Make More Money Out Of Your Marketing For Your Plumbing Company Through Your Phone Great Marketing Can Kill a Bad Business. It is all well and good having a good marketing strategy for your business, but if the telephone skill’s of your employees is poor, your business is going to struggle. Great marketing can revive a struggling business, and a good marketing strategy can entice more people to contact your business by telephone. However, if the telephone experience that they receive is not up to their standard, chances are, they will not be inclined to call your company again in the future. This is not going to be good for a healthy business going forward, and it will not matter how good, or how much money you spend on marketing and advertising, if the phone answering technique of your staff is poor, your business will suffer. Importance of a Phone Call To begin to understand the importance of great telephone skills to your company, and how poor telephone skills can undo all of the hard work that your marketing strategy has put in, you need to think about the value of your customers to your business. For example, imagine that a customer spends $300 with your plumbing business for service, and then spends the same amount again on three separate occasions in the next 4 years. The total value of that customer is $1,200, which is something that you need to bear in mind before you next pick up the telephone. Answering the Telephone As obvious as this sounds, the very first thing that you need to do when the telephone rings, is to make sure that there is actually a human being in your organization who can answer the telephone. This is the first rule of success when it comes to attracting new customers over the telephone. The reason why this is so crucial is because people often have a list of companies to call, and they tend to want to do business with the first company that actually has someone to answer the phone. Therefore, if you advertise your company as having 24 hour emergency service, you better make sure that there is a person on the other end of the telephone when someone calls, no matter what time of day or night the call comes through. If your business is small or has just started up, you may find that it is beyond your means to have someone to answer the telephone at all hours of the day and night. This could be because you are doing most of the work yourself, and there is simply no one around who can be waiting to take telephone calls outside of office hours. If this is the kind of situation that you find yourself in, there are companies who you can employ who will answer the telephone for you. These companies can be found on the internet, and they provide a telephone answering service for small companies who wish to be contactable 24/7, but who do not have the means to do so themselves. Getting the Telephone Greeting Right In addition, to making sure that the telephone is answered by a person and not by a machine, there is also the need to make sure that when someone does call, they get a friendly greeting. Simply saying the name of your company is not good enough, instead try a friendlier more open approach such as, ‘Thank you for calling us,’ or ‘Good morning or afternoon.’ Or for a much better approach, you can try using a combination of the two. Greeting potential clients with a friendly greeting can go a long way to enable you to turn enquiries in to custom. Of course, ‘hello’ is the standard greeting when answering the telephone these days, however, it does not make for a very good greeting, and if that is how you are greeting people on the telephone at the moment, STOP! A mere ‘hello’ is going to just confuse the customer, and they could end up questioning whether they have in fact dialed the wrong number. To avoid this, you should always make sure that the company name is mentioned in all greetings; otherwise you may find that a potential cus...
