Can apologizing calm an irate customer? Maybe. Maybe not.

“Sorry” is a common word for call center agents who spend their days demonstrating how they can tackle any issue and drive client satisfaction. But call center staff often have a strong belief that they need to go the extra mile and keep apologizing to deal with difficult customers on the phone.

After all, in the lead generation industry, the call is especially critical in the path to closing in on a sale.

According to Harvard Business Review, apologies that keep resurfacing in the conversation with an irate caller are likely to backfire. More often than not, demonstrating too much empathy or trying to be cheerful in a conversation with emotionally-charged clients also results in decreased satisfaction. If so, the question is, how should call center agents handle a difficult conversation?

Sure, it’s challenging but not impossible to sell to the irate caller whose dissatisfaction has hit an all-time high. Since every issue is unique, asking questions and diagnosing the entire problem is the only way to develop an angry caller policy and make sure that the same or similar problems don’t reoccur in the future.

Let’s take a closer look at how brands can provide excellent call service.

Harnessing the Value of Complaints

Navigating the customer experience can be a tricky matter. Even when brands go to great lengths to deliver excellent service, there’s always a chance that a client can hit a snag.

Murphy’s law states: “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.” To name a few things, products can get broken or damaged, deliveries can get delayed, the servers can go down, or call center staff can be unhelpful. Those are pretty substantial motives for angry phone calls, and that’s why delivering a positive experience is not always easy. Besides, client experiences do not occur or remain in a vacuum – negative experiences especially.

Let’s face it: frustrating experiences and bad customer service come at a heavy price. In a recent Microsoft Corporation report, 58% of consumers agreed that poor customer service is a justifiable reason to part ways with a brand. Сoupled with the significant increase in sharing negative information online, this is a social media disaster waiting to happen.

It’s no secret that as activity on social media keeps spiking, consumers continue sharing and comparing their experiences online. This means that, for angry customers, it’s no longer about discouraging only friends and family members. It’s about sharing with everyone and anyone who’s eager to listen. The central question is whether brands realize that silent and irate customers expect excellence, which is reflected in immediate feedback, no recurring issues, and multi-channel support.

Today, the consumer-brand relationship is very different from years past. The tangible benefits of products are no longer the principal focus. Consumers expect communication to transfer seamlessly to different channels, and they have no desire to repeat themselves or describe a problem in detail multiple times. In fact, a phone call ranks number one among all the channels consumers prefer to communicate.

Source: Gladly

Naturally, phone and email remain the most frequently used channels for consumer-brand communication. That’s why call center agents need to treat complaints and angry phone calls not only as routine tasks and stress factors but also as an opportunity to learn and improve their services, as well as transform the perception of the brand.

What Angry Phone Calls Can Teach Brands

The fear of an angry client is what every call center representative knows firsthand. The acute stress agents feel weekly or even daily is often the cause of increasing call center turnover rates.

While stress is a part of the job for call center agents, it’s also a negative factor that affects the support team’s engagement, satisfaction, and the overall experience provided to customers. In fact, one in three agents states that one of the biggest challenges they have to deal with is managing too many calls. But what about the ability to respond to clients’ needs and expectations?

Sure, the market is volatile and brands have to remain agile and attentive, as well as eager to learn and align their mission with client expectations. Otherwise, brands won’t be able to provide a consistently positive experience to consumers. At the same time, the increasing number of calls can be overwhelming, especially when it comes to handling every angry customer in a call center.

Phone conversations, however, are overflowing with insights that might fall through the cracks if call centers don’t utilize a high-quality tech stack. With the right call tracking solution in place, brands can bridge data gaps, refine the customer journey, boost ROI, and build better relationships with clients.

Every marketer and call center manager needs to leverage call data even if it means driving insights from calls with emotionally charged customers. Call analytics is another critically important part of the tech stack that enables brands to view the client journey from the very first interaction to keywords used during conversations with call center staff.

There’s no doubt that treating angry phone calls or complaints as an opportunity is not that simple. While some of the perceptions and frustrations of angry callers might be unreasonable, the inability of help centers to resolve issues or assign knowledgeable call center staff is often a deal-breaker for customers. Here’s how consumers tend to respond when asked about the most important aspects of customer service.

Source: Microsoft Corporation

As you can see, frustration and angry phone calls originate at a point when customer service falls short of expectations. That’s the principal reason for brands and call centers to develop policies and scripts that enable call center agents to handle confidently every concerned or frustrated client.

