Answering the Phone
So what keeps the average small business owner awake at night, likely lots of things. There are a lot of moving parts to a business, and we all wear many hats. While I like to write about the latest cutting edge marketing tricks, I wanted to touch on something that I sometimes worry about in our Boutique Apartment Management Business,
Are We Answering the Phone?
It is said that after all of the marketing we all do, 70% of purchases, orders or however you actually sell something occurs with a phone call. How can we ever be to busy to answer the phone?
Start to Measure
As with most things in any business, many pieces and parts of the phone equation can be tracked. And, according to the great Peter Drucker,
What Gets Tracked and Measured, Gets Done.
There are a multitude of third party providers who can help you with tracking and reporting of your phone calls. However, another big thing on the keep me up at night list is preserving operating capital, so we decided to use Google Voice.
If you haven’t used Google Voice, it is pretty cool, free and has helped us in multiple ways. Here is the link on Getting Started with Google Voice, and below is a video outlining the features. We have included how we are using the service and our results so far after the jump.
What We Learned
We have set up Google Voice to deliver to a gmail inbox, so there is a record of when the call came in, and you can play the calls back through your computer, or see the text of the call. It is pretty cool, and much easier to manage.
Even though this is pretty basic data, we have learned a few things. To, this isn’t a slam to our employees at Urbane Apartments, they work pretty hard, and as a hands on owner, I am right in there with them most days, however, we can do much better, and will with increased phone focus.
We Were Missing a Lot of Calls
- 87% of the missed calls that went to voice mail occurred during the hours we are open, only 13% occurred after hours.
- 56% ofthe missed calls that went to voice mail occurred when we had two leasing consultants working
- If we slightly expand our hours open, we can capture 90% of the 13% of missed calls that went to voice mail. This however, only makes sense once we make answering the phone a higher priority.
So, We have some work to do, and will keep you posted on our improvements. What are your experiences with managing phone skills?
Eric’s background is rooted in the rental and real estate industries. He founded metro Detroit’s Urbane Apartments in 2003, after serving as senior vice president for a major Midwest apartment developer. He established a proven track record of effectively repositioning existing rental properties in a way that added value for investors while enhancing the resident experience.
He also established The Urbane Way, a social media marketing and PR laboratory, where innovative marketing ideas are tested. Eric has been featured in Entrepreneur Magazine and Business Week Magazine.
You can connect with Eric_Urbane on Twitter.
Eric also writes regular articles for the following publications;
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