Starting a new small business usually takes several thousand pounds, which sometimes doesn’t leave enough money to hire full-time customer service staff or a receptionist. As a result, your telephones may not be answered promptly, which could mean missing calls and losing customers. To ensure that important calls are not missed, you can use one of these solutions.
Voicemail System
Many small business owners rely on their voicemail to answer their telephones when they are out of the office or on another telephone call. While voicemail can answer telephone calls when you can’t, it shouldn’t be the only solution for making sure that all the calls coming into your company are answered. While some people do not mind leaving voicemails, others find it irritating and will hang up instead of leaving messages.
Statistics show when people are directed to voicemail because no one is available to answer the telephones, up to 80% of callers hang up without leaving a message. For a small business, this could mean losing customers to their competitors and never regaining them. This can make it difficult to turn the profit needed to expand your business and hire the help you need.
Hiring Staff
As your business grows, you may have no choice but to hire full-time help to answer telephone calls, handle correspondence, and greet clients, vendors, and others who come into your office for meetings. Most customers appreciate talking to a live person when they have questions about the products or services your business offers. However, not every telephone call may be answered by your receptionist so you would still need a backup method for making sure that all telephone calls are answered.
Once someone is hired, he or she still needs to be trained about your business and how you prefer for the calls to be answered and directed. It can take two weeks or more from the time the opening is advertised until an appropriate person is hired to take on the job. The delay can mean losing more clients to other companies.
Telephone Answering Service
Hiring someone to answer your telephone calls and act as your receptionist can help you accomplish more during the day. However, hiring staff is sometimes a long and costly process because you need to advertise the opening, sort through the CVs you receive, schedule and conduct interviews, and then make a hiring decision. Meanwhile, your calls are still going to voicemail or being unanswered.
By contracting with a telephone answering service, your telephone calls can be directed to live people who will take messages, fulfil simple requests for catalogues or press kits, and redirect calls to the appropriate person. A telephone answering service provides a fully-trained staff that can start working for your business after being briefed about your company. This telephone answering service infographic shows the services that they can provide your company.
A telephone answering service can help your business grow by making sure that no important calls are missed and prioritising the messages that you receive so you can return important telephone calls right away.