Increase Membership with Better Phone Skills

Even in our digital world, the phone is a critical customer service and marketing channel. No matter how many paid ad campaigns you run or how informative your website is, sooner or later, future members will actually call your business.

Invest the time and resources to ensure every employee, from your front desk employees to your most seasoned trainers, know what to say and how to say it when the phone rings. Consider these two ways to turn your employees into phone service experts:

Train Your Employees on Phone Etiquette

Researchers found 48% of customers want to use the phone for service. Hubspot offers excellent tips for improving phone communication skills:

• Answer a call within three rings.
• Introduce yourself right away.
• Speak clearly, confidently and with a smile.
• Actively listen, so you can base your response off their comments.
• Ask before putting them on hold or transferring their call.
• Be honest if you don’t know the answer — then go find it.

(Carefully) Use Call Scripts

Call scripts guide your employees through their phone conversation and help them promptly and accurately answer questions about membership, training specials or other important information. Take care, though — one survey found 78%  of customers feel their customer service experience improves when the agent doesn’t sound as though they’re reading from a script.

Salesforce provides tips for developing effective call center scripts and delivering a highly personalized customer experience:

• Use call recording to create a script that sounds natural.
• Be concise. Your script should be short and sweet, and relevant to the topic of the conversation.
• Keep customer responses in mind when creating your script. Your future members need a chance to speak and be heard.
• Be flexible. Train your team to properly handle the unexpected.
• Always be adapting to meet the changing needs of your business and members.

Use Call Tracking to Improve Your Marketing ROI 

Proper phone skills are essential to marketing success, and so is knowing the source of those calls in order to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns. That’s where call tracking comes in. This technology tracks phone inquiries by inserting a tracking number into your website, paid ads and direct mailers to see which of your marketing efforts are really producing results. 

What’s more, you can measure and listen to calls from both online and offline marketing campaigns, and automated reporting goes straight to your inbox. 

Your employees are the face and voice of your business. With proper training, they can also become your greatest marketing assets.

Jon Butts is the SVP of marketing and co-founder of UpSwell. He can be reached at jbutts@upswellmarketing.com or by visiting fitness.upswellmarketing.com.