CallSource

CallSource

Performance Management for Sales and Marketing

Reputation Management

The Importance of Reputation Management for Your Business: A Guide

by

Introduction

To earn a positive reputation, businesses must prove themselves worthy to their customers and potential customers. A company with a bad reputation will not earn as much business as one with a positive reputation.

By providing superior service and valuable products, you build your positive reputation. How do potential customers discover how great your business is? Customer Service no longer starts or stops with your business or your technician. Potential clients want to understand other current clients’ experience. In today’s digital age, a positive brand reputation works cohesively with positive online reviews. If you don’t have reviews, your search engine ranking can suffer, and potential clients are less likely to choose your business.

Online reviews have become increasingly important in consumers’ buying journey. This goes hand-in-hand with the relevancy and interest in content-driven marketing. Companies must provide value to potential customers even before they acquire them as a customer.

Consumers are further down the purchasing funnel due to online research and wanting to be as informed as possible before even contacting the company—they are deciding whether it is worth their time to speak to a salesperson and find out more information after they read what their peers think.

Some of the statistics about online reviews1 may surprise you:

  • 84% of people trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation
  • 54% of people will visit the website after reading positive reviews
  • 74% of consumers say that positive reviews make them trust a local business more
  • 58% of consumers say that the star rating of a business is most important
  • 63% of consumers use a search engine to find online reviews

The takeaway from these stats is obvious: online reviews are helpful for businesses looking to expand their clientele and get people to choose their business over a competitor’s.

Why online reviews are important

Before the days of the internet and online marketing, small businesses relied on word-of-mouth and traditional marketing for new customers. While referrals are still a great (and free) way to win business, online reviews provide feedback about your business to everyone on the internet who is in the market for your service.

Our New Friend, the Internet

People no longer need to ask those closest to them for advice on businesses when choosing a plumber, car dealership, or doctor. Consumers hop online to read reviews and recommendations at their fingertips in a matter of minutes.

Did you know: 84% of consumers trust online reviews just as much as personal recommendations and 85% of them read up to 10 reviews for a local business to trust the review and feel satisfied with their buying decision.1

This is why managing your online reputation is vital: it isn’t enough to only be known in your local circle anymore if you want your business to sustain current growth. Having an online presence, and managing it, has increasingly become a significant responsibility for businesses.

Don’t Make Your Friend Your Foe

Research by Woodbury University about consumer studies found that while online reviews have the most impact on business selection, reviews were not yet top of mind for business owners and executives.2 The takeaway here? Businesses need to shift how they manage online reviews.

When 87% of people need to see a rating of 3-5 stars for a business before they will use them,1 how can you ensure that your business has a high enough star rating if your online reputation isn’t a priority?

Studies show that the average star rating that shows is the most important factor that consumers look at when judging a business. It has also been shown that going from a 3-star rating to a 5-star rating gets a business 25% more clicks from Google Local Pack.1 This is a simple way to get more visitors (and good leads) to your website alone.

It is time to turn to online reviews, the new word-of-mouth, and get good at managing them. While many consumers will still recommend your business if they have a positive experience, it is becoming more and more likely that they will also read or post something online about their experience as well.

Ask for reviews

Simply reaching an acceptable star rating is not enough. You want to make sure that you are continually churning online reviews.
You understand that online reviews are important – but how do you acquire them? Well, you should ask, of course.

70% of consumers will leave a review for a business when asked

You task your employees with setting an appointment to end in a sale eventually, so why wouldn’t you give yourself the goal to ask customers for a review to aid in making additional sales?

The recency, or newness, of reviews, is important to consumers – 41% of them pay attention to how recently a review was posted to determine if it is relevant, and “73% of consumers think that reviews older than three months aren’t relevant.”1

Although running review campaigns to gather more reviews is a good idea, you don’t want to work on gathering a bunch of reviews at once and then slow down on that initiative – you should always be focused on acquiring new and useful reviews from clients. Google also frowns on massive/bulk review requests.

A recent study determined that “59% of consumers look at 2-3 review sites before they make a decision about a business.” Make sure you are not only focusing on gathering reviews from your clients often but also collecting reviews onto any and all review sites where your potential consumers will be looking.

In an age of ever-increasing technology with review sites, platforms, and Apps, online reviews are becoming just as important as word of mouth referrals. Yet, not all businesses are quite on board yet with their significance. When studies find that 74% of people trust local businesses more after reading positive reviews about them,1 it is evident that reviews are that important. You do want to better your business, right?

The majority of CallSource’s clients utilize our reports, scored by human analysts, to determine their overall conversion rates and receive feedback on how their call handlers are performing on the phone to increase their appointment setting rates. One of the factors looked at when scoring employees on their appointment setting skills, and conversions is to see if the call taker asked for the caller’s commitment.

If you know it is important to ask for the appointment, why aren’t you asking for your customers’ feedback after making the sale?

Reviews help you gain new business; it is easy to conclude that you need to regularly and continuously receive reviews from your customers. One way to ensure that you are receiving reviews is to simply ask.

Although asking for a review is an additional step for management, the salesperson, or whoever is taking care of the customer at the appointment, it is worth the effort to steadily maintain and grow your online reputation. There are many easy ways to do this, including but not limited to:

  • Verbally asking
  • Leaving a business card, magnet or sticker including The Ask
  • Sending a follow-up email after the appointment
  • Including a review link widget on your website.

While it is considered unethical to incentivize customers to leave reviews, simply asking will more often than not do the trick. It is unlikely that 100% of your reviews will end up being strictly positive, but no matter the outcome, reviews are more and more becoming a useful and essential tool for business to have. Address and learn from the negative, and reap the benefits from the positive.

The impact of negative online reviews

Online reviews get you noticed, show that you’re in the game to play, and help you achieve new customers. It’s been shown that 67% of consumers are influenced by online reviews.3 That’s over half of all consumers and your prospective new customers.

