By: Karen Arbel, Eric Klein

Change is an inexorable force. What was once impossible to even conceive of slowly becomes normal or even obsolete. Consider that 30 years ago, the main channel for advertising was newspapers and broadcast media such as radio and television. Today, it has moved to web and mobile.

Yet the goal remains the same: to make it easier for your prospects to become your customers.

To borrow from an old TV program (and now movie series): Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to enable your customers to reach you.

Why use Click-to-Call?

Data! it's all around us, flooding our senses and our mental capacity. The average person is capable of spending no more than 25 seconds reading a text online before rapidly seeking a call to action. In most cases, when your customer visits your website, specifically when he or she is seeking to obtain information or make a purchase, they want to converse with a human being.

Click-to-call is an easy way for your customers to contact your sales or care agents directly from your website.

Studies show that 35 to 50 percent of customer sales will go to the first business that responds to their inquiry. Research also shows that if there is as little as a five-minute delay, that prospective customer is 25 percent less likely to buy. So, enabling them to connect while they are interested should increase your sales conversions. When you capture leads when they are still warm, you increase your ability to convert them into a customer.

But how exactly you do it can affect your success.

What is Click-to-Call?

At its most basic, click-to-call is the ability of a customer or prospect to initiate a call from a website or application. In reality, this functionality can be implemented in one of several ways that enable a customer to speak with an agent.

Let’s look at this basic scenario: a prospective customer goes to your website and sees the “Click to Call Us” button. They click it.

Is the click sending the client to call your business via their phone dialer? Is it having your call center call the client back? Actually, it could be either of these, which is why this is so confusing.

Now how this will actually work depends on two things:

• How Click-to-Call is set up on the website 
• What device the customer is using when they click (smartphone, computer or table)

Traditionally, these work out to:

• Smartphone: Click to call (built-in phone calling)
• Computer or tablet: Click to call back (no built-in phone capabilities)

Defining Click-to-Call

Click to Call (see Figure 1 - above) is usually a widget on a website. When activated, it uses the customer’s mobile device to make an outgoing call to the call center without the person having to input the number by hand. If they view it from a computer, they will usually see the phone number that they should call.