Reason #3: Every call is important. You cannot miss any.
Most of the investment and struggle startups go through are aimed at attracting customer calls and draw business from them. However once they start getting calls, they fail to cater to each and end up missing innumerable calls.
As a habit, whether after working hours, on holidays, or while attending other customer calls, startups miss a volume of calls which actually were real sources of business opportunities.
How to prevent further loss?
Deploy a Call Management System.
It makes all your missed, attended and follow up call logs accessible to you.
Through deeply analyzed call reports, it helps the teams to handle calls responsibly and the owners to monitor teams’ performance closely.
Reason #4: You should be growth ready
Startup means business with growth. Once running, they scale at an unprecedented level.
Increase in number of calls from customers is a significant metric depicting growth. Hence, the faster startups grow, the closer they reach to need of scalability.
At this point, startups have to become growth ready as 10 customer calls today may become 100 calls tomorrow.
How do I make it possible?
With a virtual business number.
It has multiple phone numbers mapped behind it. These numbers are capable of tracking and handling any volume of call traffic without abandoning your customer calls.
Through call hopping, calls get connected to the agents’ mobile phones as per their availability. Hence, empowering you to attend multiple customers calls, whether 10, 100, or 1000, without a miss.
Reason #5: Call logs + CRM = Everything
Be for daily work processing or for effective task/performance monitoring, automation always proves a good deed for businesses.
That phase when startups have already adopted automation, say automation of customer calls and communication, they discover its benefits in other related operations too, viz. sales, support, customer experience.
Herein, startups seek integration solutions to make use of their call data everywhere as an add-on and enhancement for business operations.
How to make it work?
CRM integration it is.
It integrates your customer call data with your existing CRM and brings ease to related activities like understanding lead status, seeing agent’s pipeline, and on-call activities all in one window. Together this facilitates:
- automation of sales and support processing
- personalised view of all leads information
- increased employee efficiency
To summarise, managing business calls implies ‘optimisation’ of business calls. This in return lays the foundation of winning customer relationships alongside simplified business operations.
MyOperator understands where you are and remembers what it’s like to be when just starting out. That’s why we’ve created MyOperator for Startups, an initiative to help budding entrepreneurs like you ‘optimize’ their customer calls and make your startup grow faster.
