People often ask us what is the difference between incident handling, call answering, virtual receptionist services, live voicemail, and lots of other terms. Today we’re talking about incident handling, which is very different to a basic call answering service.

Companies who require an incident handling service generally operate on a 24/7/365 basis, often needing a service to deal with emergency repairs and callouts; sometimes during the day but predominantly during nights, weekends and holiday periods.

How does an incident handling service work?

The incident handling company will generally provide you with a local 01 telephone number and you divert your main telephone number to this number. Once this is done when your phone rings, it is answered by the incident handling company in your company name, who then take details of the incident, before deploying that incident through your company’s out of hours supply chain.

A high-quality incident handling company will follow this incident through to completion to ensure that there are no surprises for the client first thing in the morning. The incident handling company becomes the ‘hub’ for that emergency incident.

The handling company will then pass details of the handled incident to the client in the morning. This is achieved in many ways and is often dependant on the volume of incidents and the client’s individual set up. It could be a secure spreadsheet exchange or the company could update your system if they have web access to it.

How do they know if I work with the company who is calling and which of my subcontractors or employees to phone?

When an incident handling service is set up, there is an onboarding process for the incident handling company which is similar to training a new member of staff. During this process, the incident handling company will be looking to learn and document your process flows as well as acquiring contact information for your clients, subcontractors or on-call employees. Usually, a company has a rota system for callouts, which they can share with the incident handling company and update / amend on an ongoing basis.

How can this improve efficiency for my company?

Clients move to an incident handling service because their current system is not as efficient as they would like or the service they are providing is not as professional as they would like. Often company owners or managers are required to take the mobile phone home and be ‘on-call’ out of hours. This can not only cause tiredness and to make errors more common, the person who is ‘on-call’ is often not working at 100% the next day. For a business owner or manager, this is not an efficient use of their energy.

If you would like any more information or maybe you would like to join one of our services then please get in touch.