Social Media And SEO Doesn’t Matter Shit If You Don’t Pick Up The Phone
This is a guest post by Caelen King who is CEO and founder of WhatClinc.com, a directory of health clinics around the world with over 500,000 unique monthly visitors. WhatClinic.com has recently expanded into Dentists in the UK and Plastic Surgery in the UK
Social Media affords you the ability to connect directly with your existing and potential customers, potential employees and a range of other interested parties. SEO is the work you do to make information stored by your company available to as wide an audience as possible through the various search engines.
Both of these disciplines require work on your part to build up your connections and your online visibility and can take up a substantial amount of your time. So why do so many small businesses forget that the first and most important aspect of being connected is being contactable? By not ensuring the phone is picked up when it rings and emails are answered promptly small firms are effectively falling at the first hurdle of being connected with the people most interested in them.
At WhatClinic.com we work with health clinics from around the world to expand their online presence for the explicit purpose of getting them more business. We work hard at this and measure everything so we can show real value for money. However one problem continually frustrates us and that is when we help a new patient try to connect with a clinic and the clinic doesn’t pick up the phone or they don’t answer the patient’s email. [It should be noted that all of our data comes from our work with dentists, surgeons & doctors from around the world. However, we know from talking to companies in other industries that this behavior is repeated across them all.]
So How Bad Is The Problem?
Our data tells us that clinics don’t answer on average 25% of their phone calls, and don’t reply to 35% of their emails within two working days. Now when you think about it very few companies have a 30% profit margin so ignoring 30% to 40% of your new and existing customers is nothing short of a disaster.
If you take into account the fact that some clinics have nearly perfect records for being contactable, it paints an even worse picture for the remaining businesses, and what’s worse for them again is when a new customer doesn’t get through the first time or doesn’t get a reply from their first email, then they will not try to contact that clinic again. In fact, not only do they end up going elsewhere, but if they ever mention the business again in public it is always negatively.
How Do We Know All Of This?
Our revenue depends on the fact that the clinics we work with realise that the business we generate for them comes from us in the first place. This is relatively easy in the case of email enquiries as the referrals come through us and are branded. What might not seem so obvious though is that even if we send a particular clinic hundreds of referrals a year, they might not see the value in them because they don’t act on them quickly enough and lose the associated business, or worse yet, they don’t act on them at all.
To counter this we contact the people who made the enquiry after two days to see if they have been successful in connecting with their chosen clinic. We then publish that information and inform the clinic themselves. For phone calls we route calls to clinics through our telecoms system so we know exactly who gets through and how long they spend on the call. Again we inform the clinics of the data we gather.
So What Is The Solution
When we work directly with clinics we push them to get their telephone answer rate and their email response rate into the 90% range. Using the measures described above every month we give the business owner a report of how many emails weren’t responded to and how many phone calls were not answered. For clarity we translate this into a handy ‘lost revenue’ figure. You would be amazed at how quickly they recover.
Unfortunately for most SME’s there isn’t a company like us in the middle providing regular reports on telephone answer rates and email response rates, but if you care about your company’s revenue they are figures you should get to know, and it shouldn’t be that difficult to gather the data you need either. If you’ve got a PABX then this should be simple, and it’s even easier if you use a VOIP provider such as Blueface. It should also be trivial for a manager to look at all of the emails that have been sent in and their corresponding replies.
About Caelen King
Caelen is CEO and founder of WhatClinc.com, a directory of health clinics around the world with over 500,000 unique monthly visitors. WhatClinic.com features dentists in Mexico to plastic surgery clinics in Dublin and everything in between. He regularly blogs about marketing and business issues. Prior to founding WhatClinic.com, Caelen rolled out 10 million+ user base social applications to tier one mobile operators such as T-Mobile USA and O2 UK with NewBay Software.
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