Whether you're extra busy this season, working remotely, dealing with fluctuating staff schedules or atypical business hours, are short-staffed, or just want to better engage with your customers in the new year and beyond, CallRail can help.
We’ve put together this overview of some of our most useful features and how to use them to make the CallRail platform work harder for you so you can reap the rewards of more happy customers!
Automate call routing to support holiday schedules and more
CallRail’s Call Flows let you create unique, fully-customizable call routing for each of your tracking phone numbers. If you aren’t using Call Flows yet, with just a few quick updates to your settings, they can help your business operate more efficiently during this busy time. The possibilities are endless!
A few ways to use Call Flows:
- Create a schedule to route calls based on your business hours or to voicemail after hours. If you have unique or variable holiday hours, implementing a Call Flow with a schedule step can help ensure 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 promote special holiday offers or communicate your holiday business 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 great opportunity to run customized messages about your offers or highlight specific services.
It’s that time of year where in addition to changes to your operating hours, your team may be working extended hours, atypical schedules, or taking some 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 to agents who are logged in and available. Now 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 forecast staffing needs
Get ahead of scheduling and anticipate staffing needs by understanding when your busiest days and times are with the Calls by Day and Time report. Or, to find out when your business might be missing the most calls, use the Missed Calls report. Look at current call volume and adjust the report dates to view last year’s holiday call volume to forecast your staffing needs for the coming weeks.
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
Quickly ramp new or seasonal team members
Scrambling to find the time needed to onboard new staff members? Inbound Call Recording, included with all Call Tracking plans, 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 getting ramped up.
Keep your customers and prospects engaged, even when you can’t speak to them
Closed for a few days around the holidays? 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're available.
Tap into the power of text messaging
89% of customers prefer to communicate with businesses via text than any other channel (Twilio).
Send holiday offers and messages to your customers and prospects to wish them good cheer and keep your business top-of-mind! Emails are fine, but with the flurry of holiday emails being blasted to your customers, what are the odds they will open or even see yours? Texts break through the clutter: 98% of consumers open text messages compared to only 20% open rate for email (The Crazy Egg).
With Lead Center, you can text customers using your tracking numbers right from your computer or smartphone while keeping your personal number private. Use Quick Text templates for commonly sent messages to save time and ensure consistency in messaging, regardless of the team member who sends it.
If you're currently routing your call tracking numbers to a landline phone, 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, and because 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.
Set your team up for success when they're away from the office
'Tis the season to be on the go more than usual and away from your desk more often. Ensure that you and your team can continue to be productive remotely - whether working from outside of the office while traveling or in the event of inclement winter weather. 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. Be ready for anything and don’t skip a beat when everyone can’t be in the office.
Plus, the Lead Center mobile app enables you to stay on top of all of your business communications from your smartphone from anywhere - en route to a customer appointment or in line to take holiday photos with your family.
Unlock more of the power of the CallRail platform
As a CallRail customer, you’ve already got great tools at your fingertips to ensure that this holiday season (and beyond) runs smoothly and efficiently, and most importantly, that your customers get the help they need and your business thrives. We hope you’ll implement some of the great Call Tracking tools we shared in this article to see how they impact your business.
By pairing Call Tracking with Lead Center, our easy-to-use, intuitive business communications solution, you can take, make, and manage all your calls, texts, and chats from one unified inbox, all without ever leaving the CallRail platform. Get a real-time view of the customer journey and have smarter customer conversations, every time. With Lead Center, you’ll never worry about missing an opportunity to drive more revenue or improve your customer experience.
Get a leg up on the holiday season and new year - start your Lead Center free trial today!
