Category: Inbound Calling

Is your business in need of more inbound calls to your call center representatives? Are you unsure of the inner workings of how pay-per-call lead generation works? Are you operating an inbound call center that doesn’t have the time and resources to expand into cold calling? Are you still wondering, “What is a warm transfer?”

Then HyperTarget Marketing may be the solution your call center business is looking for. This article will discuss some of the most pressing questions about pay-per-call lead generation, as well as other methods for generating inbound calls to your call center agents. Keep reading to find out more.

What Is Pay-Per-Call?

Pay-per-call is a lead generation solution for generating inbound calls to your call center employees. Your business pays an agreed-upon sum for each inbound call generated through our marketing and advertising streams.

There are several ways to bring inbound calls to your call center, including both customer and call center initiated methods.

Consumer-Initiated Methods:

• Mobile Search: This is inbound traffic generated from Google search results. This may include other search engine campaigns depending on the type of traffic you are looking for.
• Mobile Display: Theseare banner ads created with a call to action, prompting customers to pick up the phone and dial one of your call center agents.
• Email Marketing: This istraffic created through email newsletters and advertisements. It includes a call to action to your potential customers to contact an agent directly.
• SMS Messaging: Text messages can also include a telephone number to call your inbound contact center.

Agent-Initiated Methods:

• Live Agent Transfers: These are also known as warm transfers.
• Cold Call Follow-Up: This is when an agent calls a lead who has not yet committed to an idea of what they want or has requested more time to think about their buying options.

Please keep reading to find out more about what a warm transfer is and how they boost your contact center’s inbound call volume. 

What Is a Warm Transfer?

A warm transfer is often initiated by a call center agent, a third-party call center agent, or a consumer. The majority of warm transfers are initiated by a call center agent. That agent will then start contact with a potential customer by calling them.

This is known as an outbound call. An outbound calling service provides trained agents to contact pre-screened customers. They will discuss a product or service with a customer before transferring them to your contact center.

Outbound specialist agents take the time to ensure that a customer is ready to buy your product or service. They make sure a lead has time to continue talking on the phone before they make a transfer to one of your agents. Your agent then closes the sale and ends the call.

This method of warm transferring calls will increase sales for your contact center employees. 

What Is a Click-to-Call Service?

A click-to-call marketing service is a different form of generating calls through the pay-per-call method. This method requires the consumer to initiate contact by clicking on a phone number within an email or advertisement they have seen. Then they will make a phone call to your contact center using a smartphone.

Potential customers may see a telephone number within a search engine advertisement, website banner, email newsletter, or even a text message.

How Do You Generate Click-to-Call Leads?

A click-to-call lead gets initiated by a consumer who picks up their mobile phone and clicks on a phone number that directs their call to your contact center. An inbound call gets created.

Advertising and marketing for click-to-call methods include the consumer-initiated contact methods mentioned under the first section of this article. They are mobile search, mobile display, email marketing, and SMS text messaging. 

Why Are Warm Transfer Leads the Best for Your Business?

The main factors that make warm transfer leads the best leads for your business are the following:

• Pre-screening
• Consistent outreach
• No charges for disconnects or hang-ups

Let’s take a closer look at each one of these factors.

The Pre-Screening Process

A warm transfer lead will be well qualified and pre-screened before they get sent to one of your call center agents. Whether they are contacted by an agent or targeted by well-placed advertisements and emails – they are being transferred to your agents because they are ready to finish the conversation. They have been well educated about their options and are prepared to make the final purchase of your product or service.

Consistent Outreach

Sometimes a lead needs to be contacted several times before a sale is likely to be completed. A pay-per-call service agent will contact a potential lead three, four, or more times before that lead is ready to collaborate with them.

Rest assured that your contact center saves valuable time receiving warm transfers prepared to buy. The chances of that warm transfer becoming a final sale are increased.

No Charges for Disconnects or Hang-Ups

The right pay-per-call service provider will ensure that your final expenses do not include disconnected calls or hang-ups. Know that your money is not getting lost each time due to a call getting disconnected or a lead hanging up because they are no longer interested. 

Drive High-Quality Inbound Leads to Your Call Center

HyperTarget marketing understands that your business wants to receive high-quality, pay-per-call inbound leads. They often outperform pay-per-click leads. Yet, we thought you should understand your business’s many options before working with our expert team.

With over 20 years of combined experience with inbound marketing, online marketing, mobile marketing, and traditional media – we know how effective each campaign is for your specific call center needs. You no longer need to ask, “What is a warm transfer?”

