Ed Dikes, the store owner of Weston Jewelers and the May
2011 issue’s Innovative Retailer, had some good luck using a CitySearch.com
campaign to test the phone demeanor of his staff. Learn what Dikes and his
staff learned from the two-month experiment in addition to his regular feature
in print and online.
  

ED DIKES
WESTON JEWELERS
WESTON, FLA.
westonjewelers.com
Twitter: @WestonJewelers

How did a Citysearch.com campaign help improve staffs’
phone performance?

We ran a Citysearch campaign for four months, in part to
test location-based marketing initiatives. For two of those months we recorded
all incoming and outgoing calls to the store to determine how good the phone
demeanor was for our staff. Our staff was not told ahead of time this was going
to happen. Afterward, I met with each staff member individually, and played
back examples of good and bad phone demeanor. We discussed what made these calls
effective or not impactful, and talked about ways to improve on that. One
immediate suggestion was to follow our uniform phone greeting of: “Thank you
for calling Weston’s, this is Ed, how can I help you.” To keep it fair and to
lighten the mood of these meetings, I played some of my good and bad phone
moments. It helped a lot with converting sales, answering questions, but also
better screened calls pricing us against the competition.  

JCK