Better handling of your inbound calls is essential to improving the return-on-investment from your marketing dollars. The handling of inbound calls often gets the least attention and yet is frequently the biggest factor in determining the result of a marketing effort.

Here are several suggestions to improving inbound call handling:

Monitor Your Managers By Listening To Calls
Surprisingly it is often those who have hired an inbound call manager that can have the biggest problems with inbound call handling. That is because frequently no one is effectively monitoring that manager’s performance. An incompetent, ineffective or lazy inbound call manager will blame a failure on marketing, rather than their own team’s mishandling of the inbound calls.

Those who believe they can oversee their managers by simply reading reports are probably missing a lot. That is because only the data entered will be in the reports in the first place. If opportunities are being missed on the call, they will not appear in the reports either.

Listen to the calls
The performance of everyone on the phone will be a reflection of the competency and effectiveness of your manager and the training you have provided. It is easy to have systems track and record all of your inbound calls. If you cringe when you hear how your calls are being answered, you will quickly realize there is no substitute for listening.

Dedicate Someone To Listen To Calls
An effective way to monitor how your staff and managers are performing may be to have one person listen to the calls and flag those you should hear. This will allow you to just listen to those calls handled very well or very poorly. Those calls will help you decide who to promote and who needs more training.

It is important that the person you have monitoring the calls is apart from and does not work with or befriend the individuals who are answering the calls. Otherwise, they will be biased in whose calls get flagged. Realize the person you hire to monitor your inbound calls can work from anywhere. The important thing is that they have the training, skills and experience to know what they are hearing and what may be missing in the proper handling of a call.

Implement Ongoing Feedback & Training
Studies show that those who are incompetent often lack the knowledge and experience to recognize their own incompetence. Therefore, without feedback, there may be little way for your operators to know that they can and should improve. Furthermore, without training your operators could make changes for the worse. Although this it may seem basic, very few dedicate enough resources to feedback and training.

Learn From Both Success & Failure
Having all of your staff listen to a calls that are well handled will provide valuable insight for everyone as to what they should be doing. Also, sitting down with those who have made mistakes to listen to actual problem calls can be much more productive than just giving abstract instructions and training.

For example, telling an operator to never assume what a caller’s finances are may not hit home nearly as much as playing a couple of calls for an operator where they did just that.

Invest In Your Staff & Your Systems
Investing in better oversight and training of your staff who answer inbound calls and better systems related to inbound call handling and tracking are probably the greatest investments you could make.

Consider that no matter how you decide to focus your marketing, much of the result will be an inbound call. Calls are often the last step before someone becomes your client. If you cannot handle that well then the rest of your marketing effort, however you made the phone ring in the first place, will probably show a terrible ROI. On the other hand, if you have a greater ability to answer the phone well, it will improve your ROI. That in turn will allow you to increase your marketing, reap the benefits, grow your business and so on.

If you are interested in increasing your call volume we can help. We have both a full spectrum of branded internet marketing services and generic inbound calls from T.V. Commercials. Clever Maniacs has been successfully marketing businesses for over 13 years. Whatever you needs may be please give us a call at 855-411-5628.