As 2022 begins, businesses are preparing themselves for disruptions from the latest COVID-19 variant, Omicron.
Here at CallRail, we sincerely hope that the impact of the Omicron variant on your business is minimal. We also want to give you the resources to be prepared for its impact.
This time, we all know a lot about what to expect from a surge in cases. Whether it means working remotely, dealing with fluctuating staff schedules or atypical business hours, being short-staffed, increases in call volume, or communicating extra COVID precautions with your customers, CallRail is here for you.
We’ve put together this overview of things you can do to make the CallRail platform work harder for your business:
Automate your call routing to support unpredictable schedules and more
CallRail’s Call Flows enable you to create customizable call routing for each of your tracking phone numbers. That means when a customer calls your business, you choose what they hear and who answers, based on the settings you create.
If you are forwarding your call tracking numbers directly to your main business line without any additional routing, setting up Call Flows can quickly help your business operate more efficiently.
A few ways we suggest using Call Flows to mitigate COVID disruptions:
- Create a schedule to route calls based on your business hours or to voicemail after hours. If your hours have changed, implementing a Call Flow with a schedule step can help ensure that your customer calls are routed appropriately.
- Use a round robin Call Flow to ring one person and if they don’t answer ring another and so on.
- Add a prerecorded greeting that plays for your callers before someone from your business answers. This is an easy way to keep customers informed about precautions you are taking (or need them to take) or communicate changes to your hours.
- Keep your callers on the line even when you can’t immediately get to them with call queues, available with any of our Lead Center plans. Callers in a queue can listen to music, or this is another opportunity to run customized messages that keep customers informed.
In addition to changes to your operating hours, your team may be working extended hours, atypical schedules, or unexpectedly need to take time off. To avoid having to adjust your Call Flow schedule step each time someone’s hours change (especially if that happens daily or weekly), CallRail’s Lead Center’s agent availability setting automatically updates to route calls only to those logged in and available to take them, so you don’t have to make manual changes to your regular call routing schedule to ensure you don’t miss out on opportunities.
Leverage reporting to reduce the impact of missed calls
Track the impact of increased or decreased call volumes with the Missed Calls report. Get details on the number of missed calls on each day of the week, as well as within each hour in a day. You can use this report to understand your peak call times and to ensure that you’re scheduling your staff at the times when they’ll be needed most.
Short-staffed? Do more with less by making the team you do have more efficient. Lead Center’s unified inbox and complete interaction history for every caller enables your entire team to work from a single workspace to view and respond to customer calls, texts, and chats faster and support repeat callers that may have been previously handled by another person without missing a beat.
“Having CallRail help manage our missed calls has led to more business. It has allowed us to maintain our small-team feel — we don’t have to over-staff to ensure we capture every call. We can handle calls coming in and calls back that were missed across the whole day with our unique small team.” - Chris Berg, Owner, Screen Medic
Set your team up for success when they are away from the office
Ensure that you and your team can continue to be productive remotely–even if they are away from office phones. Our Lead Center softphone is a complete virtual phone system that lets you answer and place calls, texts, and chats, from within the CallRail platform from your computer or phone. It’s designed to be a team workspace when your team isn’t–or can’t be–in the same space.
Quickly ramp new team members
In the wake of the Great Resignation, you may also be onboarding new staff. If you are scrambling to find the time needed to onboard new staff members, utilizing inbound call recording can help. Included with all Call Tracking plans, it captures all your incoming customer calls so new employees can self-train – saving you time and money – or you can review their conversations and provide helpful tips for those in the future.
Adding Lead Center into the mix lets you automatically capture outbound call recordings as well, so you get the complete picture of all calls placed and received. Lead Center also gives you the ability to monitor or join in on live conversations so you can provide real-time coaching and support for your new staff as they are ramping up.
Keep your customers and prospects engaged, even when you can’t speak to them
Whether you are experiencing increased call volume or are short-staffed (or both), you may be having trouble keeping up with incoming calls. Set up automated response messages for missed calls or texts to let your customers know when they can expect to hear back from you and keep them engaged so they don’t reach out to a competitor.
You can also set up missed call or text notification emails so you know exactly who to reach back out to when you are available.
Tap into the power of text messaging
Texting is now widely used in business due to shifting customer preferences. 89% of customers prefer to communicate with businesses via text than any other channel (Twilio). And, the pandemic only accelerated this trend, as customers prefer more contactless ways of communication.
Customers using Lead Center can text customers using your tracking numbers right from your computer or our smartphone app while keeping your personal number private. Use Quick Text templates for commonly sent messages to save time and ensure consistency in messaging to your customers, regardless of the team member who sends it. For example, reminders about COVID-19 precautions you’re requiring can be quickly sent in advance of appointments. Or, send updates on atypical business hours and office closures to keep customers informed and safe.
If you are routing your call tracking numbers to a landline phone currently, you may be missing out on customers who are trying to reach you via text (like that 89% we mentioned earlier). Lead Center makes it easy to stay on top of inbound texts as well. We know lead tracking is important to your business; you can also get visibility into the sources driving your customers to text you, just like you do with phone calls.
We’re here to help.
COVID has impacted us all, but a surge in cases hits every business a little differently. Want to talk to a business communications expert about how your CallRail account can be configured to address your unique challenges and needs? Schedule an account optimization call by emailing analytics@callrail.com. It’s absolutely free, and we’re happy to help in any way we can.
