Who sits and waits for the phone to ring?

It is very rare these days for a small company to employ a telephonist, therefore the person answering the phone is often being interrupted whilst doing other work.

According to a study by University of California Irvine it takes 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to the task (full paper here) – a couple of calls an hour and that’s your hour gone! Interruptions often lead to mistakes, a poorer quality of work, stressed employees, staff sounding irritated on the phone and so many more problems – so what can you do?

 1.      Use a voicemail

This is my least favourite method of dealing with calls, I know BT research years ago stated 67% of callers reaching a business voicemail did not leave a message, this appears to have increased to 80%.

There are some great tips for getting people to leave messages, firstly have a voicemail recording of your voice. State when the caller is likely to get a call back. Make sure the voicemails are responded to in a timely manner.

2.      Dedicating a staff member to take calls

If the office is a busy office, this can be useful, but what if there are more calls than the staff member can take? For quieter offices this can mean that resources are being under used, no-one wants to pay for a member of staff sitting around waiting for a phone to ring

3.      Share the calls between the staff

This can work if all staff take it in turns to answer calls, but then what if a staff member thinks their work is more important and doesn’t feel they should be disturbed? This can also lead to staff who don’t have the best technique for answering the phones taking the calls. If someone is not used to dealing with calls, they really may not be the best person to do so

4.      Use a call answering company

There are many call answering companies where someone will take a message and pass it on, they will work to a script provided by you, then the message is emailed, sent by WhatsApp or a bespoke App. We have all made a call where you know that you are just getting a script read to you, it can be quite irritating to the caller, especially if all they want to do is book an appointment, chase up on a quote, or check out some information.

5.      Use a call handling company

Call handling is quite different to call answering, here we will take the call and do something with it. Book the appointment, send the information to the caller by email, or if we cannot deal with it, request the information and telephone the caller back with the details. At I’m Your P.A. we don’t use scripts, so every call is different and sounds authentic. We work with the clients to become a seamless extension to their team.

If you would like more information on how call handling would work for your company, please give us a call on 01902 585222 and have a chat with James or Michele – we would love to help you