Angry Caller Policy Explained

Brands often develop angry caller policies to protect call center representatives and clients. The policies are geared toward professionally handling all types of calls, including rude calls or over-the-line abuse.

However critical it is to ensure client retention, brands also need to take care of call center staff. With such policies in place, call center agents are trained to manage any scenario, draw the line between reasonable anger and abusive calls, set healthy boundaries, and understand when it’s appropriate to disconnect abusive callers.

Here’s how brands can improve the call experience:

• Utilize call recording software: Leveraging a product like Phonexa’s Call Logic is one of the ways to enhance the client experience and take call center training to the next level. It allows marketing experts and managers to get transcripts of the conversations and scan them for specific keywords and patterns.
• Use IVR to speed up the process: Utilizing interactive voice response can help businesses take the pressure off their call center agents by solving simple issues or queries. While some clients get frustrated by IVRs, it can be an extremely effective tool if brands ensure that it offers solutions instead of obstacles like complicated menus or putting clients on hold.
• Follow up with difficult customers: It’s not uncommon for clients to get angry during a call because of issues unrelated to the conversation. Some consumers tend to be silently frustrated, which often makes them silently seethe. That’s why making a follow-up call can help agents address the imbalance and mitigate risks.
• Offer alternative options or solutions: Some customers find it hard to clearly communicate the issues for numerous reasons, including anger. That’s why it can be helpful to suggest using alternative communication channels like email, for instance, to explain their position and provide more details.

Dealing with emotionally charged clients also requires a specifically tailored strategy and well-rounded script. Here’s how brands can ensure that consumers are heard and agents are efficient.

How to Calm an Angry Customer

In most cases, active listening coupled with conflict resolution skills can de-escalate angry phone calls. However, every call center representative should be trained and prepared for the worst-case scenario.

Here are some strategies that have proven to be effective in de-escalating angry clients.

Allow Clients to Vent

Interruption is the worst approach when dealing with difficult customers on the phone. The principal task of the call center manager is to stay calm and lower the temperature of a potentially heated conversation. Once the situation is under control, agents can ask for more details and offer alternatives or solutions.

Ultimately, every client wants to feel valued and heard. If the situation doesn’t escalate or a client doesn’t become more emotional, the query can get resolved in no time.

Work on Reflective Listening Skills

It’s hard enough for consumers to hear that a call center representative understands them. A more effective approach is to hear clients out, analyze the situation and then, interpret their words. This way, any irate caller will note that the agent is interested in getting to the bottom of the problem and is actively committed to resolving it.

Break Down the Issue

Every complicated problem consists of several manageable components. Breaking down a serious issue is an effective problem-solving approach. This way, call center staff can outline the smaller issues, organize their tasks, and get a better portion – if not all – of the work done before the follow-up calls.

Don’t Fall Prey to Emotion

The way agents react to angry phone calls determines the course of the conversation. It’s critical for call center staff to remember that they have far more to lose than their temper. Keeping the language and tone professional and treating clients with respect regardless of the situation should be prioritized at all times.

Learn to Handle an Angry Customer in a Call Center: Script

Real-life scenarios can be very helpful when it comes to training help center team members. While the principal approach of businesses is to come up with specific scripts that can help call center staff deal with angry callers, improvising can also be part of the training process. This way, agents can learn the skills that are essential for handling tricky situations like pros.

Examples of Customer Service Scripts

Call center agents usually don’t have to deal with angry callers nonstop. But they can occasionally come across an emotionally charged or verbally aggressive client. Here are some suggestions on what businesses can add to their scripts to help agents de-escalate angry callers:

• I understand your frustration. Can you please elaborate a bit more on [problem]?
• Hello [Name], thank you for bringing this up. We’re currently working on resolving this issue. Can you please hold on for a few seconds? I’ll check with my team and update you on this further.
• What I’m hearing is that you’re having trouble using our [product, service, feature, etc.]. Would you feel comfortable if I connect you with a [dedicated expert]?
• [Name], that’s a great question. Let me find that out for you right away.
• We appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts and feelings regarding this matter. Unfortunately, we’re not currently planning to implement [new features, services, etc.]. Should anything change about your query, we’ll let you know right away.
• Hello [Name], we are sorry to hear that. Your anger is absolutely justified. Here’s what we can do to fix the issue.
• [Name], we realize this is disappointing and apologize for the temporary inconvenience. In the meantime, a [suggestion of an alternative action or solution] can work as a temporary fix.
• [Name], we’re sorry about that. Here are three easy steps that can help you fix the problem: First, you need to [a detailed instruction]. Please let me know if there’s anything else I can help you with.

