Managing Enquiries with Call Answering Services

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If a business is growing fast, it’s essential that its internal processes and systems are scalable and that they can cope with a significant uplift in business. One area you might not consider is call answering. While it might not seem important now, if the number of calls and enquiries the business receives increases fast, you might find that production staff or other employees have an increasing amount of their time sapped by picking up the phone and administrative tasks.

It’s important to manage resources effectively, so consider carefully who is answering the phone and whether that is really the most useful way they could spend their time at work. It might be manageable right now, but if the number of daily call enquiries were to double, would you struggle to manage the additional enquiries while servicing existing customers?

Virtual receptionist services mean that existing staff aren’t distracted from their workload answering the phone, and can also help manage a variety of other business communication functions effectively. You might currently use an answer machine for out of hours phone calls, but if your business benefits from ecommerce transactions, you might find that customer need fast, accurate responses from the business before they can commit to a purchase.

Using out-of-hours call answering services means that these calls can be screened, documented and forwarded if necessary to an alternate phone number. Virtual receptionist services can include order taking, diary management, task scheduling and even virtual addresses. It’s a lot more than simply passing on messages, and is one of the best ways of ensuring that out-of-hours calls and enquiries do not slip between your fingertips.

How much time each week is your business unavailable? If you don’t answer your phone then customers will look elsewhere. Even with websites, marketing and promotional material, in many ways a phone call is the first impression a potential customer takes away from a business, so getting it right is important. Whoever answers the phone should be polite, well-mannered, organised, well-briefed and able to multitask. It’s easy to ask an existing employee to pick up the phone while a receptionist or salesperson is out of the office, but are they realty going to be able to provide the best level of service to the customer? Call answering and virtual receptionist services can be tailored for your individual business needs to ensure that all calls and enquiries are dealt with in the right way.

Alan Cairns
Alan Cairns+ writes on a number of subjects including virtual receptionist services and call answering services.

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