It’s time to improve call handler skills so that you don’t receive as many missed opportunities.
Missed opportunities are basically wasted marketing dollars. When an interested prospect calls your business, it hopefully shouldn’t take more than the right questions and direction of the conversation to ensure that the call ends in a booked appointment with your business.
What are some tips so ensure that you are able to book the prospect rather than missing out on an interested lead?
Read on for 4 tips below.
Maximize Your Phone Answering Availability
Do you know when you are missing the most calls? Check your inbound call data to discover when you have the highest number of unanswered calls or missed appointment opportunities.
After determining which hours of the day (early morning, lunch or evening) have the most missed calls or opportunities, rearrange call handlers’ schedules accordingly.
HINT: Look at your call detail report and calls by time of day to see when you are receiving calls that go unanswered.
Bring Down Barriers
Understanding office constraints can help you to reduce stress in the office and improve the long-term outlook of call handling.
For example, many CallSource clients have found much success by delegating call handlers’ number one priority to be just that — answering calls. Other duties assigned should all be secondary, or assigned to someone else who doesn’t have a main priority of appointment setting.
Give your employees the time and energy to focus on answering phones for positive caller experiences and better call outcomes.
HINT: Moving phone appointment setting away from reception is worth testing. We have seen significant gains in caller and waiting room experiences after shifting phone responsibilities.
Specialized Phone Lines
When hiring new front office staff or call handlers, it is time consuming to train on various technical aspects of the phone (routing, trunking, etc.) in addition to phone handling skills. An efficient way to improve a customer’s experiences is to designate phone lines for specific departments.
You can also use an IVR menu to route callers to specific departments or employees (Press 1 for web support, etc.). This decongests your main phone line during peak hours thus reducing hold times and botched transfers ensuring a better customer experience.
HINT: Extra phone lines can easily be acquired and tracked for accountability to ensure best practices set in place by management are being followed by staff.
Specified “Call Back” Employee
Missed calls, dropped calls, and voicemails are very important to follow-up on. Call handler priorities ebb and flow during the day, it is helpful to have specific call handler, skilled in outbound calling to return all your missed calls.
Having a designated outbound call handler to find the answers and prepare for the return call, decreases distraction for your other call handlers.
HINT: If a callback was scheduled to follow-up on a specific question, it’s helpful if the answer and solutions are prepared ahead of time before the callback.
Want more help improving your calls? Download our free call handler checklist and start improving employees’ phone skills!
