As everyone will now be aware, Boris’ big COVID-19 announcement last week has plunged the UK back into national lockdown with all of the pressures and problems that this brings to businesses all over the country.

Whilst life goes on and business is still being done, what does this mean for businesses in terms of their ability to continue to provide a professional first impression when a potential new client calls?

Using a Call Handling service

Professionally handling incoming calls is not easy at the best of times, but in this ‘new normal’ that we find ourselves in with people working from home or furloughed it can be a real challenge to maintain a professional image.

One solution is to use a call handling service to maintain a professional image at the public face of the company. A call handling company will answer the phone in your business’ name, and pass messages to your key staff about who has called, who can then follow up the call in a timely manner. A good call handling service will get a message to you in under 5 minutes. When using a call handling service which automatically sends the email, this can be even quicker. (and with less opportunity for forgotten messages. Yes, this happens a lot in the industry.)

Many companies are taking advantage of call answering services during the Coronavirus pandemic because it gives them the flexibility of a pay on use service which can be used rather than bringing staff back from furlough.

In the times we are living in currently, it has never been more important to exhibit a professional, unflustered image when dealing with the outside world… even if we are all pedalling like mad under the surface trying to make everything come together as we need it to. A call handling service is a very neat and inexpensive way of achieving this, which explains how enquiries to telephone handling companies have gone through the roof during 2020.

A word of warning though, all call handling companies are not created equal and the cheapest are definitely not the best. Any service needs to have huge IT and telephone resilience and the appropriate systems to deal with incoming calls properly, especially when they all come at once.

Some operators are no more than a person answering a phone and then typing out a message to email manually.

If you are going to trust your precious calls to another company, make sure it’s the right company.

For information on if call handling would be fit for your business, please get in touch.

In the meantime why not check out our blog post on Why should my business use call handling?