Negative reviews can lead to a bad reputation, losing customers, and even losing potential customers, making new customer acquisition more costly as well as possibly losing business sales and profit.

Research discovered that businesses risk losing as many as 22% of customers when just one negative article is found by users considering buying their product.3 But just because you can lose customers from negative reviews doesn’t mean that it’s a definite. There are still ways to reverse a negative image and strengthen your business’ reputation.

You can ensure that negative reviews don’t drag your business down if you are proactive and follow these tips.

  • Pay Attention to Your Online Review Presence

    If you are not already asking for reviews from customers, then reviews may not be at the forefront of your mind and business plan. It is time to change that mentality. Just because you may not look up reviews or pay attention to them doesn’t mean that the majority of your consumer-base doesn’t. 97% of consumers read online reviews for local businesses – so you better be focusing on them.1

  • Read and Respond to Negative Reviews

    If you are not paying attention to your online review presence, it is easy to miss any negative reviews that may come your way – and ignoring a negative review may be even more detrimental to your business than the review itself.

  • Don’t Let Your Reviews Precede You

    Besides proactively reading and responding to your negative reviews, make sure that you keep an otherwise good online reputation out there everywhere – not just on review sites. Include customer testimonials and case studies on your website to showcase your great customer service and how you really help people—it should help show a different side of your company than that one negative reviewer had to say. More good will outweigh the bad.

Negative reviews can be a real bummer – and could take tolls on your business. From losing business and profits to hurting your overall brand, they are something to pay attention to. By taking control of your online presence and being proactive with your customers and reviewers, you can ensure that negative reviews don’t have a harmful impact on your business.

Why it’s important to respond to negative reviews

Getting online reviews is vital; the process does not stop there.

The authenticity of reviews is the most important factor for consumers. They want to be able to trust the reviews they read. Consumers do not expect a business to have a perfect online review history.1 It is not only important to list your business on competent and reliable review sites but to respond to reviews to demonstrate your company is reliable and authentic.

Sincerity is not the only reason to respond to reviews—research shows that 56% of consumers will avoid a business that has negative online reviews, but 78% of consumers believe a business cares more about them when they see management respond to reviews.4

There is conflicting research and opinions when it comes to responding to online reviews. Some say to respond to every few reviews, some say to respond to all, but other research has shown that responding to positive reviews may hinder your reputation rather than help if not done correctly.

In a study by Yang Wang and Alexander Chaudhry, it was found that companies should respond to all negative online reviews to make a positive effect on consumers. But they also found that companies should be a bit warier and careful when responding to positive reviews since these types of responses can make viewers feel more negatively towards the company.5

“The overarching story informed by this research is that by acknowledging and rectifying service failures in a prompt and just manner, complaint management increases satisfaction, leading to trust and retention, and ultimately makes it cheaper to acquire and retain customers than relying solely on offensive marketing strategies such as advertising” (Chaudhry & Yang 2017).

As Shama Kabani, author of The Zen of Social Media Marketing and CEO of The Marketing Zen Group, states: “Even if you do get negative feedback, you can turn it into a positive by engaging in a constructive way and showing that you’re a genuine business.”6

When responding to negative online reviews, more work must be put into the response than with a positive review response to achieve this increased satisfaction. According to Chaudhry and Lang’s research study, when managers respond to a negative online review, it is construed as adding value since they are acknowledging where they may have gone wrong, keeping accountable and then talking about any actions they are taking to rectify the issue.

Chaudhry and Yang’s study concludes that managers should engage in review responses “for the purpose of complaint management…[they] should be timely so that they are visible to subsequent reviews.”

By regularly looking over your online reviews, you will be able to respond to negative reviews promptly and hopefully alleviate a bad situation while potentially turning an unhappy customer into a fan. You will also gain the respect for taking their opinion seriously.

And your consumers are more forgiving than you’d think—only 8 percent of them would expect a business to have a five-star rating before they consider using them. While negative reviews are not wanted, they’re inevitable. As long as they’re handled properly, you don’t have to let them take over your online presence.

How to effectively respond to negative reviews

Receiving negative reviews is not ideal, but fortunately, they won’t altogether ruin your reputation if you know how to handle them properly. When data shows that 4 in 5 consumers reverse their purchase decisions based on negative reviews,7 it is handling these reviews properly that will ultimately help build your online reputation even higher. Follow these steps to turn those unhappy reviewers back into potential customers.

  1. Know Where to Look

    Yelp, Angie’s List, Google, Facebook…there are many different review platforms for people to leave reviews on. Make sure you know where to find your reviews—you don’t want a bad one out there lingering with no response for all to see.

    Instead of manually searching every possible review site, there are many products out there that will do this for you. This is why having a performance management tool is beneficial. See all your reviews from all sites in one place and even respond from an all-in-one review platform, too.

  2. Respond Quickly

    No, you don’t have to be refreshing your feed of your online review platforms to respond to these reviews ASAP, but you should be regularly checking in on them. This way, if a negative review comes up, you can respond in a timely manner (set a goal of 2 days maximum) while it is still fresh in the customer’s mind. You might need to ask your internal staff about the situation before you respond to make sure you have all the facts.

  3. Draft Your Response

    Although you want to make sure you can respond to the review in a time-efficient manner, do not publish whatever comes to mind first! Passionate, ill-informed, or poorly written excuses can make a bad review a lot worse. Research the situation, write up something to address all of the customer’s concerns, and proofread!! (We recommend using the program Grammarly before posting your review).

    It isn’t enough to simply be apologetic or empathetic; you need to be actionable. Tell the reviewer what actions you are taking to correct the experience. Like anything you’d put on your website or pay to put on an advertisement, this response will stay on the internet and will be read by customers and prospective customers. You want to get it right the first time.