Ultimately, developing call center scripts makes sense to ensure that call center staff deliver consistent answers and a delightful experience to customers. Having well-tailored responses in place helps support teams to stay in control of the conversations.

Conclusion

Consumers expect meaningful interactions when they reach out to brands as part of the lead generation journey. They also expect consistent answers and immediate feedback, especially when they encounter issues and become frustrated.

Solutions like IVR, call tracking, and call recording empowers brands to get a clear understanding of how they operate and serve their clients.

With a high-quality tech stack in place – like Phonexa’s all-in-one marketing automation solution for calls, leads, clicks, email, SMS, accounting, and more – businesses can focus on other critical tasks like developing scripts for help centers and understanding how to de-escalate irate callers.

Armed with actionable insights, effective strategies, advanced tracking, and analytics, brands can ensure that they are delivering compelling, consistent, and exceptional service.

Schedule a consultation to learn more about the Phonexa platform and how its singular suite of marketing automation tools can help you optimize your efforts and elevate the customer experience.

What do you need to keep your business going?

It’s safe to say that every enterprise is looking to drive leads, scale profits, and land new clients. While keeping clients happy and boosting sales remain critical tasks, digital agencies often struggle when dealing with lead generation.

If you’re in the digital marketing space and lead generation industry, how do you know where to start and how to maximise the value of your service?

Today, it’s crucial for marketing agencies to utilise the right automation tool that can ensure operational efficiency and help them grow their business. That’s why many startups and marketers are looking to employ white label solutions.

It’s no secret that digital agencies strive tirelessly to supply effective and captivating products. That’s why they work relentlessly to come up with various tools and solutions, including lead generation services.

But let’s face it – there are only so many products one agency can create, support, and improve.

With white label software products at hand, agencies can scale their efforts, extend their offerings, acquire new customers, and much more.

Let’s explore in more detail why lead generation is often missing a white label solution in an agency’s brand strategy, and how to leverage it.

What is a White Label LMS Software?

A standard lead management system (LMS) allows digital marketers to monitor all channels and gather granular information on the performance of lead generation campaigns. Phonexa’s LMS Sync, for instance, is designed to facilitate and automate the process of distribution, strategy recalibration, campaign creation, and much more.

When it comes to white label lead generation software, it can be used by an advertising agency or any other digital agency looking to offer lead gen services to customers.

How does it work? Agencies partner with the white label software provider to use its system for a monthly or annual fee. Some white label service providers also handle tasks like database research and outreach.

For instance, Company A, a white label software provider, sells software geared toward lead management for agencies to Company B, a digital agency. Then, Company B rebrands and resells this software with its logo to Company C.

Simply put, agencies get to rent or lease ready-built solutions without the need to create brand new in-house products. Such solutions serve as an add-on package for the range of current services a company offers.

Capabilities of White Label Services

Agencies often look for white label LMS platforms that can help them tackle issues their customers face and maximise the value of driven leads.

With a white label LMS platform from Phonexa, your customers can leverage automated lead sorting and filtering, turn declined leads into a new revenue source, ensure that every prospect and lead is accounted for, and get a firm grasp on their ROI.

Advantages for Agencies

Ultimately, white label lead distribution for agencies offers numerous benefits, including a possibility of instant rollout and an expanded product portfolio. But that’s hardly a complete list. Let’s take a closer look at the other benefits white labelling offers – here’s a list of undeniable advantages of partnering with a white label lead management software provider.

Boost Brand Awareness Without Hassle

Apart from brand memorability, small businesses, startups, and large enterprises also focus on strengthening and empowering their company through improving products, introducing new solutions, and enhancing their business capacity. Naturally, it requires time, effort, and money.

With white label products, companies don’t have to go through the hassle of developing a solution from the ground up. In fact, all they need to do is rebrand the solution.

Elevate the Value of Your Marketing

White label lead generation solutions are geared toward helping customers tie leads to specific initiatives, tap into the attributed data, and assess the generated revenue.

Ensure Meticulous Lead Tracking

The value of your agency’s work is typically tied to the number and quality of delivered leads. With a white label LMS platform, you can keep track of every prospect and lead in your funnel.

Propel ROI Generation

When agencies employ a white label solution, they have more time to plan customer outreach, scale their pipeline, set their pricing plans, and acquire clients. They not only get to save effort and money but also generate ROI faster.

