The Secret Agent’s Guide to Call Tracking: 3 Tips for Marketing Success

If secret agents had marketing plans—and they don’t, because they’re secret agents—they would likely be the most effective marketing plans known to man. Why? Because spies live by these three rules, and if you follow them, your marketing campaigns can capture leads the way James Bond captures bad guys. Know your source. You should always know your source. In spyland, this means being cautious about from who you accept your [...]

Build Relationships and Track Ads Like My Grandpa

When I was a kid, my grandpa and dad owned a publishing business called Nelson-Hall. In its heyday, Nelson-Hall was a leading publisher of social science textbooks and general readership books on subjects like locksmithing, jujitsu, and world disasters (my favorite book originally published by Nelson-Hall was entitled Darkest Hours by Jay Robert Nash). Nelson-Hall was where I learned how to run a business; from designing book covers to operating [...]

WEBINAR – Want to close that real estate lead? Answer the phone!

Want to understand the importance of ad tracking and lead response for REALTORS(R)? Register for our webinar on Wednesday, December 14, 2011 at 12:00 p.m. CST Join Ifbyphone CEO, Irv Shapiro as he discusses the importance of tracking and measuring the effectiveness of all your real estate marketing. Then, once you begin measuring and generating leads, Irv will outline the best, fastest way to respond to those leads. What you [...]

Black Friday 2011: Six business tips to maximize sales

The holidays are approaching fast–is your business ready for Black Friday? Black Friday: it’s the Super Bowl of retail, the day when businesses large and small hope to hit year-end profit goals and declare shopping season victory. But with the potential for more profit comes added pressure; there are more customers to serve (and satisfy), a larger pool of employees to manage and a bigger, faster-moving inventory to handle. We’ve [...]

I Don’t Want to Talk to Someone Until I Do, and Then I Want to Talk Now: The Importance of Lead Response

This week Ifbyphone is heading to Anaheim, CA for the 2011 Annual REALTORS® Conference and Expo. I’m looking forward to it. Real estate is one of our top industries and “Annual” as its commonly referred to is always a fun and memorable event (this year I get to meet Tony Danza). Getting ready for the conference reminded me of another real estate event I attended last year and an interesting [...]

Who’s the ideal MyLeadResponder user? You are.

A few weeks ago I chatted with some folks in Florida about a video they were putting together to help us spread the word about our new application, MyLeadResponder. When I explained to their writer how it worked to and went on about the problems this new app would solve, she started laughing. “That’s me!” she said. She was laughing because what I had described—the chaos, slowness, inconsistency and incomplete [...]

How To Transfer Calls To A Coworker When Working From Home

If you, or your sales and support staff, ever work from home, how do you transfer a phone call to another employee or department located back in the office?

How Home Service Businesses Can Improve Customer Satisfaction

When it comes to home services, trust is the name of the game. Several leading home services franchises recognize this, going so far as to focus on customer interactions in their corporate values. ServiceMaster, for example, lists the need to “Excel with Customers” as one of the company’s core values. Customers will only let a serviceperson into their homes if they know that the company they’re dealing with is professional and reliable.

How to Ensure Customers Reach the Best Destination for Their Calls

The National Retail Federation's recent survey of more than 9,000 people posed a simple question: "Thinking of all the different retail formats (store, catalog, internet, or home shopping,) which retailer delivers the best customer service?" Zappos, not surprisingly, was the company named most often. More instructive than the identity of the winner, though, is the reasoning behind the choices. When asked to elaborate on why these companies are the best, a few common themes emerged.

3 Ways to Prepare Your Call Agents For Customer Conversations

The surest way to wow your customers is to curate great customer interactions. And there's nothing customers love more than dealing with knowledgeable and well-prepared call agents. Imagine the improvements to your sales and customer service calls when the customer is greeted with a personalized message and with a call agent who can see, at a glance, all previous interactions.

Here are 3 ways to prepare your call agents for calls:

Top 10 Call Routing Strategies

How to Make Your Call Center Greener and More Cost Effective

As the conclusion of 2010 approaches we can look back at the stories that made our year. Beyond the terrible (earthquakes in Haiti and floods in Pakistan) and the triumphant (the entirety of Chilean miner saga), two ongoing stories have dominated our interest: the economy and the environment. These two are interrelated. Will the advent of green jobs spur economic recovery? Will financial troubles prevent the enactment of serious environmental reform? While there are larger political issues at play here, you can do your part in a simple and easy way.