Today there are so many options for handling in bound calls you just have to find the one that is right for your business. As I look out onto blogs written by other people about how one should handle business calls, there is a recurring theme I have noticed.
Customers don’t want to cal their vendors l and get an automated message, they don’t want to get put into voice mail, and they don’t want to get stuck with a message taker. By the same token, busy sales people and business owners are blogging about getting stuck in voice mail land as their calls back up during the day. As annoying as voice mail can be for the caller, it seems it is even more annoying for the callee..
When I call on prospects and ask them what they are doing to handle their business phone calls, in the smaller businesses the answer is, oh I just forward them to my cell phone. That can either be a bad idea or a good one. As I explore further with them, a few facts come popping up that actually help the case for my services. Here, let me give you an example.
The phone rings in your office, you have it forwarded to your cell, and you are out meeting with a client. You can’t interrupt your meeting to keep answering the phone, that would be rude and disrupt the time with your customer, so you let your calls go to voice mail. As you continue in your meeting, the phone is on vibrate and it keeps notifying you of calls coming through. Are you really giving your appointment all the attention they deserve? What is happening to your voice mail box, and are these important calls, or just someone trying to get your business. Is forwarding your calls to the cell still sounding like a good idea, really?
Let’s say you get out of your meeting and you check your voice mail. The first message is from a long-term customer that just wanted a simple question answered. The second message is from that same customer, but now they are getting upset. The third message, same customer, and they are mad. I think you know where I am heading with this. The other calls are all from other businesses attempting to solicit business from you. Now you have 15 messages in your voice mail, and you have to listen to each of them sequentially. While you listen to those, that first customer has called again and she is really fed up now.
May I give you another option? I can work with you to set up custom phone answering procedures, tailor-made to your operation. You can give us a list of questions people ask you most often, and we can also have the answers to those questions ready to give to your customer. I think this would have fixed the first situation quite nicely, don’t you. Now, the other thing we can do is turn your calls into Text messages. That way, without having to check voice mail, you can see instantly what each call was about, and which ones you should return right away, which ones can wait, and which ones you may simply delete.
Central Communications call center / answering service has evolved into something then a person sitting behind a switchboard taking messages. We are pretty much virtual assistants.
Is it still a good idea to forward your business line to your cell? Maybe, but we have a free 30 day trial, why not give us a go and see if we can’t do better for you.
Pearl