Take Pressure Off Your Team

When your company develops a product, your employees have to deal with all the issues like fixing bugs and malfunctions. Employing white label solutions allows you to focus on handling customers and boosting their loyalty.

Visualise Future Growth

With a white label LMS solution from Phonexa, customers can leverage predictive modelling to show various outcomes of active lead generation campaigns and predict the potential success of expanding them into new states or GEOs.

Enhance Brand Consistency

White labelling allows agencies to give their clientele a seamless look and feel across all product features and communication channels.

Improve Client Retention

High-quality leads make for happy and loyal clients. Employing a white label LMS solution empowers agencies to show their clients the value of driven leads and encourages them to stay for good.

Schedule a consultation with one of Phonexa’s experts to explore how you can empower your brand and expand your product portfolio with white label LMS software.

The insurance services industry is one of the biggest spenders in the world of advertising.

It’s understandable why agencies spend so much time and funds to create an omnipresent experience that will precipitate the company’s existence into consumer minds prompting them to take action later.

Insurance carriers like Geico, Progressive, and State Farm spent $5.38 billion in 2020 alone on advertising. What if you could bypass that step of conventional ads and dive directly into earning big through digital advertising?

Of course, the stakes are higher than ever for most insurance marketers with this solution. But if you leverage the right technology, you’ll bridge the gap and begin to see the return on your investment almost immediately.

But to do that, you must first meet your insurance clients where they are — on their phones. You must utilize call tracking technology and make yourself available to your clients through a streamlined and personalized journey.

Here’s everything you need to know about creating unique call tracking journeys for your insurance business, as well as the top reasons why you should.

Why do Insurance Companies Need Call Tracking?

It’s no secret that most — if not all — customers in the market for insurance coverage will end up calling an agency before they decide to commit or convert. So, regardless of your agency’s conversion metrics, most insurance conversions will actually happen over the phone, where callers can get instant answers to their questions on a human-to-human basis.

In fact, phone calls result in about 30 to 50% conversions, so backing your insurance call center with technology that tracks call outcomes down to a granular level will help you materialize your agency’s potential, and attribute success to a single call, campaign, or click that resulted in the outcome.

1. No Direct Contact Equals Fewer Conversions

Getting the attention of your callers and prospects is only a tiny part of the battle. However, what does change the course of events is how you keep consumers engaged. Frequently, this depends on what you do to win them over.

A proven metric is creating a streamlined and uncomplicated caller journey through an unconventional Interactive Voice Response system that collects caller data before they’re even connected to a live agent.

And with so many people clicking and calling to inquire about specific coverage and policies, agencies need responsive and scalable software that prompts higher conversions.

But we know that receiving a call doesn’t automatically secure a conversion. The realities are quite different and require a more humanistic approach to tying together a converting call journey to engage high-intent callers.

You may ask, “what happens when a client reaches a call agent faster?”

Over 40% of callers will abandon the call if they’re waiting too long in the queue. Tracking phone calls will help you eliminate the guesswork of how you can retain these callers and customers. All you need to do is ensure that callers experience a good call journey before connecting with your agents.

Take that journey to another level by creating custom caller experiences through an interactive voice response system or the use of Cloud PBX technology to collect and retain certain information about your callers. Then create profiles for each to personalize your agency’s interactions with them going forward.

When doing so, remember — some 59% of customers say that tailored engagement based on past interactions is very important in winning and retaining their business.

2. Ruling Out Campaigns That Don’t Work

With intense and costly efforts to stand apart in a saturated insurance marketplace, agencies should be confident that their budget isn’t being spent on things that don’t bring revenue.

With Phonexa’s call analytics software Call Logic, agencies can do precisely that as part of all-in-one marketing automation solution for calls, leads, clicks, email, SMS, accounting, and more.

With valuable analytics and data insights on a given campaign, this software provides insurance marketers with the ability to identify, flag, and remove campaigns that no longer serve their goals.

Some identifiable data points can include demographic groups and characteristics that have responded to a given ad, flagged campaigns that received greater engagement and interaction, conversion rates they collectively delivered, and more.

3. Leveraging the Potential of Real-Time Data & Flagging Capabilities

What makes Phonexa’s call tracking software stand apart from competitors is its ability to provide real-time data insights, fraud reports, and more to help marketers adjust campaigns to respond to campaign needs.

