5 Effective Methods to Manage Online Customer Enquiries

You're worked hard to establish an online presence - building a website, social tools, blog and participating in on-line forums. Now the traffic to your sites has increased and you're getting a steady stream of enquiries. The only issue is that some of these enquires are falling on deaf ears ... how do you fix this?

Today's blog post was created after a Tweet I saw today:

Research shows 42% of all email enquiries in USA to real estate agents seeking info on a property go unanswered. @brwhite

A scary, but not uncommon fact. Furthermore, I'm sure that there are also businesses out there that could not tell you what proportion of enquiries did/did-not receive a response!

The fact is that many businesses spend a considerable amount of time, effort and money developing their on-line presence (web, email, social, etc.). Then these same businesses neglect to provide adequate resources to ensure that these platforms can suitably service current/prospective customers.

Using the above Tweet as an example; in this instance your business would be missing out on almost half of the leads generated on-line by your business! That's almost half of your on-line budget under-performing; and (depending on your conversion-rate) potentially an even greater level of sales forfeited.

If this sounds like your business, there are a number of steps you can take to turn this trend around.

Some suggestions include:

• Create a list of all enquiries that can be referred back to as a point of reference;
• Delegate a staff member to manage all enquiries that come from on-line sources to ensure that responses are provided;
• Ensure that your on-line enquires are logged in a task-list;
• If you use a lead management system, ensure that all enquiries are added to this system; and
• Periodically review your enquiries, responses from your business and analyse the results.

While not an exhaustive list of solutions, these simple approaches (which can be as easy as using an Excel spreadsheet) can make a huge difference.

There is multiple ways ranging from free and simple methods right through to large scale systems to manage your enquiries depending on your needs. We have worked with clients in the past and on an ongoing basis to help them implement these systems. If you think now is the time to start looking at your options, get in touch and let's discuss where you could go.

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