  4. Give Your Direct Contact Information if Necessary

    If there is an issue brought up in the review that is particularly concerning, show that you care. People like people, so when you are putting a real face and voice to your business and showing you truly care about their concerns, they will appreciate it. The whole conversation doesn’t need to be online, but it shows you are willing and putting forth the effort to make it right.

Why online reviews are important for SEO

Another huge benefit that online reviews can have for your business is an increase in your search engine optimization efforts.

Having more reviews and more stars in the Google Local Pack (and across other online review sites) doesn’t only help your business become more trustworthy and enticing—it also helps with SEO.

Although the world of SEO is ever-changing, there are still habits to be made and key areas that will always be important (at least we think so). And let’s face it; being proactive in at least one of these areas is never going to have a negative impact on your online presence.

A BrightLocal survey notes that “two recent studies by Moz and The Local SEO Guide show the variety of ranking factors that influence local search rankings. Both of these studies show that online reviews influence where a business appears in Google’s Local 3-Pack results and in localized organic search results.” They have also said that the Star Rankings in the Google Local Pack “generate higher [click-through rate] CTR than organic search results.”1

Yes, it’s true. Having your customers do the work for you by writing reviews for your business will have a positive impact on your SEO – especially when it is estimated that online reviews account for nearly 10% of Google’s total SEO ranking factors.

How? Well, online reviews give your company relevant and recent content on the web. When customers are writing about your products, they are adding to your long tail keywords and helping your company show up in search results when other consumers are looking for products and services that you have.

But what are all of the ways? Let’s get into it.

Long Tail Keywords

Keywords are important determining factors for how consumers find your content on the web. What are they searching to reach your business? What needs or wants do they have that you provide the solution for? You should be aware of what keywords to be targeting in not only your paid search but also your organic search as well.

Besides using your own created content to drive consumers to find your business, online reviews can also help you in this component of SEO.

What exactly are long tail keywords? They are typically three-to-four word searches or phrases that visitors are typing in their search bar to look for what it is they want or need to purchase. Long tail keywords focus on consumers that are later in the buying journey (typically BOFU, or bottom of funnel leads) and know specifically what they are looking for.

Since reviewers have already purchased from or had an experience with your company, it is likely that they will be mentioning some of your long tail keywords in their review – which will help when other consumers are searching for solutions or products for those same phrases. Not only will it bring them to your company, but also show that you are a reputable and reliable source for their need.

Relevant & Recent Content

Online reviews also contribute relevant content on the web about your business and continuously give the internet recent content about your company as well.

Perhaps you are constantly creating new blog articles, lead magnets or web pages with good keywords and relevant content, but reviews will do this for you in addition to your own work – and without any effort! When someone else is writing content for you and about you, it will improve your rankings as well as improve your online review rating. What’s better than that?

Increase in Traffic

Consumer searches for something they need.

Consumer clicks on review website to find the best company to provide what they are looking for.

Consumer finds your company as highest-ranked with the most recent reviews.

Consumer goes to your website.

It’s pretty simple, right? So why wouldn’t you work on increasing your online review presence when it’ll drive more potential customers to your website?

Besides getting more leads coming on your site – websites with higher traffic receive better relevancy scores for their SEO. If people are searching and clicking through to your site more often, then Google sees that as “good” and will increase your ranking.

Visibility on Review Sites

Achieve more online reviews, appear on more on review sites.

The more reviews you have, the more you will show up not only in regular searches but in peoples’ searches on particular review websites as well. And when roughly 85% of consumers reported reading online reviews and about 67% of them read 6 reviews or less before they form an opinion about a given business – you want your business showing up as an option.9

Use online reviews to help your business offline, too

By now you should be convinced that managing your online reputation is important and that the best way is through earning online reviews from your customers.

Although it is great to have a good reputation and earn new customers through your positive review presence, what are some other actionable ways that you can use customers’ reviews?

Online reviews do not only have to stay confined to the internet – they can be brought to life by aiding in your internal and operational day-to-day to better your business. Be proud of your reviews—show them off! You can aggregate reviews on your website, use them in promotional ads, make signs in your store, or combine them to publish a testimonial paper.

Gathering feedback from your audience through online reviews helps you gain insight from their experience.

Use Customer Feedback to Improve

Feedback from online reviews helps your business, product(s), and/or customer experience improve due to the reactions and suggestions received.

How?

Reviews don’t only exist as customer opinions for others to learn about your business – they also serve as feedback from customers. Of course, you want to do more of what they say you are doing well, and take note of areas for improvement.

Your reviews inevitably won’t all be entirely positive, so make sure to notice the less-than-favorable or suggested enhancements from customer experiences.

As long as you have someone assigned to regularly checking your new online reviews or – even better – an aggregate online review system, you can stay on top of what consumers are saying about your business. Keep track of improvement suggestions to implement in your products or internal processes, especially those that are mentioned more than once.

Competitive Benchmarking

By viewing online reviews of your competition, you will learn what you can do that your competitors can’t or what you do better than they do and vice-versa.

Determine if any improvements or processes can be improved by what your peers are doing. Do customers seem to comment on one aspect of their business that they really like that you can implement on your end? Maybe you should start doing something similar! Do they seem to lack in customer service but you know that is the bread-and-butter of what makes people choose you over them? Continue to work on staying great in that area of your business.

Receive Even More Positive Reviews

Once you start using your online reviews to make improvements, you should gain more positive online reviews simply from making your business better and listening to customer feedback.

Update customers who left reviews suggesting (or complaining) about a particular aspect of your business when you implement changes so they, and the rest of your audience, see that you are listening and improving thanks to your customers.

This not only shows that you actually take time to read reviews but listen to them and take action as well. And you are now a more trustworthy, personable, and great business for doing so.

How using an aggregate online review platform can help

If all of this information and handling your online review presence seems overwhelming, an aggregate review platform may be the answer for your business.

What does an aggregate review platform do?

