The way your business communicates and the brand image you present cultivate your professional appearance to your customers. The smallest of details influence your target audience toward a positive or negative first impression.
Your professional image is the one that your business projects based on its reputation and appearance. However, it’s a catch-22 when you’re just starting out. You can manage your professional appearance, but you must build your reputation over time.
A dedicated business phone line offers credibility, builds consumer trust, provides personalized customer service and more. Check out the five ways having a business phone boosts your brand appearance and reputation.
Offer Credibility to Your Professional Image
Small business and startup operations are more chaotic than flawless when you open your door to customers. But you don’t want your customers to know that, especially if you work in a non-traditional setting. A dedicated business phone gives you a professional image, whether you’re working from your kitchen table or a desk in a high-rise office.
How do you go about establishing credibility in business on a budget? Obtain a dedicated business phone line to instantly boost your image. For example, add business credibility to your company reputation by customizing your main greeting. This action creates a professional and warm welcome for your clients. Share essential information, such as company hours and location, to strengthen your business appearance.
Imagine also adding “With a combined experience of 15 years, we bring the best care home to you,” as a part of your greeting. Such details add positives to a reputation that your consumers do not see at first glance.
Build Consumer Confidence and Trust
To build trust in business from business to consumer is one of the greatest hurdles in getting started as a small business or start-up. First-class connectivity directly demonstrates customer dedication and quickly builds consumer confidence in your professional image.
Even in the modern world, customers look for physical addresses and dedicated customer service phone lines to vet companies. Trust and credibility from customers propels brand success.
Provide a Person-to-Person Customer Experience
Humans trust humans, not bots. Build a better customer interaction with the help of innovative technology, and provide a person-to person customer experience. A virtual receptionist efficiently keeps the phone lines running and routes multiple callers at once to the real people they need the most.
Improve customer experience with a business phone system that makes sense. Customers receive responses from automated emails, texts and other services all the time. Keep the greeting and purposes of the virtual receptionist simple.
Automated services do have their place in helping customers to hit a reset button or make a quick payment, in theory. Too often, businesses overwhelm the customer with too many automated options when they just want an answer to a simple question. Customers get frustrated as they wait for hours just to speak to a real person.
Leave human problem-resolving to humans. With more free time, you extend the hours that real humans take calls from customers and boost both customer relations and customer interaction.
Give Resources to Your Customers
Allow your customers to connect to business information quickly. Your customer may have unique questions about product features or need an emergency referral. Your business phone line provides a direct link to human resources for your customers. It adds a personal touch in a sometimes too technological world.
Your business phone number should be listed right there for customers to reach you. 78% of mobile searches for area businesses result in a sale. Why not be available to walk the new customer through the ins and outs of a service to make sure it completely meets their needs? That transparency and accessibility quickly converts a lead into a loyal customer.
Get to know your customers so you can provide the resources they’re seeking in the way they need. Optimize the customer experience with your business phone line, appropriately allocating quick directions to resources. Fast track high-priority concerns directly to customer service.
Represent the Business Organizational Structure
Your call directory listings can organize your business by offering a guide to resources, but it also represents your business as professional to your customers.
Too much hierarchy undermines team collaboration and efficacy. However, representing a proper business organizational structure impacts your company reputation in the eyes of customers. First impressions in business carry more weight than you think. In fact, you have seven seconds to make a great first impression on a new customer.
Customers develop a bad perception of a company when they are constantly redirected between departments. Let your call directory help your customers and represent the business organizational structure, while boosting your appearance and reputation.
Takeaways For Maintaining a Professional Image Via Dedicated Business Phone Line
Reputation management is a growing field in business for a reason. However, business owners focus more on managing and responding to reviews. They often overlook the value their business phone line adds to the customer experience, and thus, their business reputation.
A dedicated business phone line is one of the easiest steps you can take in forming and maintaining an professional image. Whether you work from your kitchen table or a desk in a high rise building, giving off a professional appearance is intrinsic to the success of your brand. Again, maintaining a professional image via dedicated business phone line allows you to:
- Offer credibility to your professional image.
- Build customer confidence and trust in your brand.
- Provide a person-to-person customer experience.
- Give resources to your customers.
- Represent the business organizational structure.
It takes years to build a professional reputation when you are just starting out in business. Give a strong first impression and manage your professional appearance with a separate business phone number.
A few taps on a smartphone can’t solve every customer issue the way quality customer service can. Your customers deserve a superb, rather than subpar, experience. Let your competitors keep frustrated folks waiting as you pick up the slack and move on to success. Keep your customers coming back by connecting them with real humans on the phone in real time.