John Goddard, a recent guest on our podcast, spoke of a hypothetical business with 50 locations, customers sending leads to each individual location, and the agent at each location being responsible for follow-up. Next, John posed a great question:
“From a follow-up standpoint, if you have one individual at each one of those locations doing all the calls, and they get overwhelmed, how are they going to follow up?”
In our episode, John then explored various benefits that can accrue to multi-location businesses if they have one centralized call center responsible for all leads. One of the main benefits is that your business can employ a team of agents at the call center, and one of their main responsibilities can be following up sales opportunities. That’s really streamlining the conversion process. It’s much different than tasking each of the 50 agents at each location with being responsible for follow-up.
This got us thinking: If your business is using a call center, won’t local consumers be dissuaded from calling it because it won’t have a local number?
We here at MarketSnare often tell our clients that it’s advantageous for each of their local businesses to have their own phone number. That way, local customers can simply check the phone number’s area code to confirm that a business is indeed local. Local numbers help businesses connect with the local community; it’s that simple
But the more we talked to John, who is a Business Marketing Consultant at Goddard Industries and an Executive VP of Business Development at BoxCrush, the more we questioned our assumptions.
If you, too, want to challenge what you know about marketing and call centers, we really recommend you listen to our full episode with John Goddard.
And if you’re considering opening a call center, here are a few high-level tips to start the ball rolling
(1) Decide what kind of call center you want:
-
An inbound call center (which handles incoming calls from customers).
-
An outbound call center (which has agents that call customers)
-
A hybrid of the two.
(2) Start thinking of calls as consisting of three parts:
-
Opening the call (which is when the agent picks up the call or makes the call).
-
The call body (which is listening to the customer and understanding their issue).
-
Closing the call (the agent making the sale, or fixing the client’s problem).
(3) Investigate what kind of roles you’re going to need to hire for, including:
-
Call center agent(s).
-
Call center team leader(s).
-
Call center manager(s).
4) Explore the various types of training that your call center representatives will need, including:
-
Communications training.
-
Problem-solving training.
-
Sales training.
-
Skills training (empathy, confidence, tone, etc.).
Thanks for reading! And be sure to check out our podcasts!