Answering Service as Life Saver?

BusinessManagement

  • Author J. Todd Hubbard
  • Published September 2, 2010
  • Word count 863

An answering service as a life saver? Well, maybe not in the sense of stopping a bullet or pulling you from in front of a speeding car, but saving you to live your life outside of your business.

Are you feeling overwhelmed by all the customer calls your thriving business is receiving? Did your business explode seemingly overnight? Did you just get a huge order and don't have the time to interview and hire extra help? While those are good problems to have, they are still problems that need solving. One way to solve them is to enlist an answering service.

You might be asking yourself "How would an answering service help me solve those problems?", and that's a valid question. If you are feeling overwhelmed and working 16, 18, or even 20 hour days to get everything done, an answering service will take part of your workload and allow you to focus more on the actual work of the business. The more of the peripheral tasks you can delegate out, the more you can devote your attention to the core tasks that allow your business to thrive.

Because, while the phone is your lifeline to your customers and vendors, it is not the reason you stay in business. The reason you stay in business is that you are able to fulfill the orders from customers so you can pay the vendors. If your business can't do that, no matter how many people want your product or service, your business will not survive. Even though the phone line is important, no one said YOU had to field ALL of the calls it receives. That just drains your productivity and energy. To personify this point, I have a quote from an answering service client, Tamara Rose of Earthly Delights Day Spa in Madison. MS. She said, "I didn't realize what a distraction that phone really was. Now I can relax and focus on my clients and I am doing better quality work." She recognized that her effectiveness had suffered and because she did something about it, her performance improved. I'd be willing to bet her massage clients are happier with the work she is doing since she started having an answering service handle her incoming calls. And all because of an answering service.

And even if you are getting everything done to keep the business chugging along, how many hours do you work in a typical day? If it's more than eight, your efficiency may be a lot lower after that eight hours than up to that point. Studies have shown as a general rule, people are less productive the more hours they work in a day.* Also, because you are working those long days, you are not getting a full eight hours of sleep nightly. Lack of sleep "diminishes your ability to concentrate, multi-task, pay attention, problem-solve, retain information, react quickly, and make good judgments."* In short, the effectiveness of all of the abilities you need to be a successful business owner are reduced because you are working too much. There's a reason they call over-working "burning the candle at both ends", you're burning yourself out. Using an answering service will assist you in working less hours.

How does an answering service help you work less hours? The answering service takes all of your incoming phone calls and basically screens them for you based on criteria that you set. They are separating the wheat from the chaff when it comes to your business's phone calls. All of those vendors calling to sell you their "latest and greatest" product or service? No longer a distraction. Wrong numbers? Flushed. And the worst, telemarketers? Kicked to the curb. All of those types of calls are now bygones and no longer stealing away your productive time. In addition, the calls that really matter are now transferred directly to you or sent in message form so you can deal with them as your schedule allows, not someone else's.

And how quickly can an answering service begin to help you recover that previously mentioned lost efficiency? They can do so almost immediately. Most answering services can set up an account for you with a customized call answering script in as little as one day. For example, I know of a law firm that needed to have an answering service available within a week to handle, by their estimate, 80-90 hours of calls in a seven to ten day period. The answering service they chose was able to move quickly and set up the prescribed call flow to be used by the agents and hire the extra personnel that an extra eight to twelve hours of calls per day would require before the week was over. If an answering service could do that, they should certainly have no problem quickly handling almost any client's needs.

So, whether you've been too busy running to keep pace with your business and just falling further behind or you've had a stroke of good fortune and customers have suddenly swamped your business, the answering service solution can help you re-gain the balance to tackle those challenges effectively and efficiently.

*URL's to cited content is available upon request.

To learn more about answering services, please visit MyAnswering.com.

About the Author

J. Todd Hubbard has 18 years of customer service experience and has helped a number of companies improve their customer service relations.

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