CallSource’s online review platform, CS Reviews, can help in a few ways:

  • Generate
    • Simple interface to request reviews from your clients
    • Better control by filtering unhappy comments
    • Makes it easy to share good reviews and celebrate your successes
  • Listen
    • All of your reviews are in one centralized dashboard, so you can hear what your clients are saying
    • Easy on-the-go access
    • Receive alerts to know what people are saying about you
  • Respond
    • Respond to reviews from inside the dashboard, so you don’t have to log into each site
    • Negative reviews are easily managed to improve your customer service
    • Don’t have time? We can respond for you!

If you don’t want to login to all of the separate sites where online reviews may be left for your business, and/or to read and respond to every review yourself, an online review platform is extremely beneficial to maintaining a positive online reputation.

Conclusion

Although this guide has a lot of information, the key takeaways are simple.

  1. Online reviews are important.
  2. You need to ask customers to leave you reviews.
  3. While negative reviews can have an undesirable impact on your business, but you can reply to them in a way to turn a bad thing into good.
  4. Online reviews don’t only help manage your brand reputation – they can also aid in your SEO efforts and improving your business offline, too.

We hope this guide helped you become well-informed about how to manage your reputation with online reviews.

If you have further questions regarding call management or just are interested in learning more, subscribe to our blog or contact a CallSource specialist for more insights and solutions.

We are the experts in call tracking, call management, performance management, review management, and digital management. Contact us today to learn how we can help with your call management needs.
 

  1. https://www.brightlocal.com/learn/local-consumer-review-survey/
  2. https://www.reviewinc.com/WoodburyOnlineReviewsSurvey2014.pdf
  3. https://moz.com/blog/new-data-reveals-67-of-consumers-are-influenced-by-online-reviews
  4. https://moderncomment.com/customer-feedback-stats
  5. Wang, Yang, and Alexander Chaudhry. “When and How Managers’ Responses to Online Reviews Affect Subsequent Reviews.” Journal of Marketing Research (In Press).
  6. https://www.forbes.com/sites/sage/2014/03/03/handling-haters-how-to-respond-to-negative-online-reviews/#4517d24e6a85
  7. https://www.reviewtrackers.com/online-review-monitoring/
  8. https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/09/06/how-a-strategy-for-customer-reviews-can-impact-seo-brightonseo/
  9. https://searchengineland.com/2013-study-79-of-consumers-trust-online-reviews-as-much-as-personal-recommendations-164565

Why Your Business Needs CallSource

by

Introduction

CallSource is the premier technology-enabled business performance company who invented call tracking over 25 years ago.

Having tracked over 1 billion phone calls, CallSource is the industry expert in all things call tracking. We have developed our products based on our clients’ feedback, wants, and needs.

CallSource is much more than just a SaaS call tracking company. With human-analyzed lead scoring, appointment confirmation, and employee performance overviews, as well as real call coaches and a reputation management system that responds to reviews for you, CallSource aims to help our clients improve in all aspects of their business.

No matter how you record your phone calls, or where you receive online reviews, CallSource provides data-driven recommendations to improve your marketing spend, optimize employee performance, manage your brand reputation, and help increase your bottom line.

If you are not using any call tracking solution, you are blindly making decisions for your business. Ringing phones are a sign of a healthy business, and you spend many thousands of dollars to make phones ring. Call tracking is essential to make informed marketing decisions based on real data, not assumptions, of marketing and employee performance.

The CallSource Purpose is to enhance performance, accomplishments, and results for individuals and organizations in work and in life. We are here to help you on your business journey.

How the CallSource Solution Works

“Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.”
– Peter Drucker 

What sets CallSource apart from our competition is our human element.

We humanize your business through our data, giving you actionable options for what you can do right now to improve.
We have unparalleled customer service because of the great humans who work at our company.

We are the only call tracking company that uses humans to score and analyze phone calls, as artificial intelligence (AI) still isn’t at a place to compete with human accuracy.

Although it is a marketing attribution technology, call tracking helps you get to know your customers and what drives them to your business. Data is necessary to make informed business decisions, but it does nothing for your organization without humans diagnosing the data and taking actions based on analytics.

What is call tracking?

At its simplest, call tracking is a set of unique phone numbers (local or toll free) for each marketing campaign that you want to track. Ideally, you should include all of your ad sources, such as your website, direct mail pieces, television advertising, and online listings. All calls to these numbers are routed to your main line(s).

When a potential customer calls in to a call tracking number, detailed information — including the caller’s phone number, name, address, connection status, duration, and more — is automatically captured. The call recordings can be listened to almost immediately after the fact for review.

By viewing call tracking reports, you can see which advertisements drive the most calls to your business, and whether or not you need to move around some of your marketing spend for the best ROI. You can also see the busiest call times for your business, so that you can staff your employees accordingly.

Moving beyond call tracking

Meter showing good to greatCall tracking benefits all appointment-based business. However, there are many more solutions to truly move the needle for your business.

CallSource’s call management solution, which is a suite of our products, tracks and records phone calls, then filters those calls through our phone analytic system. No other solution comes close to the accuracy of CallSource.

While our competitors rely on the speech analysis of robots and crowdsourcing to monitor your calls, we use real people who know your industry to listen and determine the true outcome of every call.

With lead scoring, appointment-conversion rates, employee report cards, call coaching, and reputation management, there are many solutions to help improve employee performance and accurately attribute marketing.

Employee Performance Improvement & Brand Management

“You now have to decide what ‘image’ you want for your brand. Image means personality. Products, like people, have personalities, and they can make or break them in the marketplace.”
– David Ogilvy 

What Brand Management Means for Your Business

Having a consistent and cohesive brand is important for any successful business. Your brand isn’t just a pretty logo plastered on different materials; it encompasses what your business stands for, and what problems you solve for your customers.

CallSource empowers a consistent brand experience for your customers from the moment a potential customer calls your business. Your call handlers are a potential customer’s first impression of who your business is. How your employees speak to customers should be consistent with how your website represents you, and the tone you use in your online review responses. By speaking with united messaging and similar tones, your brand becomes more personal and is able to connect with consumers on a deeper level.

