2020 gave us not only the COVID-19 pandemic but a ferocious rise in online sales. There are a lot of start-up entrepreneurs who want to build a business. But not all of them are successful in capturing the attention of the audience and growing the customer base. Let’s consider mistakes commonly made in the promotion or customer communication that need to be fixed. And let’s look into the role IP telephony plays in resolving these issues.
Brand Promotion Mistakes That Small Businesses Do
No Website
It’s easy to open your store on Instagram or Facebook, but if you do not have a website, you have fewer means to promote your project. Social media has a limited list of tools: no convenient catalog, no way to accept a payment, easy to lose a customer when you have a lot of requests, etc. It is a mistake to lose an opportunity to find new clients that can find your website thanks to contextual advertising or banner ads, search promotion, partners, and target ads. But mainly, a website makes it easier for customers to look up information about the company and gives more points of contact.
No Data on Customer Experience
Customers love when you remember them. And you will have a hard time developing your business if you do not track where your customers come from, who they are, and what they like. Many users make an order after chatting with a manager on social media. Although, it is not a good idea to depend only on chats, not backing up the information to a separate database. You can lose the chat history with your customer on social media and the order along with it. More than that, there is a risk that someone hacks your profile.
Responsibility for tracking every stage of the sale and delivery lies with the business, not the customer. So even a start-up cannot stay without a CRM system to keep all information about orders and the stages of their execution. Besides, you can connect a virtual number to a CRM as well. It will give you cheap outgoing calls to inform customers when their order is ready.
It Is Difficult to Reach You
When customers have questions, they want to connect to the company as soon as possible. But what to do if they have a problem and cannot receive an immediate reply from a manager through chat, on social media, or through email? At best, they receive a reply in an hour. At worst, they will become disappointed in the service. For a small business where every single client matters, one critical review may lead to losing trust and profit for a long time.
Because you are expected to provide quick support, you need a channel with top priority where your customers can contact you and get a quick response from you. More often than not, a phone number becomes such a channel. IP telephony can be used in the communication process.
Virtual numbers work from any place, they are not tied to a device, and they will allow the entrepreneur or managers to reply to the calls of customers after configuring call forwarding. VoIP number gives you additional channels to interact with clients.
How to improve customer experience with virtual telephony:
- Organize customer numbers. A virtual number has statistics of calls, all contact numbers are recorded. They can be imported into CRM;
- Don’t miss customer requests outside your business hours. For example, your working hours are till 7 PM. You can set up a voicemail feature on your VoIP number so that all customers who call you after 7 PM will leave their message;
- Communicate with customers without caring where you are. Even if you are traveling, you are still connected with a virtual number and are not spending more on the calls. You are still available overseas even without roaming;
- Answer several calls at once. IP numbers have flexible call forwarding. You can work with a colleague and communicate with several clients simultaneously;
- Control over the marketing. If you are planning to use several advertisement methods, then you can track what works best and gives you more ROI by using different virtual phone numbers for each channel.
Lack of Effort to Be Heard and Remembered
If an entrepreneur relies on the belief that it is enough to offer a product of high quality and people make orders immediately, this is an erroneous judgment. Because promoting your start-up on social media is really simple, the supply side of the trade has increased significantly. The sales funnel has become more complicated, because users are more demanding in choosing a store.
You can use the following to amplify your brand:
- reviews;
- demonstration of how the product is made;
- personalized service.
You can increase the number of interactions by installing the Click to call widget on your website. It is an easy way to bring customers more convenience from the start because a customer can contact a manager just by clicking one button.
Another IP telephony service, a voice greeting, will help your brand become more recognizable. Within your greeting, you can talk about current promotions, piquing the interest of the user who called the store.
As you can see, these promotion and communication mistakes are not something rare, they are quite common. Ignoring them, you slow down the process of your business development. And virtual telephony is an affordable tool for both communication and better customer retention.