Contact us today, and let us help you generate the high-quality leads your business deserves. Don’t forget to connect with us on social media and continue to read other articles in our informative marketing blog.

Sales jobs have up to twice the turnover rate compared to other industries—why?

It’s simple: people don’t enjoy many aspects of the job. 

Outbound calls are a huge hurdle for a lot of sales workers. It leads to unhappy employees, especially if they’re cold calling, and it brings down the morale of your reps in general. When you have unhappy employees, you start losing money. 

Warm transfers can be your next solution. 

We’ve got five crucial things you need to know about warm transfers so you can save money, keep employees (and customers), and generate more business.

1. What Is a Warm Transfer?

Warm transferring is basically filtering your phone calls by having a front-end person speak with people calling in before allowing them to be forwarded to a sales representative or another worker. This allows the front-end person to qualify the caller and send the sales-ready leads to your sales representatives. 

While some warm transfer systems might not look exactly like that, it’s the basic structure of every warm transfer process—leads are being qualified and/or filtered before getting through. This has a direct impact on how happy your customers and employees are. 

You might have heard of blind transfers, but there is a difference between warm and blind transfers. You can read more about the differences here. 

Some companies are embracing the warm transfer shift, but others are still on the fence. However, there are compelling reasons for introducing warm transfers into your sales process. In fact, it’s going to cost you not to. 

2. Warm Transfers Make for Happier Employees

The majority of employees hate cold calling. Think about it: who would genuinely want to be on the receiving end of constant hang-ups or annoyed people? It’s not appealing, and it deters people from sales jobs often.

On top of that, one negative or annoyed customer can put your employees in a funk for the rest of the day. That can impact productivity, which is going to cause you money in the long run. It can also impact the company culture, which is already a delicate part of any company.

With warm transfers, that job stressor will go away. Your employees won’t have to worry about calling and hustling people, and your workspace will continue thriving. One of the hardest things to do is create a great company culture, especially when the job has tasks that are bound to be negative. Warm transfers can solve all of that for your company. 

3. Warm Transfers Save You in Operating Costs

There are a lot of things that are included in operating costs, and part of that is productivity. Besides making your employees happier, you’re creating more productivity by keeping as positive an atmosphere that you can.

Sometimes this isn’t easy, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth it. Small breaks are typically needed to ‘reset’ whenever there’s a negative experience. Cold calling often means a lot of time on the phone that’s negative, and so frequent breaks are mentally required.

If your employees aren’t cold calling, then they don’t need a 5-minute break every thirty minutes. They’ll be able to continue working, and they’ll be much happier about it at the same time. It’s a win-win situation for you and your employees. 

4. Warm Transfers Provide a Better Customer Experience

Happy, motivated employees lead to happy, fulfilled customers. Warm transfers are the number one way to do that in your sales departments.

If there’s anything more frustrating than cold calling people, it’s seeing an employee lose a sale because of a negative attitude. It’s an endless cycle for a lot of people, and warm transfers can break that and bring you more customers because of it.

When people buy something, they want to feel special—and you want them to feel happy because they’re doing business with you. Disgruntled employees are going to lose you money because of negative job aspects. 

On top of that, customers never have to jump through hoops with warm transfers. Voicemail trees are too common in the world today, and having prospects jump through hoops to talk to you isn’t helping your business. 

5. Warm Transfers Are a Staffing Solution

Warm transfers free up a lot of time for your employees. While you don’t want to overwork your employees or change things so drastically that people get upset, you can reasonably expect them to spend their time working differently.

Without cold calling, your employees can focus on the hottest leads. That’s going to bring in more money than cold calling ever will, and you won’t have to hire new employees just to handle the workload of onboarding processes or demo presentations.

On top of that, warm transfers make happier employees that want to stay. You’ll decrease your turnover rates, which results in you spending less money hiring and training new employees. On average, it costs about $2,000 to train one employee. Instead of needing to staff and train more often, implement warm transfers.

How You Can Outsource Cold Calling

The good news? Introducing warm transfers into your processes is easy. In fact, you can outsource your cold calling by partnering with HyperTarget Marketing!

With PPC Lead Generation, we’ll run marketing campaigns and gather leads for cold calling for you. People are comfortable with calling and chatting about services and products, but that doesn’t make them qualified leads. That’s where we can come in and help!

If you have any questions or would like to learn more about how you can introduce warm transfers to your team, contact us anytime.

Only 33% of consumers believe they use AI-enabled technology. In truth, 77% use an AI-powered service or device.