Your employees are an integral part of your brand. By properly managing your employees and their performance, you are managing your brand and its reputation.

Improving Employee Performance

Your phone handlers are callers’ first impression of your business. No matter your industry, as a business that relies on appointments to drive customer acquisition and sales, you need your phone handlers to deliver a consistent phone experience and adhere to the principles of a successful call. Call handlers should have a sales-type mentality when answering all inbound calls, with their number-one goal being to gain the caller’s commitment to your business by the end of the phone conversation.

It is not enough to be polite and answer questions; call handlers must take control of the conversation and ask callers to set an appointment with your business.

How do you ensure that your employees are delivering consistent service while selling the appointment to customers if you are not measuring performance?

Improve employee’s phone skills with our free call handler audit.

The Importance of Measuring Call Conversion Rates

By receiving analytics on your employees’ phone calls, you can easily see where your call handlers are excelling, and where they need more training and coaching to improve.

CallSource scores all inbound calls with real human analysts at an accuracy rate of 95% or above. Our analysts listen to and categorize calls based on true prospects and appointments set. We analyze each phone call so you don’t have to. The benefits of third-party scoring versus self-scored calls means your call handler is concentrating on the customer and not trying remember every nuance of the call. Having CallSource score your calls also means that every call is consistently scored, providing the business with unbiased data to make better-informed decisions.

Missed opportunity alerts allow you to take control of call handlers’ lost leads to recapture lost business, and improve appointment conversion rates. Without insights into how many of your inbound leads do not commit to an appointment during the phone call, you are losing business to your competitor.

Increasing Conversion Rates Through Call Coaching

Your call handlers’ calls are scored based on key indicators to ensure that proper conversational tactics for a successful, appointment-driven phone call are employed. Managers and employees receive a scorecard of call-handling performance. Call coaching is also available to boost performance where it is needed.

CallSource’s criteria for call-handler performance is based on over 25 years of analyzing and scoring phone calls. Call handlers are scored using a special scorecard developed by CallSource and honed over the years, called our Core Four Principles of a phone call.

With employee scorecards, appointment conversion rate reports, and call coaching, you will have real data to help improve your employees’ skills. Using this personalized data to learn which employees need help and what they need help with will help call handlers improve phone expertise, and enable them to set more appointments, giving your business more opportunities to make sales.

“I always thought my staff was great, but after I bought a new office, and compared its poor marketing results to our other offices, I suspected the front office staff was underperforming. I didn’t have the visibility to be sure what the problem was and I needed a way to know for sure. With the data CallSource provided, I knew which phone staffers learned from the training we gave, and I knew when a specific phone handler fumbled. It was one of the top three best business decisions I ever made.”
– Mark Sanford, CSG Better Hearing 

Measuring Your Success With Marketing Attribution

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.”
– John Wanamaker 

To accurately attribute your marketing spend and its success, you must track it.

Call tracking is the most accurate way to attribute your offline marketing. Knowing what you spent per advertising source, and tying that back to the number and quality of the calls that it drove, gives you your true ROI.

How CallSource Helps Inform Your Marketing Spend

We know that it costs money to make the phone ring, and even more to convert a lead into an actual appointment. CallSource reporting takes the guesswork out of where to invest your marketing dollars, and serves as leverage with your vendors when it comes time to evaluate your advertising performance.

Ensuring that a third party is tracking your marketing performance (instead of relying on reports provided to you from your different marketing vendors or personal evaluations) provides reliable and accurate data for better results.

By not only simply seeing how many calls are coming in from each ad source, but by viewing the types of calls coming in filtered through our human analytics, you can see if your magazine advertisement is truly bringing in 50 leads per month, or if 90% of those inbound phone calls are repeat callers or solicitations.

Reviewing call conversion reports by marketing source can help isolate poorly performing ads and highlight ads that are bringing in leads who are ready to schedule the appointment. Call conversion reporting can also give insight into which of your call handlers are not converting prospective customers into appointments, so you know where to focus your efforts.

“CallSource has helped us track specific marketing efforts, giving us a better negotiating position with various media outlets when it comes to setting prices for time and space.”
– Phil Clement, Daniel’s Energy 

Online to Offline Attribution

Although call tracking was invented before digital marketing existed, there are many similarities between the two. Both offline (or traditional) and digital attribution are indicators of advertising effectiveness. Both shed light on your customers’ journey to your business and offer ROI reporting. When you couple digital and offline attribution together, a customer’s entire journey is revealed.

Just as CallSource pioneered the call tracking industry, our digital platform is unlike any other, bringing offline and online attribution together to accurately track your customers not only across domains and channels, but across devices.

Our platform is one-of-a-kind, tracking every phone call, chat, text, and web visit that’s coming from your advertising – all in one real-time dashboard.

Conclusion

“Outstanding people have one thing in common: an absolute sense of mission.”
– Zig Ziglar 

As an appointment-driven business that relies on the phone to make sales, you will greatly benefit by using CallSource’s solutions and putting in the effort to improve your performance.

With 99.999% uptime, we’re your source for reliability and confidence that your calls are getting through. Our platform is proven, and we work with only the finest Tier 1 class phone carriers.

Although most call tracking services utilize AI and speech analytics to deliver their call analyses, CallSource uses real human analysts to listen to calls and deliver highly accurate data. While speech analytics is useful for a number of things, it lacks the accuracy required to grade an employee’s telephone skills fairly.

CallSource also has the best team to deliver the best-rated customer service. Every client gets a dedicated team assigned specifically to them as well as round-the-clock customer service teams working to make sure that you never go with a question unanswered.

“I can’t say enough about the support we have received from the CallSource team, especially our account rep who is always there to answer our questions or schedule and conduct dealer trainings.”
– Mitch Gaber, Englert, Inc. 

