As your business grows, you’ll need to adapt and reallocate resources better to provide support and care to your growing client base. To best manage this success, you’ll need first to understand the customer engagement lifecycle and how it relates to your marketing and sales strategies.
Customers, whether existing or prospect, will often prefer to inquire about products or services over the phone rather than waiting on an email response. So, when faced with a growing number of leads and higher volume of calls, it’s essential to have a call answering service in place to ensure no potential customer is dropped or forgotten.
In this article, we’ll discuss the customer engagement lifecycle and how a dedicated telephone answering service vastly improves your business’s results.
When mapping a customer’s user journey, it’s too often that customers will leave without purchasing their items or enquiring further about a service. This scenario often happens when there is a lack of information and assistance from the business representatives. Imagine you walk into a store and receive no greeting from the owner. You continue to browse, but no one offers assistance. As a customer who potentially has questions, you may hesitate to enquire about a product or service because there was no initial acknowledgment. Similarly, if you call a business and no one picks up the phone, you’re more likely to move on to the next number in your search result.
Customer activities, such as browsing or enquiring, can be interrupted due to the lack of assistance and acknowledgment. This interruption often occurs when the business doesn’t use the customer engagement cycle to their advantage and instead treat sales as a funnel, depersonalizing the experience.
The customer lifecycle is a marketing framework that illuminates the chain of transitions a customer travels to attain an outcome from the business. While the whole lifecycle includes multiple touchpoints, such as engagement, evaluation, consideration, purchase, delivery and retention loyalty or advocacy, below we’ll briefly touch on the four main stages of the client lifecycle.
Reach is the first stage of a customer lifecycle where a business makes its first contact with the prospective customer or vice versa. From the potential customers’ perspective, this stage is the discovery where the customers find the business, perhaps through a social media ad campaign, a search result or a referral from others. During this stage, the business attempts to understand the customer needs, issues and other challenges to determine the type of engagement that will be the most effective.
After successful customer outreach, the business will move into the acquisition stage. In this stage, businesses will focus on converting potential leads into loyal customers. While to the potential customers, this stage focuses on their evaluation and comparison of the product or service offered.
3. Conversion
Conversions are key to any business’s success. As you might have guessed, this is the stage where the lead converts into a paying customer. However, the cycle doesn’t end here – with satisfied customers being more likely to return we are now at our final stage.
Studies show that focusing on your efforts on customer retention, rather than churning through initial sales can increase your profits by 25% to even 125%. For any business, it’s more profitable to continue upselling and cross-selling services through existing happy and engaged customers than only focusing on new customers.
A high-quality professional answering service starts you off on the right foot. Not only can your business respond to more customer queries but also improve customer satisfaction and retention by creating meaningful-personal connections.
Here’s how a call answering service can add tremendous value to your business and benefit the customer experience lifecycle.
Sales calls are the lifeblood of your business and will often generate your more concrete leads. By using a 24/7 live call answering service as a backup as part of your sales team, your company fields more calls and creates more potential customers.
A phone answering service covers your business at all hours, meaning not a single call is missed. A high-quality and professional answering service will even work triage for your business, directly connecting customers with the right departments and handling low priority leads themselves. Not only does the service work to streamline your sales department, but always allows you to make a good first impression by responding to every call. As a result of you’ll capture more leads for your business, but also not feel torn between converting new sales and attending to loyal customers.
When it comes to customer retention, a common practice is for businesses to use promotional strategies to drum up interest. While a campaign is running, the volume of calls can increase with customers wanting to clarify conditions and take advantage of the specials. That’s where a live call answering service assists in ensuring the demands are met, and no calls are routed to voicemail. In high traffic times, your professional call answering agents will know how to troubleshoot any issue so that the event or campaign runs smoothly.
When a potential customer rings a business, they are often looking for that personal touch and friendly approach that is lost through emails.
Through a live answering service, that personal connection is still maintained and can be done so for a comparatively low cost.
Not only do your customers benefit from this professional and personal experience, but it reflects favorably on your company’s values when it comes to customer service.
Direct communication and quick response times keep customers moving through the lifecycle. By finding a dedicated team of call answering agents that can manage your customers regardless of what stage they’re at, you’ll not only boost profits but create a lasting positive image for your company. To continue maintaining a lasting relationship with your customers, let the professionals step in on your behalf where needed.
Author Bio:
Liam Barnard:
Liam Barnard is a freelance writer, social media marketer and an independent blogger who writes about sustainability, technology, globalisation, finance and home improvement. He aspires to become a professional writer and make a difference in society and the world we live in.
Liam Barnard on Twitter: https://twitter.com/meliambarnard
Liam Barnard on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/meliambarnard
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