A recent case study with a financial services lead generation network found that the Phonexa platform helped the network flag and eliminate fraudulent transactions, which resulted in a 30% decrease in fraudulent lead flows.

With these types of changes, real-time data analytics helps companies save a ton of resources on fixing fraud-driven campaigns or other faulty marketing activities. And as these reports come in, campaign changes can be applied, and new metrics can be reported.

With instant optimization, insurers will have the necessary tools to handle any uncertain market fluctuations at any given point.

Your Issues, Our Solutions: How Phonexa Can Help Insurance Marketers

For insurance marketers, it’s always essential to engage with clients and prospects on multiple fronts. Doing this effectively and efficiently is nearly half the work.

For that reason, Phonexa’s all-in-one marketing solution for calls, leads, clicks, SMS, email, accounting, and more, provides all the tools necessary to ensure an omnichannel presence for their target audiences.

Want to track and attribute call outcomes for insurance leads? Try Call Logic.

Interested in a dynamic lead management system where you can buy or sell your insurance leads? Opt-in for LMS Sync. If you’re in the game for some email and SMS outbound reach, go with E-Delivery.

Lynx is the right tool to emphasize your call campaigns with links and track them. Tie it all together with Books360, our automated accounting platform that can take the revenue you made through each campaign, manage your payouts and attributes, and make sure you never miss a lead.

Schedule a consultation or a free demo to learn more about how Phonexa’s all-in-one suite can power your insurance agency’s call tracking goals.

Every marketing campaign will feature a discussion of the campaign’s ROI, or return on investment. But to some, the importance of knowing your ROI isn’t always clear. There may be a debate as to why marketers should get caught up in such details.

In an interview with the Harvard Business Review, Jill Avery—a Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School—had a blunt message for marketers who aren’t interested in their ROI. “Good marketing is not about winning creative awards or telling interesting stories,” she says; it is squarely about “delivering customers and sales.” In short, knowing your ROI allows you to accurately measure the success of your marketing campaigns.

What is your ROI?

Your marketing return on investment—sometimes abbreviated as MROI—is critical in that it gives a snapshot of what kind of revenue or conversions your marketing campaign is able to generate in comparison to the resources that were put into it. For the most basic example, imagine you put
£50 into starting a lemonade stand: building the stand, buying the ingredients, and putting up posters. Then you made £125 in sales—that would mean you had £75 in return profits or an ROI of 150 per cent.

This calculation comes from a simple formula of ROI (per cent) = [(Revenue – Investment) / Investment] x 100.

By looking at your ROI in terms of a percentage, rather than the raw number, you will have a clearer vision of your ROI and be able to compare it across campaigns of various sizes. Having an ROI of £1,000 sounds impressive, but it becomes dramatically less so if the ROI percentage is only 10 per cent.

The Importance of Knowing Your ROI

It should be apparent, then, that having an accurate understanding of your ROI is valuable for businesses for many reasons. Essentially, your ROI will give you a “score card” for your marketing campaigns. It answers fundamental questions regarding the allocation of resources or the impact of the creative branded messages in the campaign.

Having this knowledge is useful for many reasons. If you’re in the marketing department of a larger company, you can use a high marketing ROI percentage to prove to leadership that they should allocate more resources to your efforts. You’d have a difficult time getting any kind of budget increase without first having proof that you are getting results with the budget you already have.

The independent marketers has even more need for a thorough understanding of their ROI. In many case, your entire budget and business plan will revolve around having a very high ROI percentage. Digital marketers with few overhead costs need to know precisely what their ROI is for any given campaign to determine how much revenue they’ll be able to pull in. Once a marketer has a strong understanding of their return on investment, they will be able to answer many more questions about their business. They will be able to plan campaigns more efficiently once they know which efforts will yield the highest ROI percentage.

Furthermore, once a marketer knows their ROI, they will be able to run a tight ship and hold themselves accountable. The ROI is a perfect way to attach a specific value to the work you’re doing. As a result, that number can be very powerful and it becomes vastly important that the number is accurately calculated.

Complications When Calculating Your ROI

As important is it is to know your ROI, it isn’t always the easiest figure to calculate. While the formula ROI (per cent) = [(Revenue – Investment) / Investment] x 100 is certainly straightforward, what can be difficult is determining exactly how much revenue was the result of any given marketing investment. If you’ve spent funds on Google Ads, email marketing, and digital banner ads, who can you assign your incoming revenue to the marketing channel that brought it in?

