If Conversion Rate Optimisation’s ultimate objective is to maximise sales from a fixed number of customers, then why do so many practitioners only focus on changes to the user experience of a company’s website? How a business handles a telephone enquiry is just as important as a web visit, explains Sue Ratcliffe, Head of Client services at professional telephone answering service alldayPA.
Conversion rate optimisation is an analytical discipline that involves testing, measuring and editing websites until the perfect user experience is created to maximise conversions, be they sales or leads.
Online businesses of all shapes and sizes are investing in CRO with consultants and web teams pouring over analytics data and making small incremental changes to constantly improve performance.
But why does CRO have to be just a virtual discipline? What if we applied this approach to ‘traditional’ business practices such as telephone call answering?
The good news is that marketers now have much more data to track and measure all these processes.
Marketers can now easily attribute leads thanks to phone tracking services like ResponseTap, so visits from a website can continue to be tracked once it is being handled by a human being.
But how many businesses actually do this? From our experience very few. This is either down to a lack of appetite or – more likely – low awareness of this level of granular analysis being possible.
How can CRO be applied to ‘real world’ phone conversations?
There is a clear set of steps for applying CRO to telephone call answering.
The first step is to put a trackable phone number in place. There are many services such as ResponseTap that track phone calls. Or, just a simple 0845 number could be used to track calls and their impact.
The next step is to check if a phone number is clearly displayed on a website. You’d be amazed as to how many businesses unintentionally hide away their phone number. Even putting the phone number on a ‘contact us’ page is not good enough. This number should instead be clearly displayed in the top right of a company website, as well as being clearly displayed on a contact us page.
There are countless other ways to improve the visibility of a phone number like using Google site links and ad extensions to display a phone number in search results –
but that is a separate blog post topic and something to be explored at a later date.
Back in the ‘real world’, it is very important to check is if telephone calls are answered in three rings. Any longer and customers start to drop off. Minimising unanswered calls is key to CRO.
Our statistics show that more and more customer telephone calls are occurring outside of working hours. One of the biggest conversion rate tips is to answer the phone whenever your customers want to speak to you. You’d be surprised how many calls are missed because there isn’t an out-of-hours telephone call answering service in place.
Engaged tones are also a major problem. In this day and age of modern telephony an engaged tone should only be heard in exceptional circumstances.
All businesses experience busy periods however by using an overspill or contingency telephone call answering service the incidence of engaged tones and use of hold music, or automated menus can be minimised so fewer customers experience the frustration of being put on hold.
Once a customer gets through to a member of staff it is important that their query is handled quickly and accurately. The caller’s details need to taken accurately and the appropriate response needs to be expertly assessed. Is the information that has been provided urgent? Does it need escalating? And if a customer is promised a ‘call back’ how long does this take to happen?
To limit customer drop out a business also needs to assess if calls are diverted quickly to the right person. As businesses grow customers can sometimes be passed from department to department in a perpetual loop. Clearly this kind of inefficiency needs changing. Mystery shopping calls and customer surveys are just two ways to assess if the customer journey is satisfactory.
Training is also crucial. Are the people who answer the telephone call trained in handling calls effectively? Telephone call answering skills can be taught, but can you teach people to have the right kind of positive, happy-to-help attitude that customers want to hear on the end of the phone? Arguably companies must recruit people with the right attitude for the job and then train them to become effective. Many firms find recruitment, training and development the biggest blocker of all.
In this age of modern technology, real world conversation rate optimisation is easier than many people would think. Experts can assist with improving the call answering service and increasing sales and customer retention and conversion rates can be expertly measured using the data from these firms.
By Sue Ratcliffe is Head of Client Services at alldayPA.
PrivSec Conferences will bring together leading speakers and experts from privacy and security to deliver compelling content via solo presentations, panel discussions, debates, roundtables and workshops.
For more information on upcoming events, visit the website.
comments powered by Disqus