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As a small business owner, your time is usually spread thin. You will have to manage your team, go through accounts, and deal with the day-to-day tasks that are involved with running an effective business. What you don’t need is being interrupted by business phone calls. For small businesses, missed calls cost money. Not only that but they also diminish customer satisfaction. This is where telephone answering services and having your calls answered by a virtual receptionist come in.
What is a Call Answering Service?
A telephone answering service is a team of dedicated receptionists who spend time getting to know your business and should feel like a natural extension to your team. Your virtual receptionist will be trained to take calls on your behalf and deal with your customers exactly how you want them to. Whether you want your virtual receptionist to simply take a message to pass on, deal with queries based on your FAQs, book appointments, the choice is yours! Here at Pocket Receptionist, we offer first call resolution and are capable of dealing with all enquiries as you would. A telephone answering service can be the difference between gaining a new customer or losing them to one of your competitors. Crucially, it will also allow you, the business owner, to focus on what you are best at whilst ensuring not a single customer is neglected. Now that we have gone over what a telephone answering service is, here are the key benefits of having a phone answering service for small businesses.How Small Businesses Benefit from Telephone Answering Services
Never Miss a Call Again
Even though technology has made it possible to connect with businesses via email, messaging, or live chat, many customers prefer speaking with someone on the phone. We know how important it is for customers to have their calls answered. When your customer is unable to reach someone, this doesn’t offer a great start to your consumer-business relationship. We also understand that every sales call is the lifeblood of your business, and if you miss a call, it is a missed opportunity to make a sale. Quite simply, if your customer is unable to make contact with you, they may move on to your competitor. With a VoIP phone call centre, you can ensure that you never miss a call again. How your call answering service operates is completely up to you. You can have your virtual receptionist answer all your business phone calls or for all incoming calls to ring through to your internal team first before redirecting to a telephone answering service to pick up the call.Quicker Response Times
We all know what it’s like to be waiting in a long queue before finally speaking with someone who can help us. Not many people like calling a company to be passed between different agents before being transferred to someone who can resolve their issue or answer their question. By using a VoIP telephone answering service, you can rest assured that all your customer calls will be answered within seconds. When your call routes through to a telephone answering service, it redirects to every agent in the call centre until someone is available to take the call.Stay Focused
Quite simply, distractions kill productivity. Many tasks require a block of your time, and you could be in ‘the zone’ working on something important and suddenly your phone rings. You have to answer the call because it’s an important call from a potential customer or an existing customer who needs support. While these calls may be short, they all add up. By the time you have finished the call and get back to your task, you likely won’t have the same focus as you did. With the help of a call answering service, you can time-block hours so that you can focus on important tasks without interruption, which improves your time management and productivity. A telephone answering service will help you concentrate on evolving your business while your virtual receptionist looks after your customers.Flexibility
VoIP phone systems are fully flexible and are location-independent. This means that wherever you are based, your telephone answering service doesn’t have to be local. You can recruit a team of dedicated receptionists from anywhere in the UK. Whether you work remotely or in an office, you are not restricted to hiring talent locally.Scale Up or Down Easily
As a business owner, there is no better system than one that has scalability. Business growth isn’t something you can predict. Businesses often have peak times where there is a surge of incoming calls. VoIP helps you handle these unexpected demands, so your customers aren’t kept waiting. With telephone answering services, you can expand or decrease your services in line with your business needs. Whether you need cover for just a weekend, a few weeks, or need receptionists to handle overflow calls, you can update this within minutes by speaking with your dedicated account manager.Flexible Call Answering
A call answering service can be used to cover your incoming calls whenever you need it most. Whether you need out-of-hours cover, overflow calls answered, or all customer calls looked after, this can be changed according to your business needs. Your business may have closed for the day, but that doesn’t mean your calls need to go unanswered. This means that you can have someone manning your phone line, ready to assist your customers whenever the calls come in. Call answering, placing orders, or taking a message, telephone answering services can do this all even if your business is closed.Manage Your Calendar
Many telephone answering services can do more than simple message taking. What your telephone answering service will do, depends on your specific needs. If you make a lot of appointment bookings over the phone, your team of receptionists can manage your business diary by scheduling, rebooking, or cancelling appointments, so that your time is not wasted on admin.Eliminates Hiring and Performance Monitoring
Hiring staff is more than the interviewing process and paying wages. Expanding your team requires time and effort to ensure that your staff are happy in their role and are performing well. As well as eliminating the costs of hiring an internal team of call handling agents, a call answering service removes all the associated responsibilities of hiring in-house. If your business could benefit from a telephone answering service, give our sales team a call today on 0800 009 6555. Our dedicated team will discuss your call answering needs and schedule you in for an onboarding appointment to get your account set-up, so that we can answer your calls your way. ‹ Back
