First impressions count. The experience you provide over the phone to your prospective clients builds a picture of the service they can come to expect when working with you. Putting your best foot forward means your customers are more likely to come back, and if the experience is great, they are likely to recommend your services to people within their professional and private networks.
That’s why quality call management practices are so important – particularly if your business receives a high volume of calls.
5 tips for handling your business calls
Here are some ways you can provide a great customer service, and be more efficient using call management technology.
1. Provide professional messaging when your customers are on hold
Being put on hold can be a pain point for your customers, which isn’t helped by repetitive elevator music or a looping voiceover. Your customers’ time is precious, so rather that playing a looped message, you can get creative with the content you deliver with on-hold platforms like Captivate Connect.
Best-of-breed on hold messaging keeps your customers entertained by never starting from the same position each time and has daily updated content like news, weather, on this day and sports blended in with your own business messages.
New on-hold technology also means you can provide a more interactive experience to your customers. If you typically have long wait times, why not offer them an interactive jukebox to choose the genre of music they are listening to. Or, you can even include a way for your customers to enter their mobile number to receive information via SMS on the product or service your on-hold message just spoke about. With these options, you can use your customer’s time in a way that not only benefits your business, but also makes your customer feel like their time isn’t being wasted either.
2. Review your customers’ experience
Modern call management platforms can turn your client conversations into valuable data. Tools like these can analyse calls to identify key contact drivers, flag emerging problems, determine customers’ sentiment and even produce transcripts of calls.
Call recording tech like CallN and Dubber includes features that can record and transcribe every conversation, and monitor sentiment to identify whether calls are positive or negative. With these features, specific words can be flagged – an invaluable tool from a compliance perspective to ensure that certain disclaimers are being read. From a sales perspective, you can deep dive into your team conversations to see how often certain promotions are being mentioned to your customers. These tools help you improve the quality of client interactions through feedback and coaching.
3. Leverage call accounting
Call accounting platforms like CALLN and Tollring, analyse all use of the phone platform and generate reports which your business can use to improve productivity, match staffing to client demand, measure effectiveness of campaigns and even link to your accounting platform, to ensure no billable time is lost in professional service industries such as law and accounting – even when the client calls your team directly on their company Telstra mobiles.
4. Consider outsourcing
Depending on the volume of calls your business receives, staff capacity for answering calls, or whether your call volume fluctuates without warning, it may be a good idea to consider outsourcing to an answering service. These call centre services can take all your inbound calls, or simply support you only when you have overflow.
5. Implement the right technology
With so many tools to choose from, it’s important to find a solution that’s right for your business type and size. Call management technologies should help improve internal efficiency and productivity, and ultimately improve your bottom line.
Call centre services for small businesses
The average call centre team in Australia contains only 5-8 staff, so never feel you are too small to require call centre features, such as call queuing or a dashboard to see call statics in real time. When you’re considering solutions to implement in your business, think about the number of calls you receive, the average duration of calls, the number of operators you have, your plans for future growth, and your budget. The productivity improvements, client experience and business insights gained, demonstrate a great return on investment.
Let’s uncover the right solutions for your business
At TBTC Perth South, we partner with a range of call management vendors so that we can provide recommendations that are tailored to your business goals. Our technology advisors are here to help you find the right solution for your business. Let’s talk.