Getting Started with CallSource

Onboarding with CallSource is easy to do. We will provide you with new toll free or local phone numbers to publish on your various marketing sources. If you prefer, you can port in your existing marketing source numbers, or integrate your existing recording method to benefit from our services.

Customer service is the number-one priority for us, and every client receives a designated team of CallSource representatives on their account. Your CallSource team will have an introductory call with you within days of signing up to guide you through any set up and walk you through our easy-to-use reporting platform.

Our continuing advisory services will ensure that you are not just getting data delivered to you, but that you know how to use this data and set goals based on our reporting.

Start Now

CallSource’s solutions provide the insights based on 25+ years of experience and over 1 billion phone calls tracked. In order to grow your business and acquire new customers, you will need to put in efforts to improve. Using call tracking and actionable analytics will guarantee your future improvement success.

It’s time to let us help you reach your goals. CallSource is ready to take this journey with you.

Request a Demo

Your Newest Customers, Millennials, Are Changing Up the Car Buying Process. So Where Should You Focus Your Efforts?

by 3 Comments

Millennials optimize the online car buying process more than any previous consumers. What does this mean for dealers?

It’s no secret to car dealers that the process of car selling is ever-changing. Besides the evolution of automobiles themselves, there is also another important factor changing in the industry—the customer.

As the largest call tracking company in the world and having worked with auto dealerships for over 20 years, CallSource sees all the trends in the automotive marketing space—so you can say we know a thing or two about it.

It is important to not only focus on the car selling process but the car buying process that your consumers are experiencing. And while it may or not be surprising for dealerships, millennials (people born between 1981 and 1997) are making up a bigger customer-base than you may have previously thought. Seriously –AutoRaptor reports that as of April 2016, millennials are the largest living generation in America.

The question that remains is: where should you be focusing your marketing and selling efforts to most effectively meet your sales quotas and your millennial customers’ needs? The answer, of course, can be found online.

Quite literally—I mean the answer is the internet. You need to focus more on your online process and the online car buying journey.

OK, focusing a bit more on your online efforts probably isn’t any groundbreaking news for you – but I want to make sure that you understand the significance. Having a website isn’t enough; there are many facets of the online experience that you need to pay attention to, especially when it’s reported that millennials spend over 17 hours researching their vehicle before purchasing it, and 71% of them need to be aware of all of their possible vehicle options.

These two stats combined show that they are obviously perusing many other sites other than your own, so you need to make sure that your dealership stands out online, and that doesn’t only include your website.

How do you do this?

Dealers Need to Focus on Online Reviews

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again—you need to focus on your online review presence! This is even more vital when attracting millennial customers, who are more likely to read and write online reviews. Still not convinced that you need to spend more time on reputation management? This statistic may change your mind.

BrightLocal reports that 97% of millennials read local business’ online reviews, and 89% of them trust online reviews. That means a better online review presence may make the difference between winning or losing a customer.

Don’t think that just because you may be in the closest proximity to customers that they’ll choose you for convenience—Digital Air Strike’s Sixth Annual Automotive Social Media Trends study for 2017 reports that 72% of car buyers and 63% of service customers would drive 20-60 miles to a dealership with good reviews. Don’t you think that’s worth striving for?

Get Smarter on Smart Phones at your Dealership

Most of us are guilty of being attached at the hip with our smartphones; it’s a device that millennials are using when doing some of their online research. Sad as I am to report this, according to AutoRaptor, 80% of millennials have texted in the past 24 hours, and 83% of them even sleep with their mobile device.

Automotive text-enabled phone numbers

This is why you need to be sure to have a great mobile-enabled website, as well as tech-savvy smartphone capabilities such as text alerts, click-to-call, and app integrations. If a consumer tries to text you and your number isn’t text-enabled, they will think that you are ignoring them, and move on to your competitor who does have text-enabled lines.

Don’t be left behind due to a lack of being up-to-date with your technology.

Mobile-Friendly Sites to Sell More Automobiles

Don’t know if you have a mobile-friendly site? Check out Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test. It’s a free mobile evaluation tool.

Dealers Need Digital Ads

AutoTrader reports that 82% of millennials credit third-party sites as the top source of their purchase decision. You want to make sure your dealership appears on all of these sites, and anywhere across the web that consumers are looking as a part of their buying decision.

If you don’t know where they’re looking, you don’t know where to target this customer-base. But when you can track the entire customer journey – cross-domain AND cross-device, you can ensure you are showcasing your dealership to prospective customers and understanding how people get to your dealership.

Less Isn’t More

I don’t want to say that millennials are more flashy than their Baby Boomer parents but…I’m going to say it, they’re more flashy. When you can show off everything you have in a few clicks to a social media site, how can you blame them? According to AutoTrader’s study, millennials care about owning the best brand and are willing to pay more for a product that fits with their image.

Marketers and salespeople know that achieving a sales lead is no time to be modest – show off on your website what features your dealership has that makes you the best and put your vehicles’ special features in the forefront when listing cars. You know that millennials are going to do a deep dive into figuring out all that they can anyway, why not deliver it all up front?

Schedule a time to learn how CallSource’s EveryLead platform can show you which cars consumers are looking at now – and make sure to keep your most popular vehicles in stock.

Auto Dealers Need to Get More Social on Social Media

You better believe that some of millennials’ online research will lead them to social channels. If you aren’t present there, it can be catastrophic for your dealership. The truth is, they might not even find you to begin with if you aren’t present on social media.

Digital Air Strike reported that 77% of car buyers and 55% of Service Customers clicked on a Facebook ad because of an offer or promo, and a recent report by Deloitte found that 47% of millennials say social media influences their purchase decisions (compared to 19% across other age groups). Where are you advertising?

