SMB’s Need an Effective Strategy for Their Call Centers

When it comes to inbound call centers, balance is key. Placing your phone number everywhere will increase calls but will not help sales. If you remove your contact information from your marketing you will decrease calls but may not be able to improve revenue. If you combine the right tools with an effective strategy your company can decrease inbound call center costs and increase sales.

Create Service Levels

One effective strategy for inbound calls is to create different levels of service. A premium-level customer call will be handled immediately, a medium level handled even after normal business hours. A standard level would have calls handled in the order they are received.

This will help your call center process incoming calls and will make your customers feel special when they are a part of the accelerated levels. Membership options are a good marketing technique, encouraging people to participate at the higher levels that cost more.

Phone Number Placement

You need to include the company’s phone number on your website and on marketing materials. People need to be able to reach you when they have questions or want to make a purchase. However, if you predominately display your number everywhere you may encourage people to call you with casual questions. This takes up your staff’s time without increasing sales.

Include your phone number on the contact page of your website. Then add it on your landing pages or with calls to action on your blog. This way you will provide interested customers with your number without increasing call volume unnecessarily.

Effective Strategy For Technology

There are website tools that can help people with questions without overburdening your call center. Chat apps and live person call plug-ins will leverage FAQs pages and social media service communication. Some people want to find their own answers, some want a salesperson to help them no matter what, and others only want help on occasion. A good mix of technology will cater to all of your customers and keep your call volume under control.

Effective Strategy For Sales Department Assistance

Studies have shown that when companies integrate sales and customer service tools, the marketing department becomes more efficient. Sometimes sales can increase by as much as 15%. The information from inbound call center interactions can indicate the need for support packages, additional products or cross-sell opportunities.

If you use different phone numbers for marketing campaigns you can use tracking metrics to determine the effectiveness of advertising and contact information placement. Your company can use 800 numbers for contacts that are in different stages of the sales pipeline. This will help your company ascertain conversion rates and strategies for attracting new customers.

Customers and potential customers need to be able to get in touch with you when necessary, yet your employees need to be able to work effectively. Creating an efficient inbound call center strategy will increase the chance that targeted leads contact you. Effective technology, phone number placement, and merging CRM and sales information will help your company determine which strategies are working for your company and which ones are not.

If your company has a high volume of sales calls or not enough leads, you should review your inbound marketing and call center strategies. To address these challenges, you can try to tweak your policies or you may want to consider outsourcing to an IT help desk company to lower inbound call center costs.