“Sorry no one is available to take your call right now, but if you....”
How often have you put down the phone at the sound of a recorded message?
The only time I want an answer machine are those rare occasions when I am making the call because I need to leave information and actually prefer not to speak to anyone. All other times I am calling because I DO want to speak to someone. Yet surprisingly, many businesses make it difficult for their customers to talk to them by relying too much on voicemail or automated call handling.
I recently spent over an hour on site with a business owner who wanted more customers while the phone rang repeatedly and callers were met by an answer machine. Despite my efforts to convince them that this was a constraint on their business they were adamant that people would call back. Well, some will, but plenty won’t. Meanwhile the business had no way of measuring how many new enquiries were being lost.
With modern communications there are plenty of ways for calls to be routed to a real person and many companies now offer “virtual assistants” who can handle calls and routine enquiries. If you want to segregate new enquiries from existing customers then allocate a separate phone number in your marketing material and instruct your virtual assistant to respond accordingly. And it means that you can accurately measure the number of new enquiries you get—which is the starting point for monitoring your sales performance...
So where is the bottleneck in your business?
Talk to us now and we will identify where small changes can make a big difference to your business!