Social media isn’t only for gaining new customers, though. You should be using your social channels to regularly communicate with your audiences, especially if someone directly communicates with you via these platforms. Sprout Social reports that 30% of millennials engage with a brand on social at least once a month, but also—89% of social media messages to brands go ignored. Yet, the top choice for a customer care channel is social media. Don’t be a part of this disconnect—use social media to your advantage in marketing and customer service.

Keep Consumers Engaged With Your Dealership

It’s evident in this internet-era that people just don’t have quite the attention span you may be hoping for. And when, as we mentioned, millennials are spending over 17 hours doing their car research before buying—it’s important to get their attention back to your dealership. Responding quickly to online chats, tweets, or whatever digital way your consumer is interacting with you is imperative.

Do you know how your social chat feature on your website is doing? How about the number of consumers who are visiting your website and then leaving to visit another dealer’s site? Well, with EveryLead, you can see these stats and more. With this newest product, you can see transcripts of online chats, which cars your consumers are viewing, and how many are defected to competitor sites—all in one easy dashboard.

So what are you waiting for? Get working on your online presence and start selling to your largest pool of customers! The millennials are waiting for it.

Schedule a demo with a CallSource Automotive Specialist now and start improving your dealership’s sales – even to millennials.

The Phone is Vital to Your Dental Practice’s Patient Experience

by

As an appointment-based business, your dental office relies on the phone for new patients and book appointments with existing patients. The phone is an integral part of your full customer experience scope, and should not be ignored.

It is the experience that is delivered which leads to positive online reviews from patients.

Maximize reviews for your practice by ensuring your front office staff provides exceptional phone skills; giving a great first impression on the phone starts the patient’s experience with your office as a positive one.

Patients are calling your office

The easiest way for patients and potential patients to get a hold of you is via the phone. Therefore, this is the first point of the patient experience.

Patients call through your marketing materials

When new patients discover your dental office, they will need to contact you for any inquiries, including booking the appointment. Usually, this point of communication will be via the phone.

You probably rely on marketing to acquire new patients. Your marketing materials should be targeted for your practice’s ideal types of patients, prompting them to contact you. These marketing materials may include:

  • Direct Mail
  • Radio Advertisement
  • TV Commercial
  • Newspaper Ad
  • Online Ads
  • Etc.

Make sure each of your ads have an easy to find contact method included so that people who are ready for your services can quickly get a hold of you. The most common form of contact is a phone number.

Learn how to effectively use call tracking for your dental practice
– in under 30 minutes a week!

Patients call your office after finding you through local search

Another way that consumers may find you would be by searching online to find a practice near them. When they find your office, either from your SEO efforts, local search, or a great online review presence, they will visit your website or use one of the contact methods found on a review website or provided by Google. It is important to make sure you have a working phone number for all of these places that your business has a presence online.

Discover how using call tracking phone numbers
can help your dental office.

Patients call from a referral

Even patients that are referred to you by someone will most likely ask their referrer for your phone number as the point of contact.

No matter how a patient finds your office, it is a high chance that they will call your office as the preferred contact method.

Why a good phone experience is necessary for a positive reputation

When patients call into your office from your ads, finding you organically, or through a referral, you want to be sure that your front office staff has the skills to give a great first impression by providing a superior phone experience to potential new patients.

Your phone handlers are the first point of contact that a new patient has with your office – don’t ruin the first impression and lose a potential patient with a poor experience over the phone.

Get our free call handler checklist for the qualities
of a successful inbound call.

Improve front office staff’s phone skills

To receive great online reviews, you must be sure that your employees are delivering a consistent and positive phone experience to existing and potential patients calling your office.

Are you ready to stay accountable and employee scorecards and coaching your office? Reach us today at 888.788.0123 to learn more, or we can have someone contact you.

Improve your call handlers appointment setting techniques.

Get Employee Report Cards and Call Coaching

I want to talk to learn more about improving
my call handlers’ phone skills

Why Should You Incentivize Your Employees?

by Leave a Comment

Let me ask you a question.

If your friend asked you to help them move, how willing would you be to help them? If you’re a great friend, maybe you’d say yes with no questions asked – but internally, how much would you really want to help? Let’s be honest, no one likes moving.

Now, let’s say that this same friend offers to take you to a nice dinner with drinks after helping them move. The incentive for you to assist them in moving makes the activity a bit more worth it for you. Sure, you are still doing a kind favor for your friend, but you won’t be as bummed about the un-fun, laborious task.

The same goes for your employees at work. Although their job is not something you are asking them to volunteer for (they are getting paid), it still helps to create a little light at the end of the tunnel of the regular day-to-day tasks.

This is also important for employee turnover. Access Perks reports that roughly $11 billion is lost due to employee turnover. Don’t you think that employee incentives will help restrict these losses?

Incentivizing employees

If your business relies on appointments to make sales and acquire customers, then a main priority for your employees is obviously to book appointments. Yet, it may be unclear to inbound call handlers that setting the appointment is truly their most important task is to set appointments. They have other tasks to accomplish as well, so they may start to see themselves as simply “order takers” or just a body there to answer the phone and the callers’ questions. If they properly answered all of the caller’s questions and had a good attitude on the phone, then they accomplished their goal, right? Wrong.

If you clearly communicate to your employees that appointment-setting is a crucial metric for them by tracking their performance and creating a contest for your call handlers to see who has the highest appointment-setting conversion rate each month where the winner gets some sort of prize—don’t you think they will try a heck of a lot harder to do their best to set more appointments?

Incentive plans motivate your team and help them appreciate that they have control over booking a prospect into an appointment. In fact, it shows them that they truly are in control of and responsible for exceeding expectations in their job duties.

Why are incentive plans important?

Incentive plans motivate employees to do exactly what they are incentivized to do. As owners and managers, you must decide what you want your employees to accomplish. If you task employees with multiple duties, keep in mind that people will usually focus more on the tasks they are incentivized to do. If you want your team to increase the amount of booked estimates, they will focus on that more than other tasks or goals.

