Ifbyphone Blog

You can never know enough about how your business is running, how customers are interacting with your employees and the different services you offer, or what time of a day, month, or year is the busiest for your business in terms of incoming calls.  The reports and analytics available with the Ifbyphone service lets you drill down to the core of your business and see exactly how your communications are working.  Use the Call Analyzer Report to compare the amount of incoming  calls and Click-to-Calls to the outbound calls your business is making.  The Call Detail Report will allow you to track caller ID, call duration, and everything a caller did on your phone lines once they reached you.  Maybe the majority of your customers prefer to leave a voicemail rather than speak to a live person.  If you’re aware of these things, you can tailor your Ifbyphone set-up to suit your needs.   These reports and others give you a wealthy insight into how to better run your company.  It’s just one of many ways Ifbyphone works to improve your business’s efficiency.

For more, see the Reports Advanced User’s Guide on the Tutorials page of the Ifbyphone website.

Verizon did something quite remarkable with their new cellular telephones: the phones alert you — as well as anyone else nearby — when you dial the police emergency number. As you might imagine, that’s not always a good thing. More precisely, Verizon is implementing a government mandate that cellular phones notify you when they connect to 911. It’s a bad idea in the first place, of course, but that’s the fault of the FCC. Customers are up in arms.

Now apply this lesson to your telephone service. Your customers are calling from a busy street corner, from an airport lounge, or from a fast-food restaurant. What information do you demand from your customers when they call you? Is that information something they’d be comfortable saying out loud?

Although a person’s social security number and mother’s maiden name has to be one of the worse-kept secrets in the entire world, as it’s known to any one of the millions of merchants who have access to a person’s credit records, people still consider that information to be very private (and rightfully so). Do you demand that your customers provide this highly confidential information over the phone? Do you find that customers are reluctant to give this information out unless they’re speaking to a person?

When I’m in a public place, I don’t like to say my credit card number out loud over the telephone even though a credit card number isn’t much of a secret. The three-digit or four-digit codes that have recently appeared on credit cards are now supposed to be the “real” secret, and I certainly wouldn’t like to give that number out loud.

So, the question becomes: what information do you actually need from your customers? What is the least intrusive information you can request? How can you make your customers comfortable about saying this information out loud?

Voice Broadcast used properly is an effective and reliable alternative to email. Ifbyphone’s services are ideally suited for delivery of customer service information, customer notifications and employee communications. All information valuable to the recipient.For example, let’s say you own a heating and air conditioning company. You used to send emails to your customers in the spring and fall to recommend they schedule a tune up of their air conditioner or furnace. The last couple of years your customers have complained “John, why don’t you email me a reminder anymore?”. But you do. What’s happening. Your emails are going into your customer’s spam folders. Spam technology has rendered email an ineffective customer communications tool.
Instead of using an email message use a Voice Broadcast. Record a short 30 second message to each of your customers. Schedule 20 of these messages to go out a day and offer the customer an option to transfer to your office and make an appointment during the call. Just as email used properly enhances your customer relationships and improves sales, Voice Broadcast used properly is a more reliable delivery vehicle then email, which all to often today ends up in someone’s spam folder.

It’s that time of year: the candidates are about to start calling your home in advance of the primary elections. Sometimes it’ll be pre-recorded messages; sometimes it’ll be “surveys” in which they ask you leading questions; sometimes it might even be utterly fake calls, pretending to be an independent entity taking a survey but with nasty insinuations about political opponents. Most of the smarter candidates have abandoned calls in which they impersonate their opponents, because they sometimes get caught; I suppose the really smart (but utterly amoral) ones might still get away with fake calls.

But if you’re like me, you don’t enjoy these calls. They’re annoying and intrusive; frankly, I try to avoid voting for candidates who go out of their way to annoy me.

What about your business? Political organizations have a legal loophole, but for businesses, blind telephone calls to consumers are illegal; the Federal Trade Commission just issued nearly $8 million in fines to companies that violated the Do Not Call list.

But forget the law for a moment — even if blind calls to consumers were legal, it would still be a bad idea. Sure the calls are cheap, and they can be automated; but how much ill will can your business stand? When I get email spam or an unsoliticted phone call from a company I cross them off my list permanently and won’t do business with then any longer.

If your company does make outbound calls, you’d better be absolutely certain that these calls are welcome.

