You might be wondering how you can increase the amount of orders you get daily. It is not your fault that you dont know what I am about to tell you because the only way you would know is with experience. Every email that we send to you has a little piece of our personal experience that is rarely found on the internet.
If you are reading it and take action on what we recommend, you will be on your way to having a successful online business. Do not let your work distract you from taking a ten minute break and learning this priceless knowledge that we share with you every week.
WEBSITE PHONE SALES
The purpose of a website is to work for you 24/7, and act as a sales agent for your company. But you know that your website is far from being a perfect salesman, after all it does not convert as well as you can in real life.
Even though the website is available to do the transactions for you, it lacks the human touch. There is a very interesting video, about how we process information in our brains. They say that content is only responsible for seven percent of convincing the customer to buy from you, 38% is tonality which your website lacks, and 55% is the visual aspect that your website most likely lacks as well.
Now if you take my advice about making beautiful visual product webpages, you might boost your conversions. However, your website will never be you, and it will lack the human tonality, unless of course you invest a lot of money into video production and website design.
Most businesses put together a bunch of UGLY product webpages, with no tonality, poor graphic design and one sentence of content, and they expect their website to convert 24/7. Get REAL!
BUT HOW DO SOME SUCCEED?
Well they answer the phone when the customer calls, and then they will answer any questions about the product (information that was supposed to be on the product webpage in the first place). If they are a great salesman they will use their tonality to try and close the sale, and finally a creative salesman will use a persuading emotional sales pitch to close even more sales.
So assuming that you are in the position of doing a terrific job of closing sales over the phone, what happens when you stop answering the phone at the end of the day, and your live chat goes offline? Have you ever counted how many sales you lose?
You need to calculate how many people try to call you after business hours. How many of them do not reach you, how many do not bother to call you, and finally how many do not get an answer to their questions.
MEASURING SALES AFTER BUSINESS HOURS
Shopping Cart Elite uses TEA (Threat and Engagement Analytics) to measure how many people attempt to call you. Here is a screen shot of what that looks like.
The screen shot shows 243 visitors attempting to contact the website owner over a month period. TEA confirmed all of them were real human visitors, which had excellent engagement. You will see the date underlined with visitors who tried contacting this website before and after business hours.
It is not guaranteed that they were successful in contacting anyone, or if they sent in an email with their question. What we do know is that if someone was available during those hours, then those visitors would become customers.
Here is how we track these visitors:
If you are a real human visitor AND
If you have browsed the search results for more than 40 seconds OR
If you have browsed a product webpage for more than 30 seconds AND
You visited the contact page for more than 10 seconds AND
The Contact webpage was the last page visited before leaving the website THEN
Trigger the TEA Issue Tried to Contact
You can try to track this using Google Analytics, but because Google Analytics doesnt track real visitors vs. fake visitors you will have a hard time coming up with a conclusion on how many sales you are losing due to this problem.
PURPOSE OF CUSTOMER SUPPORT
Finally, lets assume that some the visitors are not new customers, but existing customers who have a problem. You might make a decision that you unquestionably dont care to provide them after hours customer support.
However, you must understand the fundamental purpose of customer support, it is to change feelings, not the facts, but the way your customer feels. The facts might be the price, or a return, or how long someone had to wait for service. Sometimes changing the facts is a shortcut to changing feelings, but not always, and changing the facts alone is not always sufficient anyway.
If a customer service process (your call center/complaints department/returns policy) is built around stalling, denying and begrudging the customer, and finally to the few customers who persist on calling you until you comply, then it might save money, but it is a total failure.
The customer who seeks out your help isnt often looking to deplete your bank account. He is usually seeking validation, support and a path to feeling the way he felt before you let him down.
The best measurement of customer support is whether, after the interaction, the customer would recommend you to a friend. Time on the line, refunds given or the facts of the case are irrelevant. The feelings are all that matter, and changing feelings takes humanity and connection, not cash.
So if you have a customer service problem that requires customers to call you at these hours, then you should
Develop a system to address these issues before they happen
Create or Optimize your company Core Values and make your customer support team embrace them
MEASURING CUSTOMER SUPPORT AND SALES
Shopping Cart Elite uses TEA to track phone sales. When a visitor enters your website, they are assigned a reference number on the footer of each webpage. When that visitor calls you, you can ask them to give you their reference number. You would then create an account inside Shopping Cart Elite and tag that reference number. Once that reference number is tagged TEA will know where that phone call originated from and if it results in sales, it will log that as well.
Additionally you can log when the phone call started and ended, as well as what the call was in reference too. This way you can print a weekly or monthly report to see how many calls your company had, and how long on average the calls lasted.
Stop using an amateur shopping cart system that you are using today, and start using Shopping Cart Elite. YOU WILL BE GLAD THAT YOU DID.
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Tags: business hours, phone sales, measuring phone sales, tracking phone sales, customer support