The solution can come in the form of an ROI-driven marketing platform with call tracking, lead management, and email marketing that is able to gather this kind of data. The right platform can collect necessary information that tells marketers which of their efforts brought in every lead. This allows you to compartmentalize and sort all the revenue generated by each marketing channel so that you can have a definitive ROI percentage for all your marketing efforts.

It’s entirely possible, for example, that you put some £2,000 into paid search ads and £5,000 into radio ads and get a return of £25,000 in revenue. That can seem great, but a granular analysis of your ROI may reveal that you’re getting 400 per cent ROI on the paid search ads and just about 150 per cent on the radio ads. You’ll likely want to scale up your paid search and hold or reduce your radio budget. The next time you run your campaign, you could see even higher revenue returns for spending less.

Stay on Target

Ultimately, for marketers who want to see the quantifiable success of their marketing efforts, they’ll need to put in the effort to calculate their ROI. While the formula is simple, the collection of data is much more complicated. Marketers can use technology to track marketing revenue across different channels, allowing them to discover new insights from targeted ROI percentages. Such revelations can be used in preparing budgets and planning campaigns in order to become more efficient and increase profit margins.

It takes great wit, skill, and labour to effectively generate leads. But all that effort could be for nought if you are not distributing your leads to the right destinations. The process of strategically distributing one’s leads is known as lead routing.

Depending on the size of your business, lead routing can be a significant undertaking—involving multiple destinations and possibilities. In this way, it is not unlike the London Underground, the massive transport system that is approximately 249 miles long, connecting 270 stations and using roughly 4100 trains.

Much like an efficiently operating Underground is critical to keep the city of London in business, lead routing is vital for those who hope to find success in the world of lead generation and performance marketing.

What is Lead Routing?

Lead routing begins with marketers who are generating leads across one or a variety of channels. When a marketer is generating a higher volume of leads, it becomes necessary to employ a lead management system to organise and distribute those leads.

Lead routing is the practise of using strategic automation to send leads to their optimal destination based on a multiplicity of factors. Traditionally, the main objective of lead routing is to transport leads to the businesses who will see the most value in those leads—often leading to those leads being purchased at a competitive price.

This process of intelligent lead distribution can often include the use of ping tree technology. A ping tree allows a lead to be shown to one potential buyer, who has the option to acquire the lead or pass. If they pass, the lead “moves down” the ping tree to the next buyer in the queue. This continues until the lead is purchased.

Why Lead Routing is Useful

Like a Underground that is clean and on-time in London, an efficient lead routing system will benefit multiple parties.

Marketers

For the marketers who work tirelessly to generate leads, lead routing is integral to achieving a high return on investment. It means that they are able to share leads with those businesses who have the highest interest in their leads first. As a result, high-quality leads are more likely to be sold at loftier prices because of their value to the buyers.

Advertisers

The advertisers who are acquiring leads find value in lead routing with ping tree technology because it allows them to get a “first look” or “early look” at the leads that are most relevant to them. It then becomes the choice of the advertiser to accept or reject a lead at a certain price point. This ability to choose from a selection of high-quality leads is very attractive to direct advertisers.

Consumers

The consumers who are filling out forms or making calls are also benefited by this system of lead routing. Because ping tree technology uses strategic routing, the consumer is in position to get connected to the business that is best equipped to serve them. Rather than having to perform an exhaustive search, consumers are presented to multiple vendors for whatever they are looking for: insurance, home service work, financial services, or other businesses. By being connected quickly, the consumer has a favourable customer experience.

Lead Routing Solutions

In order for lead routing to work, businesses need a superior lead management system. LMS SYNC from Phonexa, offers all the tools marketers need to track, manage, and route their leads.

Any purchase exploration of a lead management system should ask the following questions:

1. Do I have optimised lead routing to ensure a high return on my marketing spend?
2. Can I access reports that are simple, efficient, and useful in making data-driven decisions?
3. Am I able to filter my leads so that my business exclusively routes leads that are high quality and close to conversion?
4. Does my lead routing ensure a smooth and successful customer journey?

For marketers seeking to improve their knowledge and find greater success, the smartest course of action will always be for them to face their biggest problems head on. This is a truth that has been known by discerning minds for, well, centuries. In fact, one of the greatest writers of all time—William Shakespeare—offers a quote in Henry VI echoing that exact same sentiment: “”Let me embrace thee, sour adversity, for wise men say it is the wisest course.”

