Instructor Business Hint 7 - Answer your Phone, Help your Customers Contact You

Instructors often ask how they can deal with enquiries and calls when they are teaching.  Answering calls when teaching is not possible and if you are not lucky enough to have someone who can deal with potential customer enquiries you can miss opportunities and lose potential leads.  The solution we found many years ago when we were in the same position was to use an answering service.  We still use a PA answering service  to deal with out of office hours calls and as an overflow with excellent success.  We appreciate that an answering service is not the ideal solution as a first point of contact for your business, but it is better than customers not being able to talk to someone when they call, we also find that we have difficulties getting an answer from instructors when we contact them, usually because they are teaching.

To use a PA service you divert calls or unanswered calls to the PA service, your customer gets to speak to a real person who answers the phone in your business name and takes a message.  This message is sent to you by email or text and you call them back when you are available.  Experience has taught us that people do not like leaving messages on answerphones, they will however leave a message with a person.  While you are establishing your business we would recommend that you consider using a PA service for your calls. For more information click PA answering service.

It is important to be friendly and helpful to people who contact you and always get back to people quickly and efficiently.  There is nothing worse that replying to an email days after it was sent.  Add your emails to your mobile phone so you can answer fast.

Review your own website, make sure that it is easy for people to find the information they need to contact you.  Is you phone number easy to find?  Do you have a clear contact page with an email form or link?  You can make it easy for your customers to book on your courses by adding the code from your ProTrainings dashboard, this will make the courses you have listed on ProTrainings appear on your own website. Many individuals look for courses in the evening and weekends when they cannot call you and if you have online booking, you will find that you sell places on your courses while you're asleep!  You can access the widget to add your courses from your instructor dashboard, add then code provided by cutting and pasting it into the code of your own website, this is easier than it sounds, if you need any help please call our support department.

Having a blog can also be a good way of getting information to new customers and then gaining leads.  Social media is also the way many people find and contact businesses.

It is vital to provide your customers with easy access to information, it is equally as important to return their call or answer their enquiry as quickly as possible, if you do not all of your hard work is wasted.  It isn't always possible to return a call as quickly as you would like to but when a potential customer calls you, they are probably calling other businesses that provide the same training, it is important to do everything you can to help you to be the first to get back to them, this way you can close the deal before your opposition has even read the email.

For more information please click this link alldayPA – Answering Service.  If you have any questions or would like to become a ProTrainings centre, please contact us by email on support@protrainings.eu, phone on 01206 805359 or use our online chat from most of our websites.