In 2020 and beyond, it’s a distinct advantage and almost a USP in itself to have a strong policy on-call answering in a small business.

Why?

Because unlike a few years ago when the phone was King, and an unanswered phone was seen as a huge failure, for some companies it has now become acceptable to not answer calls when a customer wants to ask them something, instead relying on voicemail, email and even social media to reply in their own time.

59% of customers prefer brands that respond to customer service inquiries and complaints on social media than those brands that don’t.

Now someone playing Devil’s advocate might say that the public has become used to companies operating from mobile phones during COVID-19, and the public are OK with the phone not being answered from time to time as we are in the grip of a Worldwide Pandemic.

However, even with COVID, as human beings, we still cannot help forming the first impression of a company based on how responsive they are when we contact them, and not answering the phone forms a negative impression whether people will excuse it during these difficult times or not.

For example, in August I needed a Perspex screen for a café point of sale so I contacted 3 companies off the internet. 2 of them did not answer the phone other than to play a message saying that COVID was hampering their business so I sent them an email as well which was met with an automatic reply explaining the COVID situation and asking me to send them technical drawings. The third company I suspect used a call answering service, who were very polite and they took my enquiry professionally and said that Jo would get back to me within the hour.

Jo phoned me back 20 minutes later, we exchanged a couple of emails and the deal was done in around 90 mins.

The first company called me back 3 days later explaining that they had been short-staffed in the office, and the other company never called back at all, as I suspect they had no idea that they had missed the call at all. I never got around to the technical drawings.

Have you read our latest post, all about “5 top tips to improve your businesses call answering.”

So what is a strong call answering policy?

Commit to answering the phone consistently during business hours.
Check your phone logs to see if you miss calls. Report on it daily if you can so you can get back to people in a timely manner
Be bright and cheerful. We’re all busy. Don’t make the caller feel like they interrupted your day.
Take customer’s details. Take a contact phone number and email address so you can keep in touch with the prospect.
Consider extending your business hours. Often people are now calling before 9 am or after 5 pm. Be there when customers want you

All of these things can be done in-house. However, it can also be a very cost-effective alternative to use a call handling service

Hopefully, you have found this post interesting and have learnt some new techniques to improve your call answering, for more information please get in touch.

Thank you for reading.