It may seem far-fetched for digital marketers to heed advice from a playwright who died over 400 years ago, but there really is great value in marketers embracing “sour adversity.” Finding solutions to your biggest problems not only will you help your business run better, but you’ll likely also gain valuable insights into your industry and earn an edge over your competitors. For many, the solutions to their biggest marketing challenges can be found by utilising the right call tracking platform. Here are the ways that call tracking helps marketers embrace and defuse the issues that plague them.

1. Proving Marketing ROI

According to a State of Inbound report, beyond “lead generation,” the greatest challenge that marketers face is “Proving the ROI of our marketing activities.” In-house marketers need to prove their ROI to justify budget spends while entrepreneurs need to know their ROI so they can understand their expected revenue. Of course, the most important reason it is imperative to know your marketing ROI is so that you can improve your marketing ROI—thus creating conditions for growth.

Call tracking exists to help marketers solve this problem. Utilising a call tracking platform, you will be able to get powerful insights into how much your marketing investments are paying off. The right call tracking software will also collect valuable data on all your calls and give you the sophisticated reporting you need to not only know your ROI, but dramatically improve it.

2. Understanding Campaign Attribution

In addition to wanting to know your overall ROI, another concern that can frustrate marketers is judging the relative success of individual marketing campaigns. It can be difficult to plan your next big campaign without a clear picture of how your last campaign performed. Fortunately, call tracking software gives you the opportunity to get exceptionally detailed reporting on every campaign you launch.

With call tracking software, you can get a bird’s eye view of all your calls and campaigns. You’ll know how many calls each campaign produced, and how many of those calls converted. You will also be able to unlock and demystify all your data thanks to call analytics, which thoughtfully condenses and organises all your campaign data into easy-to-read reports, allowing you to closely judge each campaign’s performance.

3. Finding Data Blind Spots

Every business is forced to grapple with knowledge gaps in their business—but call tracking software helps you aggressively close those gaps by giving marketers get a more complete picture of their strategies in action.

The best call tracking software offers marketers granular reporting like being able to see more than just whether a call was accepted or rejected—but also details as to why. Call recording can give you access to conversations between callers and representatives so you can identify problem areas or learn what works best.

Plus, automatic reporting via call analytics means that you can have easy access to the data reports that are most important for your business. Time can often be wasted transferring call data into reports and graphs that help you identify trends. With automatic reporting the work is done for you, allowing more time and energy to be spent on planning your next campaign. 

4. Improving Lead Quality

One issue that can often vex marketers is dealing with low-quality leads. If your business suffers from too many calls from leads that are highly unlikely to convert, then using a filtration system through a call tracking platform could be the answer. There are many benefits that come with using a sophisticated filtration system—not only are you able to pre-emptively screen out most bad leads, but you can also create and edit your own filters for maximum flexibility. 

5. Optimising Your Business

The cumulative benefit of tackling all these problems is that it will also help you take on one simple but persistent concern that every marketer is faced with: “How can I optimise my marketing strategy?”

To that end, call tracking assists in many ways. With an accurate understanding of your ROI, you can build a better budget. Getting granular reporting on your campaigns can help you streamline your sales funnel and more effectively target your prospects. Automatic reporting will save you and your team time, allowing you to pay more attention to more complex issues.

The benefits of using call tracking to tackle your most difficult problems are self-evident. There’s little doubt as to why wise men might say it’s “the wisest course.”

Your leads keep your business going. If you’ve got things sorted when it comes to lead generation, you should have a steady stream of inbound leads. These can come from calls, web forms, PPC ads, and many other sources. But just as important as getting those leads is being able to keep them organised, manage them, and then either convert or distribute them.

In order to do this, it’s critical to know what a sales lead is and how to use lead management.

What is a Sales Lead?

When we talk about leads, we typically mean sales leads, but there are distinctions. Some leads are marketing leads, or marketing qualified leads (MQLs). These are leads that have been educated by your brand marketing and are deemed ready to present to sales. A sales lead, or sales qualified lead (SQL), is a lead that has taken an action that suggests they are ready and eager to make a purchase.

A sales lead will have clicked a call to action with statements like “Call Now,” “Get Quotes,” “Talk to an Agent,” or something similar. A sales lead is very valuable because it is a lead that is far ahead in the sales funnel and are ready to take the plunge.

What is Lead Management?

