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With Facebook, Skype, online chat at your website, email, text, and more all available to communicate with customers, you may wonder if business phone calls are all that important these days. The answer is a resounding “Yes! They are.”
There are many pros and cons to running a small business from home, but lack of a professional-sounding business phone system can be a problem that makes customers feel uncomfortable and loses them. UniTel Voice Virtual Phone System can transform your ordinary smartphone into a powerful customer service machine, along with a little customer service phone etiquette training.
The tools are affordable and available to turn your cell phone into a key small business asset. But back to our original thought – why is it so important to have a great phone experience for customers? Well, for one thing, it’s because there are crucial situations in the customer-company relationship that are best dealt with over the phone.
Here are 5 reasons the phone remains such an important business tool in the 21st Century:
1. Urgent problems produce phone calls.
If a customer needs immediate answers to important questions related to your product or service or is experiencing a billing error or misunderstanding, a late package delivery, or another problem, they call you.
Customers know that actually talking directly to an employee at your company over the phone is going to get you on the problem and get it resolved fast. That’s just not nearly as likely to happen with other forms of communication, aside from face-to-face walk-in conversations.
2. Complexity demands a phone call.
A similar but different reason why people call in, aside from urgency, is the complexity of an issue. It’s just too hard to explain a complex problem to a voicemail or text it or even email it and expect a good response.
Customers want to hear the other person respond and acknowledge he or she is following them as they explain the complex issue. They need time to tell the story so that unusual situations can be resolved – the kinds of things seldom covered in FAQs or that have a number on menu options.
Customers needs a thinking human brain to listen, and they also often desire a chance to voice their frustration.
3. Phone calls can be more secure.
While it’s always possible a line is tapped, that’s not a very common security problem. The Internet and anything you have to type or write down is much more dangerous for personal, sensitive information than a phone call.
There are some customers who call because they don’t want to give out a credit card number in writing online or elsewhere or only want to give a SSN or date of birth to a CSR who has verified them – for the effective of that verification process produces confidence on both sides of the phone line.
4. Not everyone is online.
We tend to think the whole world lives online these days, but that’s just not true. Many do, but many only surf the Web occasionally or barely at all. Some don’t have Internet at home and don’t get out to the library, Web cafe, or a friend’s house much to use it.
Thus, having a business phone that you can advertise and where prospects can inquire for detailed information about your company and what it does, is still a key way to make contact with interested prospects and convert them.
5. The personal touch.
Finally, so many other means of communication with customers and prospects seem so robotic these days that it creates consumer apathy.
A well trained employee answering the phone so that callers can interact with “real people” is a huge positive for the customer experience and for customer retention.
Upgrading your smartphone into a business phone through UniTel is the simplest and most affordable way to take advantage of these and other business benefits to a great phone system.
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- Subscribe
- Skype
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- Mix
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- Copy Link