Recording inquiry calls can reveal a wealth of information about your marketing efforts and how well your team is handling intake calls.
“This call may be recorded for quality and training purposes.” It’s a line we’ve all heard when on hold with customer service. In fact, we’ve heard it so much that we may never have thought twice about what it actually means for a company. But recording inquiry calls can reveal a wealth of valuable information. Is your company listening in or are you hanging up on a major growth opportunity?
The Benefits of Recording Inquiry Calls
Recording inquiry calls offers your company many opportunities to learn about and improve marketing and sales processes. The obvious opportunities are listed right there in that common phrase: quality and training purposes. But there are even more improvement possibilities you could be leaving on the table if you’re not listening in.
Customer Service Quality: The first call a potential client makes to your care company is crucial. It sets the tone for your service and can either instill confidence or skepticism. Recording calls helps companies identify the quality of customer service potential and current clients are receiving.
- Are calls being answered or going into voicemail?
- Do your representatives sound warm, knowledgeable, and empathetic?
- Are they able to articulate your services well? Or do they sound distracted, rushed, irritable, or unsure of themselves?
- Are they finding solutions for callers or passing the buck?
- Do they get information needed to follow up with the caller after the call?
Training: The information gleaned from recorded inquiry calls can help you enhance your staff training and identify opportunities for process improvement. Calls can serve as examples for employee training in which you can work to improve how staff:
- Greet callers
- Lead callers to solutions
- Answer callers’ questions
- Gather information needed for follow-up
- End the call
Perhaps you hear several calls where the representative rushes through service offerings before asking the client what their needs are. This is an opportunity to focus on gathering information upfront and making the client feel heard, which builds trust and confidence.
Maybe your representatives are quick to explain the cost of home care services in cold, hard numbers. While the information given may be factual, it can also be a turn-off for potential clients. Instead, train intake staff to focus on the value of the services that clients will be receiving. The topic of price can be discussed if the caller brings it up, but price should never be the primary focus of an inquiry. Inquiry staff should lead the call, describing what the potential client will receive in service and care to meet their unique needs.
Technical Difficulties: Dropped calls, unclear messages, long hold times, or calls that too often go to voicemail are the types of issues that frustrate callers if they are not fixed promptly. If a potential client continually encounters issues like these, they will likely move on to an easier-to-reach agency. Recording and listening to your calls can help you catch and fix these technical difficulties quickly so you can keep putting your best foot forward.
Search Marketing Issues: Recorded inquiry calls provide valuable insights for your search marketing team, as phone calls can often reveal search optimization issues that need to be addressed. For instance, if you are getting repeated calls for a different home care agency or a different type of business altogether, your information may be showing up in places it shouldn’t online. If you are receiving calls from people outside of your service area, this could also indicate that people are finding your agency when searching for keywords that are irrelevant to your business.
A Better Understanding of Your Marketing Efforts: Recording calls through a service like CallRail, which corecubed uses but is not compensated by, allows you to track where your calls come from. This helps you identify which calls come in from organic search, Google ads, Google business profile, etc. Knowing where calls come from gives you a better picture of how well your marketing efforts are performing. It can also reveal where tweaks might need to be made.
Big Help or Big Brother?
Occasionally, people object to phone call monitoring because they feel it’s a “big brother” way to treat employees. Will it make employees too nervous on calls? Will they perform their best knowing that someone is listening in? Will they resent us for reviewing their calls?
In actuality, call monitoring can benefit employees in a number of ways, including the following:
- It helps agencies to identify when employees are experiencing compassion fatigue.
- It highlights examples of calls being handled well that can then be used as training examples.
- It enables the agency to provide more training to employees answering the phones, which in turn helps them feel more comfortable and empowered.
Phone call monitoring provides home care agencies with unique opportunities to coach and improve the performance of employees, handle technical issues promptly, and ensure their marketing efforts are working well. This allows both your employees and your business to grow and become more efficient and productive.
If you would like to learn more about how corecubed can help your agency monitor and evaluate calls for any of these criteria, our expert home care marketing team would be happy to speak with you. Call us today at 800.370.6580 or reach out to us online for more information.