As competition intensifies in the face of falling customer spending, making it easier for customers to order or call your contact centre when they are most keen to buy can make a real difference to your results.

Consider these two scenarios:

Number 1: Younger generations and certain products lend themselves to website self-service ordering however with over 50 percent of websites failing usability tests (depending on which analyst you ask), what happens if a potential customer ‘just has a quick question’ or wants to check features, colours, sizes or your return policy and can’t find the information on your website? 

Number 2: Similarly, email marketing is now one of the most popular marketing tools to communicate to customers and prospects (accounting for 44.9 percent of marketing investment globally according to the 2009 Marketing Outlook by The CMO Council), particularly for special offers and time limited deals. Once your email is opened, what’s your call to action and how are you going to convert as quickly as possible?

The answer for most companies is to plaster 1300 YOURNUMBER all over the website (site redesigns are too difficult) or email and hope the customer or prospect will find their phone, translate the phone number on their screen to punched keypad numbers (correctly!) and connect to the contact centre. Unfortunately the second you force customers to leave their computer you break the web’s very effective ‘browsing, instant gratification’ spell. You’ll lose some people just at this vital step.

The power of VoIP to the rescue

Surveys and research reinforce the popularity of ‘speaking to someone’ when placing an order or gaining customer service and in our two scenarios a call to the contact centre is the next logical step. Better still, with a VoIP based web-to-telephone service you can easily connect the customer or prospect with your contact centre from their computer screen.

Let’s face it, why should a customer remember your number when they know by heart their own number? Why should they potentially incur any call cost? Why should they bother with the hassle of dialling your number when they could just click to dial your contact centre.

With a web-to-telephone (or click to dial) service, the customer simple clicks a button on your website, enters their own phone number (mobile or landline), which makes their phone ring, and is then connected to the contact centre. This kind of service has seen response rates of around 15 percent from e-newsletter recipients.

Why it works

The concept of click to dial services is very simple, leveraging three human ‘truths’:
- People can easily remember their own phone number
- People like free calls
- People like it when things are easy

Additionally, by extending the online experience you can avoid what we call ‘cross-channel drop-out’ where sales evaporate as the change from the online channel to the physical phone can get interrupted (think toilet break or cuppa-time) and sales momentum lost.

Click to dial also works extremely well for websites with repeat customers, where it is often easier for the customer to speak to somebody than complete long forms online. We have seen it work well for ticket sales (including waitlisting using just the IVR), holiday-related bookings and a vast array of B2C and B2B companies using email marketing.

Try it now

Typically, the setup process is very simple and fast and the resulting URL can be used as a hyperlink in any HTML document or page - in fact you can try it now:

Click here to call IPscape now for free (it’s programmed to go to our IVR
so just hang up if you don’t wish to actually speak person to person - but
we’ll be by the phone just in case!).

By The IPscape

The technical boys at IPscape are Darren Younger and David O'Leary. The boys run the IPscape technical group including managing the development, operations and telecommunication teams.