AI and machine learning, as well as bots, are quickly becoming ubiquitous. Some believe it is only a matter of time before they fully replace customer service representatives.

But customer service has evolved with technology trends to become something new. Customer experience (CX) is now the most competitive space among brands. Most companies recognize that creating an invaluable customer experience is the best way to differentiate themselves.

This has spurred immense investments into AI. AI is now being used to augment messaging, route support inquiries, and help with call lead generation.

But AI is still in its infancy. It’s useful, but the customer’s experience still depends on the human touch.

Here are 8 reasons to make it easy for customers to talk to a person while leveraging AI.

1. Customers Still Want to Talk to a Person

61% of mobile users call a business when they’re in the purchase phase of a buying cycle. 57% of those do so to talk to a person.

It’s not that AI and automation don’t serve a purpose. They’re excellent at diagnosing common problems and answering frequently asked questions. But nothing can replace the trust that’s built between a customer and a representative during a phone call.

AI can be leveraged as a chat feature on your website, for example. You can even use an automated answering tool for incoming phone calls. But you don’t want machines to be the face of your brand.

2. Customer Complaints Are Best Handled by Humans

If a customer calls or messages because they have a complaint, AI can exacerbate the problem. Instead of speaking to a human who can address their problem directly, they must first get through the barrier of a bot or automated messaging system.

It should be easy for a customer or client to speak with a representative at the touch of a button.

A human can listen to the customer and acknowledge the problem. They can do a better job of assessing the facts and providing a solution.

But most importantly, a human can work to bridge the divide between your brand and your customer. Than can become that customer’s advocate.

3. Humans Can Make Exceptions

Building a remarkable customer experience is all in the details. Often, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to help clients and customers. When customers have special requests, it takes a human to address them.

Take a simple e-commerce transaction as an example. What if the customer wanted to return an item but had a family emergency and didn’t get a chance to until after it was too late?

An automated system may not be able to address this situation. But a human would clearly empathize with the customer. They’d be able to override the system and process the return.

4. Humans Can Understand Context

In the past, when a business received a phone call, there was no telling who was on the other end of the line. It could have been a supplier, a current customer, or even a fresh lead.

As AI advances, it becomes more useful in segmenting leads, prospects, and customers. But AI still can’t understand context the way a human can.

Part of delivering an excellent customer experience is personalizing every interaction based on context. You need to know where that caller is in their buying cycle, what their needs are, and other information. This goes beyond demographic information; you need to know that person’s goals and pain points.

You need to know what a day in their life is like.

Automation and AI are useful for serving up this information to humans. But ultimately, it’s a human who must synthesize that information and make a connection.

5. There Needs to Be a Hand Off

AI can be a useful tool for inbound marketing. It removes many of the manual processes that take up time, like segmenting leads. It can even tell you what to write your next blog post about.

More and more, AI and automation are being used at customer touch points. There’s clearly a benefit to this, but there needs to a seamless handoff from machine to human.

Furthermore, it needs to be evident to each lead, prospect, or customer that they are interacting with a machine.

Chatbots are the main culprit in this regard. Many businesses use chatbots, but they don’t always make their chatbots declare themselves. Instead, they put up a generic photo of a “customer service representative” and force visitors to wade through their AI before they can speak to a human.

Make sure your customers always know when they’re speaking to a bot and when they’re speaking to a human. Make it easy for them to switch between the two.

6. AI Can’t Close the Deal

Buying a product from Amazon is easy enough. Just log into your account, point, and click. But B2B sales are much more complicated. Often, there are numerous stakeholders who must sign off before a purchase is made.

On the sales end, AI can be used to facilitate adaptive sales techniques. For example, it can screen calls and present customer information to your sales representatives. It can even route customers to the appropriate representatives based on their context.

But ultimately, AI can’t get someone to sign on the dotted line. It’s possible to rely too much on AI. Assess your own processes to determine when AI should step aside and when the customer should talk to a person.

7. It’s Possible to Invest Too Much in AI

CX is such a hot topic that many organizations are investing loads of money into CX improvements. AI and machine learning offer some exciting possibilities for optimizing customer experience. But it’s still possible to overinvest.

One 2017 study found that only 20% of companies saw a significant ROI for their CX investments. It’s not the investment itself that makes the difference. It’s how you use that investment.

Before diving head-first into AI, consider how it will fit into, or change, your current customer experience strategy.

8. The Best Customer Experience Strategy is Omnichannel

According to one study, companies with the strongest omnichannel customer engagement strategies retain an average of 89% of their customers. Companies with weak omnichannel strategies only retain 33%.

