Why do customers patronize a brand for years? Trust. That’s the simple answer. Trust instills loyalty in customers. While a catchy slogan and dazzling website are important for your business, a seemingly simple detail like your phone number can make a whole lot of difference in whether or not customers trust you enough to make a purchase from you. Here’s how a professional business phone number can help you gain trust with your customers right from the first impression and inspire their loyalty to your brand.
Why is a Professional Business Phone Number Essential?
You may wonder, is it that big of a deal? It’s just a phone number. Well, let’s show you how customers may decide not to trust you based on the kind of phone number you use for your business.
1. Brand Image
The Nigerian business setting is full of scammers already. You don’t want to look or sound like one of them.
Let’s say as a business owner, you use your personal mobile number for your business . You print this number on your business cards, flyers, and place it on your website. One day, you receive a call from a potential client, who is interested in your product. However, when you answer the call, you’re in a noisy market, and the client hears background sounds, making it difficult to communicate. You try to apologize and explain, but the client hangs up, feeling unimpressed and unconvinced about your professionalism. The problem here is not the location but the fact that your phone number limits you from transferring the call to another member of your staff since you’re in a busy environment and you cannot differentiate personal calls from business calls.
In this scenario, not having a professional phone number can affect your brand image in several ways:
- Unprofessional appearance: Using a personal mobile number may give the impression that your business is not established or professional.
- Poor customer experience: Background noise, poor call quality, or unavailability can lead to frustrated customers and a negative brand image.
- Lack of credibility: Compared to your competitors, your business may appear less credible and less trustworthy without a professional phone number.
Meanwhile, your competitor, who has a professional phone number, transfers their calls to another staff in a quiet and professional environment, making a great first impression on their potential clients.
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2. Missed Sales and Opportunities
Your potential customers may choose other businesses over you due to their more professional appearance. This means you lose sales and the ability to retain your existing customers. Let’s even assume they decide to go on with making a purchase with you. The chances they pay you what you are worth are slim because you do not sound like an established business.
3. Low Customer Service Quality
How do you know what your customers are complaining about? Not all of them will tell you how they feel about your products or services to your face. What features or tools do you have in replace to go over interactions between your staff and customers so as to improve how you serve your customers. If you don’t have any of these features or tools, it is because you lack a good professional phone number. The result of this is that your customers may feel you are not taking their feedback and complaints seriously. So what do they do? They take their business elsewhere.
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- Choosing a Flexible Virtual Phone Number for Your Growing Nigerian Business
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4. Repeating Unproductive Sales Strategy
Mrs. Amobi is a Nigerian business owner selling solar panels, and she uses her personal mobile number for sales calls. She receives a call from a potential customer, who is interested in her product. During the call, she discusses the features and benefits of her solar panels, but the customer doesn’t make a purchase.
Without a professional phone number with call recording, she misses out on the opportunity to:
- Review the call to identify areas for improvement in her sales pitch
- Analyze what went wrong and adjust her approach for future calls
- Refine your sales talking points to better resonate with customers
When potential, ready-to-pay customers call you and they don’t make a purchase, it means they are not convinced and do not trust you enough to make that purchase. You will be surprised to learn how much a professional phone number can improve your sales tactics and make your customers trust you more. Without a professional phone number, you may never know how best to improve your sales strategy because you don’t have realtime conversations between your staff and customers stored somewhere.
Related post: How to Choose the Right Business Phone Number for Your Brand
5. Frustrated Teams
You could become very frustrated with your sales team because their efforts are not converting customers, when all the while, it’s because you do not have the means to improve their talking points and coach them on how to easily convert customers based on conversations you’ve listened to. You could blame the low sales on your team rather than examining why customers do not trust your business enough to buy from you.
Meanwhile, your competitor, who has a professional phone number with call recording, is able to:
- Review calls to refine their sales pitch and techniques
- Identify and address common customer objections
- Train their sales staff more effectively
- Continuously improve their sales approach, leading to increased conversions and sales
Related post: 9 Signs Your Business Phone needs an Upgrade
How To Build Trust with a Professional Business Phone Number
With a PressOne professional business number, you’re set to take your business to the next level. Here’s how:
1. Project a Professional Image
Impressions matter a lot. First, when your callers call you, they are greeted with a personalized message that signals that your business is an established one. This will make them pay you what you are worth and give them a sense that your business is a trustworthy one. Infact, when you are busy, in a meeting or out of the country, you can transfer a call to any member of your staff easily regardless of your location.
If there’s a very important customer or investor on the call, the team can also transfer the calls to you easily. The icing on the top is that you get a single number for all your team members. They can all make calls simultaneously and without interruptions, while transferring calls to the right departments. You get all this, with a PressOne professional business number
2. Improve your Customer Service and Experience
Imagine that when customers call you, the calls are automatically recorded and you can go through the interactions between your customers and your staff to learn how your customers feel about your products or services. You can also hear their tone, why they do not feel convinced yet to make a purchase and what they insinuate about your products or services.
This gives you the opportunity to get ahead of the situation and improve the overall experience of your customers and your service to them. There is nothing as good as happy, satisfied customers. They will stay loyal to your brand because you listen to them and you have given them a reason to trust you. You can easily achieve this, with a PressOne professional business number.
Related posts:
- The Benefits of a Virtual Company Phone Number for Small Businesses and Startups
- How to get a Company Phone Number, a step-by-step guide for an African Phone Number
3. Coach your Sales Team
With a PressOne professional business number, you get to understand how better your staff can communicate with your customers and coach them on these strategies. You will also know if their current talking points do not easily convert or convince customers. Overall, you get to coach your team with valuable insights from our call recording and call analytics features. When your team respond to business calls with better customer interaction and improved talking points, you have happy customers who will come to trust your business.
4. Your Competitors are Already Using it
The only reason customers leave a brand for another one is because they are not getting satisfied with the previous brand, and they do not trust the brand anymore. Your competitors already use a professional business number to get customers to trust them. The only question is if they are already using it to attract your customers
Don’t miss out on the opportunity to build a trustworthy and reputable business, Try PressOne Today
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