Let’s travel back in time for a moment, way, way back—to the year 2005. The Internet was beginning to recover from the bubble burst a few years before and IVR technology with automated speech recognition, while commonly used by the customer service departments of large corporations, was still something people were skeptical about. Many consumers preferred human interaction when dealing with billing departments or service specialists. Thinking along these lines, TMC President and blogger Rich Tehrani asked a fundamental question: Does Speech Technology Work? While still in its early adolescence, Tehrani believed that speech technology did, in fact, serve customers well and was the wave of the future. He voiced a level of agreement with an anti-speech technology article linked in his blog, but came to the conclusion that to ignore VoIP and speech technologies was akin to shunning the ATM when it first appeared.

Two years on, Tehrani’s pronouncements have proven to be more than true. Speech technologies not only save businesses money but expedite telephone processes. Less time waiting for an available operator means more time to go about your day—who can complain about that? Businesses have become smarter about designing their VUI and VoIP systems, anticipating areas where it’s wise to have a customer speak directly to a human, and considerate enough to know that some people will always want to speak to with a real, live customer representative. But make no mistake, speech technology works, and it’s changing the way people do business.

Speech is a tricky thing. It can be hard enough to get a co-worker sitting at the desk next to you understand what you’re saying, let alone trying to make a computerized voice machine send you to the right message over the telephone. With so many companies going the way of computerized Virtual Receptionists and using VUIs (voice user interfaces) to conduct day-to-day business, it’s increasingly more important to have a system that can read different accents and variances in speech. But you don’t want to go overboard, either; it wouldn’t be useful to have every cough or neck twitching grunt take you to the CEO’s voice mailbox, would it?

This article in Speech Technologies magazine discusses some of the ways to wisely implement a VUI, as well as outlining what to stay away from. Ifbyphone offers several applications that utilize VUIs. For more information, visit our Home page.

When I go to Starbucks for a cup of tea, I’m always asked what size tea I want. At first I didn’t want to spend time remembering Startbucks’ silly jargon for the different sizes, and I tried to tell them “small” or “medium”; but then I found they would repeat “tall” and “grande” back at me and expect me to parrot the words back at them. I realize that the people behind the counter are only doing their job, but frankly I always try to get tea elsewhere rather than put up with this rather annoying Starbucks marketing trick.

What about your company? Do you expect your customers to learn how to speak to you, or are you responsible for listening to them? Almost every company develops an internal jargon, but that jargon can cause real trouble if you start using it to talk to customers.

Let me give you an example of a poorly-designed telephone application. A few years back I called a local hospital to check up on a bill. I got their automated billing system, and that’s where the fun began. “Please enter your group number. The group number is the two digits to the right of the dash in your account number.” This announcement was so wrong in so many ways that I can’t begin to recite them all, but here’s the summary:

• Trying to teach me their internal jargon (”group number”) was a huge mistake;
• They could have just asked for the entire account number and sorted out what they needed without getting me involved;
• I was so bemused and flustered by the directions that I entered the digits to the left of the dash, and that was that for the phone call.

The basic lesson is quite simple. For a phone application to work successfully, you can’t confuse your customers and they shouldn’t have to learn new tricks. Your announcements have to use words that your customers expect to hear, and the choices that you offer should make sense to the customers.

How do you know what they expect to hear? Listen to what they ask and echo it back to them. If they ask for “a medium cup of tea,” don’t offer them a “grande,” offer them a medium cup of tea. They’ll be happier and less confused; and a happy, less-confused customer will use your telephone application instead of demanding to speak to a live operator.

In a previous blog, we discussed the way placement, image, text, and branding are all vital to a successful Click-to-Call. Those are the basics that lead to more conversations with your customers. But let’s talk specifics. What types of images really grab a Web surfer’s attention? What text leads them to click a button or link and call? With all the advertising money pouring into Internet marketing these days, several studies have been conducted to help explain the subconscious decisions people make while browsing the Web. Though browsing habits vary across age groups and by sex, there are certain things you can count on and take into mind when designing your CTCs.

