Here’s an important suggestion that we made several months ago to an attorney who is one of our clients. It’s a tip regarding his incoming phone calls – a tip that actually doubled his intake.

In fact, he sent us this email: “I tested the new answering service for two months, and it seems to work well. Our intake has gone from 27 new clients in October and November to 55 new clients in December and January. Did the number of phone calls increase?”

When we called this client to arrange a meeting back in September, we realized that his telephone system had one of those “press one for this and press two for that” messages.

We checked on the duration of his phone calls, and we found that a lot of people were hanging up within one minute, and they hung up without speaking to a live person or leaving a message.

That needed fixing.

WHAT DO CALLERS WANT?

Using a system called Dialogtech, we are able to segment a client’s phone calls to determine which particular calls are generated by the work we do at Social Firestarter. How?

When a visitor arrives at a client’s website because the visitor was directed there through our SEO (search engine optimization) work, it automatically changes the phone number on the website – so that we can see precisely how many phone calls our work is generating.

We compared the client’s October/November call report, with 27 new clients, against his December/January call report, with 55 new clients. It’s just one of the many ways we monitor our own work as an internet marketing company.

The number of this client’s individual phone calls in the December/January period did not double – in fact, that number slightly declined. What we found, however, is that callers very much want to talk to a live person.

WHO ANSWERS YOUR PHONE AFTER OFFICE HOURS?

We’ve conducted this test for other clients as well. Every time a client of ours changes over from an automated telephone answering system to having telephone calls answered by a live person, the intake numbers always go up, and when the intakes go up, the number of new cases goes up too.

Especially consider what happens after office hours. Do your calls go to a voicemail, or do they go to an answering service or your private cell phone?

If it’s at all possible, you need to have your phone answered by a live person – 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

We’ve seen it consistently. You will take in more calls when a live person answers every time, and you will quickly have more clients.