Can’t hire right now? Here’s how to grow your organization.

If you surveyed people for their idea of a typical business goal, most might answer “to sell” or “to acquire new customers”. In some cases, that’s probably true!

However, there’s a somewhat newer school of thought which indicates that improving your relationship with existing customers is the best long-term way to grow your business. Clients whose needs are met, and who feel valued by your organization, are likely to continue growing with you. They’re also much more likely to recommended your business to their colleagues. 

At CallTrackingMetrics, our number one goal is to ensure the continued success of our clients. This year, we built an incredibly talented Customer Success team to offer personalized assistance and deeper communication with our clients. 

We’re definitely excited to work with Ken Sylvain. He has dedicated his long career to managing business relationships, both for national organizations like ADP, and for smaller businesses in niche markets. With such a wealth of experience, we’d be surprised if there were a problem he hasn’t yet come across. 

Ken, what are the most common headaches your clients report to you, and how have you helped them work towards a solution?

When it comes to our agency clients, everyone is seeking to demonstrate the value of their work. Generally, this is done through communicating activity and conversions.

We coach our users on how to optimize their tracking sources and tracking numbers, so that they can generate comprehensive reports on incoming activity.  I, for one, definitely understand what a difference it can make to produce hard data on the success of your promotions. For some clients, this might involve reporting on caller demographics via our Enhanced Caller Insights, or on which keywords people searched that eventually lead them to call you.

My top two tips for this type of client:

• Create time parameters to identify conversions during specific promotions.
• Build custom panels for your call agents, so that it is easy for them to quickly rate lead quality, and even insert revenue amounts.

What advice do you give to clients who manage contact centers?

When it comes to our call center clients, I can tell you that all of them deal with the problem of missed calls from their clients and prospects.  Missed calls can be a pretty huge hit to sales numbers; recent studies indicate that around 85% of callers who cannot reach you on the first attempt will not call back.

My recommended solutions for this issue:

• Create special tags for your missed calls, so that an outbound effort can be made before your prospects reach out to a competitor. This list can even be filtered to only tag calls who abandoned the line after holding for at least 20 seconds, in order to exclude those who you can assumed mis-dialed.
• Set up a trigger to automatically send a text message to unanswered callers, promising to return their call as soon as possible.

How do you advise your clients to scale their organization’s activity, without hiring additional employees?

With the advent of automation in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platforms, my number one advice is to outsource some of your work to cost-effective software that is flexible, functional, and easy to scale. Chances are, there’s a SaaS platform out there that can handle some of the routine activities that take up too much of your employee’s valuable time. 

Our technology enables you to extend the impact of your workforce through expanding how you interact with your clients, and by allowing you to become more efficient with intelligent routing of inbound calls. Intelligent automation is key – and with triggers, we can automate just about any task possible within our platform.

Through the use of responsive online forms and automated texts, you can easily increase the number of targeted interactions without requiring additional FTEs. Imagine not having to ask repeat questions, because your software recognizes the caller data, and acts accordingly. You can even significantly increase your leads without hiring additional employees, simply via a well-crafted integrated outbound dial campaign. 

For most organizations, this all leads to a pretty ideal end result: easy-to-produce comprehensive reporting, and more client touches that make sense, all without expanding your manpower.