You made it through Black Friday, but we still have a month left of the holiday season. Regardless of industry, shoppers want to be confident in the purchase they are making and therefore seek out more information prior to completing a purchase. This past Black Friday mobile traffic reached nearly 60% of all online traffic (smartphones made up 47%) and mobile sales grew 24% year-over-year. And when these shoppers need more information? The majority want to call, and smartphones make it easier.
In order to ensure these callers have the best possible call experience, here are 5 ways to supercharge your call routing and give your holiday sales a boost.
Route Based on Marketing Source
During the fourth quarter marketers advertise a wide variety of offers, sales, products, services – you name it. Let’s say you have a TV ad running to promote a new holiday product line, paid search ads highlighting a sale, and banner ads displaying different offers on specific products. Guess what? Call attribution technology enables you to not only track calls back to each marketing source that drove it, but also route calls from each of those sources differently. Imagine sending a caller to a sales agent who is an expert on that new holiday product line – contextually routing calls based on the source creates relevance and increases your chance of closing the sale.
Route Based on Keywords
I mentioned above routing calls based on paid search ads. It’s possible to take that even further and route a call based on the keyword someone searched prior to placing that call. Dynamic number insertion (DNI) gives marketers a pool of numbers that automatically replace your website’s hardcoded phone number every time a new visitor reaches your site. A wide range of caller metadata is captured via DNI, including the keyword a visitor searched for before calling. Call routing technology then routes based on that specific keyword, again driving relevance for the caller and boosting your agents’ close rates. This video gives a nice tutorial on how this flow works.
Route Based on Location
There’s nothing like calling a business only to reach the wrong location and get bounced around from either store location to store location, or call center to call center. Especially during the holiday season when tensions are high and you need answers – fast. Geo-location technology fixes this issue. It first pinpoints the exact location of mobile callers and then routes them to the nearest store, office, call center, etc.
Weed out Callers With an IVR
If your business relies on calls to close sales, you can’t afford to have your agents tied up with callers looking for basic information such as hours, locations, or product inventory. An IVR (interactive voice response) system keeps these types of callers out of the sales queue by providing basic information in an automated fashion. A menu of keypress prompts allow callers to select the path for the information they need – and still give the option to connect in conversation with a sales agent.
Forward Calls to Agents Anywhere
With the holiday season comes travel for everyone – including you and your agents. Ensure calls never go unanswered (and you never miss a sale) by forwarding calls to agents wherever they are. Ring all of your agents simultaneously (the first to pick up gets the call), ring them in a sequential order, and each agent can choose which of their phones a call goes to first. You can even forward calls based on your business hours, so if your east coast office or store location is already closed, calls can be automatically transferred to the west coast office to keep the lead hot and boost your chances of closing the sale.
Bonus: Trigger Calls From Web Forms
If your business receives a lot of leads via web form fills, this solution is for you. Marketers can set up web forms to automatically trigger a call to their sales team when that form is filled out. The triggered call will whisper the lead’s information to the rep and, if the rep accepts the call, another call is placed to the lead and then the agent and caller are connected in conversation. Yet another way to keep leads hot and boost holiday sales.
To learn more about how call tracking can help you drive new customers and increase ROI, download our ebook, The 10 Call Analytics Reports That Will Change Your Marketing.