• Large images jump out more quickly than medium-sized or small images, but it’s not always a good idea to throw a gigantic picture onto your site. What people zero in on most are faces. An image that contains a face, whether it’s a real photo or a graphic image, calls out to people and they look at it. Users also tend to look immediately at headlines, and oftentimes a headline embedded into an image can really strike out at a person. (Source: Eyetrack III)
• As far as images of people go, Web surfers are discerning. Individuals are more likely to look at images of “real people” over those of models because most assume that content which features models are advertisements. Most Web surfers tend to skip over advertisements, preferring to get to the meat of an article ASAP. (Source: Annenberg Online Journalism Review)
• For actionable text that guides a clicker, the consensus amongst researchers is that if you want someone to do something, say it. Simple, plain, commanding but friendly text is the best, and a simple declaration to “click to continue” can raise a click rate by as much as 8%. (Source: Copy blogger)

So what does this all mean? Well, without telling you how to design your CTC, we suggest refraining from going overboard on the size of the image. Remember, your CTC is meant to accent your site but not be the focus of it. Think about a friendly face (though not one of a supermodel) with some text above or below it that tells a caller to “click here to call me now.”

One more thing—callers like to be assured that their number won’t be sold or given away to telemarketers, so it’s a good idea to place this information in the pop-up box that appears when someone clicks the CTC link. If you’re not using a pop-up box, then this information can be written in smaller type below the actionable text.

Only if it gets them a phone call. Why? Because the majority of SMBs will never have a website with a shopping cart. Not because they’re behind the times, but because they aren’t selling things that can go in a shopping cart. Think about plumbers, lawyers and chiropractors. Now, think about that phone call.

Twenty years ago, when you needed a plumber, let’s say in Chicago, you looked in the Yellow Pages. The number of listings was manageable and they were all local. You picked one, called and spoke with a human being. You made the deal at the moment when you wanted a plumber. The Yellow Pages were designed for making phone calls. Google isn’t.

Googling “plumbers Chicago,” returns an overwhelming mess of listings, including some for Tucson plumbers with “Chicago” somewhere on their website. You can only see one page at a time, making it hard to compare or return to a prior listing that seemed interesting. If you do settle on one, you’ll probably have to navigate through the website for a phone number. And when you finally call, it’s likely you have to navigate another menu. In the meantime, your wife got the neighbor to fix the toilet and one Chicago plumber missed a job.

It’s simple human nature. We buy from people we feel connected to. Just browsing a web site we don’t feel connected. Even using a pop-up text chat box, we don’t feel connected. However, talking on the telephone we feel connected. The more human contact we have with a business the more likely we will buy their product or service. Googling “plumbers” is about as impersonal as you can get. The personal relationship is what drives sales more than any other factor. In fact, 75 percent of sales are closed in person and on phone calls, against an anemically small segment for Web site, e-mail, and chat orders, all of which create instant distance between seller and buyer.

It’s not magic: the more callers, the more business.

Adding click-to-call to a website brings back the Yellow Pages Effect, bypassing that sales-chilling period of time between needing something and calling to order it. Click-to-call marries the intimacy and immediacy of the phone to the flexibility of the Web so business can have the power of both.

If click-to-call is so valuable, why aren’t more SMBs using it? The answer until recently was cost.

Just a few of years ago, click-to-call was only available with costly interactive voice response (IVR) systems. Costing thousands of dollars and requiring highly specialized technicians, complex custom programming, and costly infrastructure upgrades, IVR systems were out of reach for all but the largest companies.

Today, the model of delivering business applications and services over the Internet, SaaS (Software as a Service) and mature VoIP technology (Voice over Internet Protocol) can bring advanced IVR capabilities to any business with a website. It’s Communications as a Service and, if you think about it, it’s what the phone company has been doing for over a century. In this model, service providers invest in the infrastructure and specialized skills ( shielding customers from the underlying complexity. All customers need to know is how to use the phone and a browser. Payment is as-you-go ( the same as your home phone.

And now that it’s simple and affordable, the benefits are huge. Click-to-call gives businesses a measurable market advantage, according to industry analyst iMedia Connection*:

• A 22 to 25 percent reduction in website abandonment from website pages with click-to-call services
• As much as a 100 percent increase in transaction conversions from click-to-call users versus toll-free callers
• 88 percent of click-to-call users say they are more likely to contact a company that offers a click-to-call service than one that does not.

Not only does click-to-call make it easier for customers to call while the impulse to buy is hot, it also makes sure their calls are answered and directed to the right place.

For example, a car dealer can route callers needing repairs to the service department and callers inquiring about fleet purchases to the sales department. You can also integrate click-to-call into email campaigns. However you use click-to-call, you always know exactly where a call is coming from. The bottom line: People buy from people. Even more so, from people they know. Thus phone calls build the relationships that build sales. And while Google is surely here to stay, click-to-call will make it better by connecting the SMB to their prospects the old fashioned way. By phone. Just like the Yellow Pages did.