Check out our incentive stats infographic here.

According to DCR Strategies Inc., while “90% of business leaders believe that an engagement strategy could positively impact their business, only 25% of them actually have a strategy in place.” This is surprising since it is also reported that having a valuable, structured incentive program in place can increase employee performance by as much as 44%. What would a 44% increase mean for your business?

As noted earlier; it is reported that about $11 billion is lost each year due to employee turnover. Without good engagement and good company culture in the day-to-day workplace, there is a great chance that you will experience a high turnover rate. But having a good incentive plan in place can help. Companies that implemented an official, planned-out incentive or engagement program found a 64% greater increase in employee engagement than companies without this plan in place.

Download our free Incentive Plan Checklist here and create the perfect incentive plan for your employees.

What Makes an Incentive Plan “Good”?

A good incentive plan is considered to be fun, exciting and rewarding. Strong plans will keep your employees engaged and motivate them. The incentive plan should provide an opportunity to gain something, such as higher pay, cash bonuses, or other perks such as catered lunches or gift cards.

According to Strategic Incentives, over 65% of participants in their study strongly agreed that travel or merchandise awards are remembered longer than strictly cash payments. Think about what would motivate you, or what would excite your team. You’ll know if you’re successful because your call handlers will be excited and they will start to hit the goals that you set in place with your incentive programs. You know your team, so you should take the time to understand what they would strive for.

If you are stumped for incentive plans, here are some non-cash incentive ideas for you.

Start Incentivizing!

Hopefully, these statistics and tips have helped you see the light that it is worth allocating a portion of your yearly budget towards employee incentives – it should not be seen as an added expense. When incentives will make your employees happier, provide a better workspace, and help increase your revenue, why wouldn’t you have incentive plans in place? It’s truly a no-brainer.

Have other ideas for employee incentives? Drop us your thoughts below! We would love to share best practices.

Google Agrees: Your Home Services Company Should Respond to Online Reviews

by

Reviews are all around us.

You want to find a new restaurant in town to eat at? You’ll look up some hot spots and check out their reviews.

You have to get your car serviced and don’t have a go-to mechanic? You’re going to hop onto Google and look up reviews.

So how are consumers choosing your home services company as the local business they want to use?

Most likely – it’s reviews.

Online reviews help consumers in the buying process.

While you should already know how online reviews impact your home services company, the next step is taking the time to respond to the reviews you receive.

When choosing a company to help with their home service needs, consumers want to make sure that the company that they choose is reliable, affordable, and will cater to their needs. When reading reviews, a company’s review page that shows the manager responding to others’ online reviews demonstrates that the company is personable and takes that extra step to really care about its customers.

But why else should you respond to customers online reviews?

Keep informed of your online review presence

When you are committing to responding to new reviews that you receive, you are making sure that you are also keeping up-to-date on your review presence.

You should dedicate a responsible employee to regularly check your online review presence – this person may be a manager, or perhaps even a customer service representative.

By dedicating the time to keep up on your reviews, the responsible person must make a list of all popular review sites that your company appears on, keeping in mind any industry-specific review sites such as Angie’s list.

If your budget allows, consider an aggregate online review platform that has the ability to automatically alert you whenever a new review is left on any review site your business appears on.

Don’t let a negative review ruin your reputation

No one wants to get a negative review from a bad customer experience, but unfortunately, they are bound to happen from time to time. Fortunately, bad reviews won’t altogether ruin your reputation if you know how to handle them properly.

When data shows that 4 in 5 consumers reverse their purchase decisions based on negative reviews1, it is handling these reviews properly that will ultimately help build your online reputation even higher.

78% of consumers believe a business cares more about them when they see management respond to reviews.2

Make sure to respond quickly – the longer you take to respond to a review, the angrier a customer may be at your business’s lack of response to rectify the situation.

But also don’t respond too hastily. Do your due diligence to research what exactly happened so you can be informed in your response. It isn’t enough to simply be apologetic or empathetic; you need to be actionable.

Tell the reviewer what actions you are taking to correct the experience. Like anything you’d put on your website or pay to put on an advertisement, this response will stay on the internet and will be read by customers and prospective customers. You want to get it right the first time.

Lastly, if there is an issue brought up in the review that is particularly concerning, show that you care. People like people, so when you are putting a real face and voice to your business and showing you truly care about their concerns, they will appreciate it. The whole conversation doesn’t need to be online, but it shows you are willing and putting forth the effort to make it right.

Get the checklist for responding to negative reviews here.

Increase your local SEO with review responses

Having more reviews and more stars in the Google Local Pack (and across other online review sites) doesn’t only help your business become more trustworthy and enticing—it also helps with SEO.

But don’t just take our word for it; see what Google themselves says about review responses:

“Interact with customers by responding to reviews that they leave about your business. Responding to reviews shows that you value your customers and the feedback that they leave about your business. High-quality, positive reviews from your customers will improve your business’s visibility and increase the likelihood that a potential customer will visit your location.”

Having your customers do the work for you by writing reviews for your business will have a positive impact on your SEO – especially when it is estimated that online reviews account for nearly 10% of Google’s total SEO ranking factors.

How? Well, online reviews give your company relevant and recent content on the web. When customers are writing about your company and services, they are adding to your long tail keywords and helping your business show up higher in search results when other consumers are looking for the products and services that you provide.

When you respond to these reviews, you boost your SEO efforts as well by becoming a more reputable company that consumers want to choose, therefore earning more clicks and showing that your company resonates with what people are searching for, therefore helping you earn higher search rankings.

Take Hold of Your Online Reputation

If you need help with your reputation management, click here to have someone reach out to you, or contact a representative today at 888.788.0123 to learn more.

Take charge of your online reputation

Get CS Reviews

I want to talk to someone about maximizing my online review presence.

References:
1. https://www.reviewtrackers.com/online-review-monitoring/
2. https://moderncomment.com/customer-feedback-stats