Lead management is what happens to a lead once it enters your sales funnel as a sales qualified lead. From here, it is on a path to being converted by your sales team—unless you plan to distribute the lead to third parties for conversion. Lead management is important because it is the link between your lead generation endeavours and sales goals. If you don’t manage your leads effectively, you could be wasting all your marketing and lead generation efforts.

If you are a very small business, you may be able to manage and organise your leads using a “manual” system like an Excel spreadsheet, a digital notes app, or even notecards on a bulletin board. But for most small, medium, and enterprise-sized businesses, there is a need for lead management software.

Organising with Lead Management Software

A lead management system is useful for many reasons, most simply because it puts all your leads in one digital place: the cloud. SaaS lead management allows you and other members of your team to track how leads made it to you and where they need to go. It makes sure nothing falls through the cracks.

The best lead management software will do even more than help organise your leads—it can also illuminate ways you could earn more revenue. You can use filtering and restrictions with lead management software to improve your lead quality and only accept leads you are likely to convert.

A feature like URL tracking can give you insight into the traffic source for each lead. By tracking the marketing that is driving leads your way, you can make better decisions about where to allocate funds.

By knowing where your leads came from and effectively managing them with a lead management system, you can account for each lead, refine your approach, and pursue strategies that will lead to more conversions.

In an age of constantly-changing technology, it is critical that businesses are prepared to adapt in order to stay competitive. More than just keeping a healthy bottom line, the ability to evolve can mean the difference between continued success and closing up shop.

One of the most famous examples of this is the “double pivot” achieved by Netflix. The company had originally started as a movies-by-mail company, sharing paper sleeves of DVDs with consumers who wanted to skip brick-and-mortar rental shops (and their notorious late fees). With the dawn of the digital age, though, Netflix pivoted to streaming services and delivered digital movies right into the homes of cinephiles. Netflix would pivot again and start creating their own feature and TV content some years later when the company realised its lack of original programming put it at a disadvantage.

The lesson from Netflix is that there is never a bad time to take an intensive look at your business and implement necessary changes. One segment of your marketing strategy that is always worth examining is email marketing. Whether you are just getting started with an email marketing plan or have been utilising it for a long time, the right kind of email marketing software can help you evolve and stay relevant.

Forge Stronger Connections

The power of email marketing is undeniable, especially when it comes to your marketing ROI. According to Campaign Monitor, for every £1 spent on email marketing you can expect a £44 return on investment. Part of what makes emails so effective is that they allow you to communicate directly with a receptive audience. It’s the personal touch of getting your message into a person’s inbox that makes a difference.

Email marketing software gives you the ability to create even stronger one-on-one connections with your target audience. With audience segmentation, you can divide your subscribers into different groups so that they get content that more tailored to their needs. Instead of sending one email out to all your subscribers, you’ll be able to craft readers according to age groups, buyer habits, or geographic location.

Considering that subject lines are one of the most important factors in achieving a high open rate, it is especially wise to use segmentation to customise your subject lines to specific groups within your email list. Doing so will lead to a deeper connection between your brand and your top consumers.

Optimise Campaigns

You can further evolve your email marketing strategy by taking a renewed approach to how you evaluate your campaigns. Build better emails by using a sophisticated drag-and-drop template that lets you easily build emails to fit your business. When you have flexibility in your email design, you can quickly adapt to changing market trends and put together sharp-looking campaigns in a moment’s notice.

Additionally, you can use your email marketing software to test different messages and see what’s working best. By taking a close look at your past open rates, you can make adjustments to your latest message so it has the maximum impact. All this will allow you to create email campaigns that perform better and deliver a bigger ROI.

Make Data-Driven Decisions

Ultimately, if you want to have agility in your business and be ready to adapt when circumstances change, you need to be as well-informed as possible. For the task of acquiring volumes of valuable information, there is no better source than campaign analytics from your email marketing software.

Not only will utilising campaign analytics allow you to have all your campaign data in one space, but it makes it easier to understand the importance of that data thanks to automatic reporting and customisable dashboards. An easy-to-navigate user interface becomes especially significant when you need fast access to the most relevant data and reports. With an uncomplicated view of how your past campaigns have performed and granular insights into your open and click-through rates, you’ll be able to execute precise adjustments that can make a big difference.

No matter how you utilise your email marketing software, there’s little doubt that it can be a valuable tool for optimizing your campaigns and making plans for the future. Staying connected to your subscribers and aware of market trends will allow you to pivot when needed like Netflix and avoid ending up in the dustbin of history, like a certain beloved blue-and-yellow video rental chain.