Irv Shapiro

CEO

Ifbyphone, Inc.

*http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/8524.asp

It’s Saturday and you’ve gone to the local superstore to purchase flowers, tools, or a new wine chest for the living room. You’ve walked into the store, but it’s huge like a warehouse, so making it there is only the beginning of your search. What you need now are sales or support people walking up and down the long aisles. If there isn’t any help roaming the store, you might leave without buying anything, overwhelmed at the mass of information, services, and goods that are confusing in their abundance.The same theory of service and support applies to your Web site. With such a large number of sites on the Internet, you’ve done half the work by getting a browser to stop at your site. Now that they’ve visited, why not place sales personnel and support teams throughout your site to better serve your potential customers and hike up sales? A Click-to-Call (C2C) in the right place essentially does just that. Below is a list of ten ways to jazz up your C2Cs and, alas, your bottom line.

1. Before you even begin, ask yourself this question: What am I trying to get a clicker to do on my site? Is it to offer support to current clients? To clinch a sale with a new customer? To have someone take a survey that asks about the specific service they’re interested in? Perhaps it’s all three, but know what you want a Web surfer to do before uploading C2Cs onto your site. Careful detail is a prerequisite for any web design; integrating voice technology into your Web site should be no different.
2. Many new web surfers are skeptical about switching from conducting sales transactions with humans to a computer over the Web. A C2C can drastically reduce site abandonment by strategically placing C2Cs in areas of your site where things get a bit tricky. Many airline companies now place C2Cs in plain view while a customer is purchasing a ticket online. That way, if the weary web consumer becomes a bit disheveled, they can click a button and be speaking with a customer service representative in seconds. This is often the crucial difference between making a sale and having one fade away.
3. Actionable anchor text can improve the number of clicks that result in calls to your business. Simple text that reads “Click here to call me now,” “Click to speak with a customer service representative,” or “Click here to speak with our sales manager” can improve connectivity between you and your customers. You’ve set up a business that caters to your clients needs. Make sure they know that when they’re on your Web site.
4. The majority of Ifbyphone packages come with many or even unlimited Smart C2Cs. Use them! While you don’t want to overload and place a C2C in every paragraph of your site, you do want to be generous with the amount of C2Cs you input on your Web page. Anywhere you list your contact information there should be a C2C. On sales pages, remind the customer that they can click a link and be on the phone with a human being that moment.
5. An attractive image is vital. If you’ve got an ordinary image saying “click here” at the bottom of a static page, you’re not taking advantage of this valuable tool. But if you’ve got an appealing button that pops out from the page, the worth of your Web site to your business increases exponentially. It’s a simple concept that cannot be stressed enough.
6. Since we’re on the subject of images, let’s not forget the box that pops-up when someone clicks on your C2C link. This window should be branded to fit the design of your site. Since you’ve spent a chunk of time making sure your site is aesthetically appealing, you don’t want to let that slip when it comes to clickable links. Ifbyphone has a range of images you can use, but for the most unique outcome, upload your own image that fits your site’s design plan.
7. Earlier on we discussed strategically placing your C2Cs in spots where you predict a customer might need help. Placement is more than just helping customers through rocky areas of the site. A well-placed C2C can mean more voice-to-voice phone time between you and a customer and thus more potential to jack up sales. Research shows that online viewers first look at the top left of a page and then scan right, so an attractive C2C at the top left or top right of your site can improve talk time. It lets potential customers know you want to talk to them.
8. Hidden C2Cs can be a good way to initiate sales talks with customers. For instance, you could have a form on your site for a client to fill out asking several questions about what they need and their contact information. Once they click submit, a C2C hidden in that submit button will connect you to the customer, making your service or sales team look top notch.
9. Click-to-Calls are a valuable tool for letting customers know about special offers or inciting them to click in order to save money or win a prize. It could be a good idea to update some of the C2Cs on your site with information or offers to encourage a caller to get in touch with your company. A current Ifbyphone customer uses a C2C on a landing page that offers deals on their next auto purchase.
10. People on the Internet can be turned off by entering in their phone numbers. Information in the pop-up box or right beneath the C2C letting the customer know that the call is free to them and that their number won’t ever be sold to a list or given away could ensure a customer that the call is safe and easy, encouraging them to input their number.