How do you manage phone verification when claiming listings on behalf of clients (local and remote)?

[IronSummitMedia]

As the top competitive difference maker, Quality/Authority of Structured Citations is pretty important. That being said, I spend a good deal of time manually running around to different citation websites and jumping through their hoops to get my clients' websites listed properly.

I've been using getlisted.org to check my sites, and a lot of the citation sources out there require phone verification. Now I was wondering how you professionally manage the phone verification step for your own clients. I've found it a bit difficult getting my clients to reliably get the PIN numbers for me. I've even had problems with clients checking the mail for the post cards that get sent!

At this point in time, I try to schedule a time (not during business hours preferably) to go into the location and answer the phone to get everything verified in one shot. For remote clients however, I just have to hope that they are on board with answering their phones and getting the PIN numbers back to me.

Lastly, how do you manage to reduce the amount of sales calls that your client receives from these listing sites? I currently register accounts under a separate email address, for example, webmaster@domain.com. This cuts down on the email marketing spam, and it obviously helps me stay in control of the listings. How do you handle the phone calls though? Especially from some of the more aggressive companies like Yelp? Personally I've just been 'briefing' my clients on how to respond to these sales calls, and I've educated them on the importance of these listings so they aren't too annoyed with the assault of sales reps calling their business constantly. Are there any magic words that my clients can use with these sales reps to make them stop calling?

Sorry for the long post, if you've made it this far thank you for reading!

[Chris.Menke]

I've always found that dealing with the verification phone call is something that has to be done in a coordinated fashion with the client.  I schedule a time with the client to initiate the verification calls (during business hours) and at that time, I first set everything up on the search engine control panel, get codes if needed, then contact the client at the number the search engine will use for verification and make sure they are ready, give code as necessary, hang up and initiate the verification call to the client, then call the client back to get code as necessary,  enter code at search engine control panel.  I've never found a more efficient way of doing it.

Sales calls from sites has never been an issue clients have brought up to me.

[DougRoberts]

I agree with Chris. It's really a case of educating and supporting your client as best you can. And making sure when you request these calls you do it in a coordinated fashion with the client.

I've had some absolute nightmares with companies that have a shared receptionist answering the calls.

The only thing I'd say, is that as you've probably found, what a client says will happen when they get these calls doesn't always happen. It's important to carry out a test by calling the contact number from an "unknown" phone and asking to speak to someone to verify a business listing and see what happens.

If this is the same number that they're using for sales enquires it can reveal some interesting things about their ability to convert leads.

[IronSummitMedia]

Thanks for the response. I will be working with a client tomorrow beginning the process of claiming and updating some of their listings. I've schedule a time to go into their location and answer their phone (on a Saturday) so hopefully everything will go well.

I guess the best way to do this is just to educate, plan ahead, and be ready to tackle any small problems that come up. Thanks for the insights.