How many times have you let a phone ring off the hook while helping a prospect that was already in your office? If your answer is a few times, that’s probably because you expected someone else in the office to grab it and it never got answered.
If you don’t give the phone the proper love and affection it needs, the volume of customers coming through those doors in the first place will diminish greatly, if it hasn’t already.
52% of callers will not call back if they missed you the first time. This means is that if you simply answered the phone, you’d double your revenue and customers in no time.
Not answering the phone also reflects poorly to the potential customers on how attentive your staff will be in person. But lack of staffing doesn’t always mean you need to hire more people, it just means you need them to man the phones better, and do a better job of knowing how to handle those missed opportunities for business.
Get a handle on that large call volume with the help of a few call tracking and call management features:
Missed call alerts
Make sure you never miss another lead even if you don’t answer it on the first try. You, as the leasing manager, can know exactly when a call was missed and whether or not it was an important opportunity for business. Some call tracking companies even go the extra mile to send you “Missed Opportunity Alerts” when the agent does answer the call, but fails to ask for an appointment.
Call Scheduling
This is called “time of day routing.” When your office closes, calls will stop ringing into the office and will instead ring to the employees’ cell phones. That way all of your calls into the office are covered. If you don’t want your staff to have to answer after hours, consider using a third-party call center to answer your calls.
Multi-Ring/Round Robin
Routing your calls to the right person is crucial in getting it answered in your office. If one of your staff members is giving a prospect a tour of the office, they might not be able to answer the call. With multi-rings, the calls ring to multiple employees at once, that way someone can salvage the opportunity. With Round Robin calls, the amount of calls each staff member receives is spread out evenly. The first would go to Employee A, then B, etc.
Most managers consider phone calls to be the most valuable conversion their marketing efforts can produce. It’s time to take advantage of those efforts by first, answering the phones.