An omnichannel customer experience is made up of many touch points. Some of them are machine-based, but others rely solely on humans. The point is to make it easy for your leads, prospects, and customers to connect with you the way they want to.

If you implement AI as part of your customer experience strategy, always offer leads and customers the opportunity to talk to a person. Make it easy for them to reach a person online, by phone call, or even by sending a text message.

If you can do that, you’ll have an optimal omnichannel customer experience strategy that leverages both your machine and human assets.

Does your business value phone calls? Do you process sales through a call center?

Call HyperTarget Marketing at 213-973-9905 to increase your call volume and to learn more about integrating AI into your sales pipeline.

Even as millennials spend almost no time on the phone, businesses are still struggling to handle call volume issues. With the help of Siri, Alexa, and other virtual assistants, it’s never been easier to call a company if you have a problem or need to reorder supplies. If you worry about calls management at your company, a few simple tips can save you loads of time.

Here are five things to keep in mind to improve phone services at your company.

1. Start On The Right Foot

From the moment you answer your phone, you can ensure that you’re offering your customers the right information. When you greet them with a well-formatted greeting, you can let them know a lot of information quickly.

When your staff answers a call, they should say “Thanks for calling Smith Tech Corporation. This is Joe. How can I help you?”

While this seems relatively standard, it’s not most people’s instinct when answering the phone. You don’t always know who is on the other end, so many people answer the phone with a “Hello?”, which puts the caller in a defensive position.

The other option is much more inviting and lets the caller know immediately that they’re calling a business. If they don’t have time for chit-chat and don’t want to have to ask if they’ve called the right place, you can save them the time.

2. Prioritize While You Talk

Make quick decisions about what a caller needs as you talk to them. If you’re in the middle of a crisis, you shouldn’t talk to the caller in a rushed manner.

Some callers have simple questions that they need to be answered. Many times, they just want to know if you’re open and for how long. Other times, they need to know if you have a common product that you know you have.

If that’s the case, make the call to prioritize your phone conversation for that short period of time.

If your caller has a more complicated question and wants you to go over the details of products with you, you need to afford time for them. Tell them you’re suddenly swamped but that you plan to call back in x-number of minutes. Get their number and most importantly, don’t forget to call them back.

Set yourself a timer whenever you make a claim like this so that you don’t forget about any of your customers.

3. Humans Over Machines

When you call any kind of company, do you want to talk to a person or to an answering machine? It’s likely the former. When you call a company to ask a question that could be answered in seconds, having to navigate an interactive voice response system is irritating.

Getting a machine when you’re expecting a human being is a frustrating experience. It will turn your customers off quickly and even cause them to seek out another company.

Instead of losing customers, hire a receptionist to cover your phone. If that’s too big of an expense, there are lots of answering services available that can ensure that your phone calls are handled promptly and professionally.

If you balance out the cost of lost business versus how much it costs to have someone answer your calls for you, you’ll find that you’re better off with a human. A machine or IVR system will leave your customers cold and your profits in a slump.

4. Summarize Next Steps

When dealing with customers, there is a lot of information that can be exchanged in just a few minutes. Over the course of your conversation, there will be requests from your customer for you to take some steps. You might have directions for your customers on what to do next.

Unless you want to get a call from them in a day or two asking about what you agreed on, you should summarize what you want to do next. Failure to summarize leads to handling multiple calls and juggling redundant questions again and again.

At the end of the call, take a few seconds to clear up errors or the need for anyone to double-check an agreement. At the end of your conversation, you can tell them what was said and what you’ve agreed on. At the end tell them, “Great, so we’ll meet at your office at 10 AM on Tuesday. There we’ll go through the blueprints.”

If they didn’t know they were expected to bring blueprints, you can make that clear. If they thought it was going to be next Tuesday and not this Tuesday, you can clear up any confusion.

5. Take Notes

Whether you do it digitally or with a pen and pad, take notes about your call with every customer. This way you can ensure that you don’t have to ask them to repeat themselves next time. Also, you can make things simpler once you get off the phone.

If there are next steps for you to take, you need to have a little direction to ensure that you have the information you need. There could be confusing scheduling issues or information swapping that needs to be done. Rather than having to call them back and ask them to repeat information, you can get everything you need the first time.

Keeping notes in a customer database is another good way to ensure that you learn about customers over time. The more information you can keep on each customer, the easier it’ll be to give them great service every time you speak.

