Archive for June, 2010


How “Clueless”, “Uninformed”, and “Annoying” are killing your sales

From Entrepreneur Magazine’s current issue:

Nothing says success like professional presentation. Unfortunately, many entrepreneurs who wouldn’t bat an eye at dropping some coin on a decent website, impressive newsletters and other collateral tend to shatter the illusion when it comes to their business phones.

We couldn’t agree more.

In fact, 96% of marketing budgets are spent on enticing callers to call, but only 4% is spent on handling that call.

Advertising to cause your phone to ring, without considering what that caller experience will be like….That’s like buying a SuperBowl ad, but sending people to a website that you threw together with your cousin. (no offense to cousins everywhere…I’m sure some of you can design great web pages!)

Entrepreneur goes on:

Too often, small-business owners send customers the wrong message by mixing business with pleasure–routing all of their calls (work and personal) to the same number, for example, or having overly casual, unprofessional voicemail greetings.

It’s amazing how many business over-look this critical customer interaction point! Some are clueless…like this one:

Clueless

Some business owners and employees are simply unaware, like this one:

Uninformed

And some On-Hold experiences are simply annoying, like this one:

Annoying

If clients and potential customers call your business…stop right now, and take a moment to call your own business.

Go ahead…I’ll wait.

Now, how can you make that a better experience? Want some ideas? Have a complete Caller Experience Evaluation of your phone experience. You might be surprised!