Calls Management Requires Systemic Changes

If you want to improve your calls management approach, you need to train your staff properly. Phone etiquette is important as you can gain or lose customers in the snap of a finger over the phone. If you provide great service over the phone, customers will be ready to work with you before you even meet them.

For more tips on putting together an inbound call strategy, check out our latest guide.

Since just training a new employee can cost thousands of dollars, you need to be sure you’re always making the most with what you have.

While you might think that your leads are hard to come by, there are ways to convert your current leads and find new ones you might not have thought of. A few sales prospecting tips will ensure that you get the leads you’re looking for.

Here are five tips for prospecting leads that you’re looking for.

1. Devote Time

Just like you would block out time for a meeting or work out in your free time, you need to devote time every single day to prospecting. It might not be your favorite part of your job, but it’s essential to making sure that you never hit a wall with anything you do.

You can’t expect your sales to just fall into your lap. You need to get out and there and ensure that your irons are still in the fire, are running warm, and ready for action.

Unless you’ve somehow gotten independently wealthy in the time between when you got hired, and now, you need to pick up the phone.

Getting started on a call isn’t easy, but y would need to devote yourself to it nonetheless. Focusing your energy on getting new clients is a must for any business. New business might fall into your lap every once in awhile, but it’s not very common and not very likely.

Making the time to prospect shows your commitment to working hard, not only to your coworkers but also to yourself. When you set an example for others, you also set up accountability for yourself.

2. Focus On Your Market

The potential number of customers you could have is vast and intimidating. Even if you’re in a specialized field, it’s likely there are a number of different companies competing for your market. You can’t take on everything, so you need to figure out where to start.

The question you need to answer first is “who is my ideal customer?”

While this may be no simple query, you can start by looking at your products and what kind of research you have inside your own database. You can surely name who your top five or ten customers are. Then you need to start picking them apart.

Find out who your worst five customers are. Think about what you don’t like about them, why they irritate you, or why they don’t come back as often as you would like.

How do you offer what your best customers like to every single customer without upsetting your five worst customers? Your campaign needs to bring those unfaithful or bad customers along for the ride.

Create a profile of the ideal customer so you can start to track them down.

3. Plug Away At Your Call Lists

Surely you’ve got a list of warm leads that you’ve been working on for a while. Don’t let any of them cool off. Take your time to call those people on the list whenever you get a chance.

Prioritize your lists and see where people on the list are in their process of decisionmaking.

They might have questions that they haven’t had time to ask you and you could be calling into them at just the right time. Perhaps there’s some information you can send them to win them over. Invite them to an event that you’re hosting.

You should host a webinar or a seminar to let them know more about you and your products.

Touch base with them in a consistent manner. Rather than letting them forget about you, you need to stay in touch so that they know about you. You need to keep warm leads warm or even get them hot if you can.

4. Get a Referral

While good reviews and great advertising can bring plenty of people through your door, it’s rare that people stick around or even purchase after their first encounter.

What works the most is to let someone else handle the work for you. Ask for your best clients to give you a referral.

Rather than just have them do this outright, you can offer them something in return. Have some coupon codes ready to offer a discount to anyone who helps you out by giving you a reference. Give a discount to both first-time customers and the people who they refer to you.

The best moment you should ask for your referral in is right after you make a sale. At that moment, the rush of the sale is on their mind so letting them know how they could increase the value even further isn’t a bad idea.

5. Get On Social Media

With billions of users on Facebook alone, you need to ensure that you have a fairly active profile on social media. While there are some Luddites who might think that social media is only for kids, there are plenty of adults on it now.

In fact, most marketers have whole departments that are devoted to getting leads and encouraging sales via e-commerce channels. Social selling is the new way to get the word out to clients.

With the help of Apple Pay and the long-standing Paypal, you can rest assured that there are secure ways to pay for goods online. Referring your clients to your site from social media is a great way to broaden your reach.

You can call people and refer them to social media or use social media to spread your contact information.

A Few Sales Prospecting Tips Go a Long Way

If you’re a call marketer, you might think that these tips don’t all apply to you but they do. The common denominator for all of these sales prospecting tips is to ensure that you’re always out here in front of your customers.

If you want to know more about leads for small business, check out our latest guide.

Generating calls for your business can be a difficult process. The hope is that actually answering the calls should be pretty easy, right?

The truth is that answering phone calls is often where businesses slip up. It’s easy to let your phone etiquette lapse when the customers come to you. But if you fall into this trap, you’re going to cost your company a lot of money.

If you think your company could do better on the phone, keep reading. We’re going to talk to you about our 10 best tips for how to turn inbound calling into sales.

Why is Inbound Calling Important?

By the time your customers pick up the phone to call a business, they’re ready to buy. They want answers to their questions, and even if they don’t know it, every second on the phone is essentially an interview process.

They’re looking for any reason at all to pick you or your competitors. So answering their calls the right way is your best bet to converting that call into a sale.

1. Make a Human Connection

The last thing your customers want to do when they call you is to talk to a robot. There are instances where a voicemail or IVR system is the right choice, but if you’re looking to make an immediate impact on your customer’s view of your company, this isn’t it.

Voicemail and IVR systems give off a cold and unfeeling impression. They don’t have any flexibility and they don’t encourage your customers to call back.

If you have a high volume of calls during hours where you aren’t in the office, it’s a good idea to consider hiring a professional phone answering service or a receptionist

2. Answer at the Right Moment

It’s never a good idea to let your customers sit and wait on the phone for any reason. Impatience is just going to frustrate your customer and make them less likely to buy from you.

However, answering the phone too soon could be a bad sign as well. If you’re rushing to answer on the first ring, are you really that busy? Is there a reason people aren’t keeping you occupied elsewhere?

Whether your customers realize they take these things into consideration or not, they do.

3. Have a Formal Greeting

Make sure your employees know how to answer a phone. Include a brief hello, a “thank you for calling [your business]”, their name, and “how may I help you?”

It might seem a little long winded and formal, but it’s good to be consistent. Your customers want to know what to expect, and it shows a level of professionalism.

4. But Don’t Overdo the Formality

While you want to keep things professional and consistent, you don’t want to wind up reading from a script. Keep a guide open for various points that your employees need to touch on, but don’t read from it word for word.

You want to make a personal connection with your callers. You can’t do that if you read directly from a script, it sounds too robotic and it doesn’t leave room for any flexibility.

5. Use Their Name

People love hearing their own names. If you can figure out your caller’s name and use it during your phone call, you get that much closer to that personal connection and a sale.

Just be careful that you don’t overdo it. You can seem manipulative and fake if you use the customer’s name in certain circumstances, so make sure you sound genuine and sincere when you do.

6. Be Open Ended

When you reply to your customers with single-worded yes or no responses, you’re not doing anything to advance the conversation. It might sound difficult at first, but if you practice, you can teach yourself and your employees how to follow up every yes or no answer with more information or another question to keep the conversation moving.

If they ask you a yes or no question like “Do you sell lampshades?” instead of saying “yes” say “yes we do, we carry these brands and they come in a variety of colors.” Ask a question, give more information.

But also keep the value of your customer’s time in mind.

7. Be Positive

Think about the people you like to be around in life. Do you prefer to spend more time with the positive people who try their hardest to say “yes” and who actually follow through with their promises? Or do you spend more time with those that offer more negative responses?

The answer is obvious. People gravitate towards positivity. Smile when you answer, even if your customers can’t see it, they can hear it in your voice and it will release endorphins into your body that’ll make you feel good too.

8. Stay Calm

This should be a given, but you need to make sure you never lose your temper with your customers. You never know who’s recording you, and you never know who they know. All it takes is for one customer to hear an irritated tone and elevate the situation.

One bad experience goes twice as far as a good one, and if word of mouth gets around that you snapped on a customer, you’ll lose sales.

9. Don’t Put Them on Hold

Another thing that should be a given but often isn’t is that you shouldn’t put your customers on hold. Sometimes it’s inevitable, in which case you should do it for as short of a time as possible.

When your customer is on hold, they have no reason to stick around. It’s just as easy for them to hang up and call someone else. Make sure this doesn’t happen to you.

Even if your customer demands to be put on hold until the person they want to speak to is free, pop on the line every 60 seconds to let them know that you haven’t forgotten about them and that their desired party is still occupied.

10. Confirm and Sum Up

When you are at the end of the call, take a second to confirm with your customer that you answered their questions and satisfied their needs. If you haven’t, ask what you can do to help. If you have, thank them for calling.

Another good rule of thumb is, to sum up whatever plans you made in the call. If you agreed on a time to meet or call back, remind them. Go over the concrete things you talked about before they hang up.

From Inbound Calling to Sales

It might seem like a lot to remember in one call, but when your customers start inbound calling, you need to make sure that you’re at the top of your game. This is a vital time for your company. You want to turn every call into a sale.

If your business needs calls and you’re not sure how to get them, visit us today. We can help drive calls to your business.