Finding the time
Not enough hours in the work day
When you run your own business, you’re already responsible for everything. Whether that’s being the receptionist, customer service, sales, all day pa, accounts or complaints, you’re always on call and the go-to person for everything which can be pretty exhausting.
You’re not alone
Everyone gets like this especially at the start, but this is a habit that can be difficult to break. To fully relinquish control and to share or delegate aspects of your business that you were once responsible for can be a difficult endeavour, but this is something you need to address to grow, scale and ultimately flourish.
It’s all work, work, work
It’s easy to get buried in work, be on call around the clock and forget what a weekend look likes but does that make you a better boss or even a better family member? Working smarter gives you back a share of your time and allows you to dictate your day rather than just firefighting and being responsible for everything.
Smart business owners delegate effectively, and if you give your consumers the best service, you‘ll need to have the time and energy to focus on important things without getting bogged down by the minutia of daily life.
Doing what you’re best at
You’re running a business because you saw a gap in the market, an unfulfilled niche or you have a strong passion and this is what you are best at. I’m sure you didn’t get into your current business because you enjoyed taking messages and answering the phone all day.
Let the experts handle things
You wouldn’t want to spend hundreds of hours learning web development so you could build a website or start taking a study course on tax law to optimise your tax. These are aspects of the business we already sub out to specialists who have the training, expertise and infrastructure to address these jobs for you.
Phone calls
Phone calls are one aspect of most businesses that people think can’t be outsourced but actually, this is where you can really capitalise on freeing up your time whilst also ensuring you’re capturing every opportunity.
Don’t think that you need to go to the expense of hiring an all day PA or dedicated receptionist to answer all these calls for you either. Outsourcing your calls is the first step in cutting any low priority call, spam and repeat callers, whilst prioritising the really important ones.
Answering calls
Low priority-based work calls
Not all calls are equal. Start any business and you’ll be guaranteed to be contacted by a slew of companies trying to sell you a new website or SEO services, but whilst you’re left taking these calls you could be doing something more productive or worse missing a sale.
Not all low priority calls are spam or nuisance calls either, these can be persistent customer calls or calls of little relevance. The problem is, that until you actually pick up the phone, you won’t know what sort of call or message you’ll have to deal with.
Prioritise your workload
Being able to prioritise your workload saves you time, stress and gets you one step close to working smarter, not harder. Ironically, no one has the time to count up all those little tasks that take up all of your time and phone calls are right up there with answering emails or social messenger responses.
Getting your time back means you’re able to refine what you do and start to direct your day. By staying “on the business” instead of being “in the business” you’ll be able to ultimately offer a better and more complete service to your consumers and you’ll be more attentive to your staff.
See your staff in a different way
If you already have a team of employees working for you and you’ve assigned them the task of picking up calls then this can also be an expensive mistake. Your staff should be in place to take 2nd level support and sales calls, that’s a given, but getting them to field every inbound call is an inefficient use of their time.
Did you know that it takes a person over 20 minutes to regain focus on their designated job after picking up a call? Even if your team are answering only a few calls an hour then they’re not going to be focused on the task at hand.
It’s all about the service
Get love from your most demanding customers
Customers today expect a greater level of service than ever before. The internet has made us accustomed to instant gratification and patience is now a rare commodity. Unfortunately, being there for your clients beyond the Monday to Friday 9-5 is now expected.
Round the clock
This however is a tough call, you want to appease your faithful following and give an exceptional level of service but you also need time with your family and loved ones too. It doesn’t have to be a dichotomy, you‘re able to attend to your existing customers 14 hours a day whilst ensuring no new ones slip through the net at the same time. And you do this with the right answering service.
When you can't always give your best
Telephone answering or call handling services are experts in what they do in as much an outsourced HR or Accountancy company are also the experts. An answering service will generally handle thousands of calls a day, go through rigorous training and auditing and are hired on the basis that they are really good with people.
If you’re stressed, you’re driving to Manchester for a meeting or in a loud environment, then this isn’t going to be the best experience for your callers. It’s much better that they get greeted in a happy and polite manner and they’re called back at a more convenient time when you’ve had time to prepare for the call.
This also gives your business an air of professionalism. Imagine having the luxury of an all day PA on hand to take all of your calls and then multiplying that by 6. A team of dedicated staff on hand to ensure that your callers get the very callers experience and your clients will think that you’re a professional outfit.
Reviews and recommendations
Reviews are still the go-to before any buying decision is made and anyone can leave a review good or bad, within seconds using a smartphone. Unfortunately, reviews are rare when you provide a good service and come thick and fast when you underperform.
Demonstrating this high level of service above and beyond what your clients expect will help to ensure that you get more of the 5-star reviews and hopefully dissuade the less than desirable ones.
No I in team
It's all about communication
So we’ve established that relinquishing the management of your calls is important but there are a few more ways in which your clients can contact you. Live chat a social media messages are now growing in popularity and you’re now just a likely to receive a customer service message via Facebook as you are someone dialling your number.
A telephone answering service can be used to respond to your website live chats and social media messages as well as your calls, so it just makes sense that they should also answer your instant messages too.
Let's get social and share in 2024
We all share content and socially follow out of the office and we need to understand that our clients are no different. In order to offer help and please our loyal base, you’ll need to cater for these different forms of communication too.
Email and a “call us” message on your website no longer cuts the mustard and if you’ve never dipped a toe in the water of social and live chat messages for business, then you need to understand the purposes of this channel.
You should be ready to address your clients in different ways and this is something that’s forever evolving. Offering a quality service in 2024 is based on addressing small changes and taking note of how to help and understand people on their terms, whatever the medium is. Whether that’s via Facebook, email or WhatsApp.
Scaling your business
Growing your business can be scary and staff costs can mount up. An increase in team size, management, changing company premises or moving office can all pose challenges but you can mitigate a lot of these worries by outsourcing.
If you already have a team of employees working for you and you’ve assigned them the task of picking up calls then this can also be an expensive mistake. Your staff should be in place to take 2nd level support and sales calls, that’s a given, but getting them to field every inbound call is an inefficient use of their time.
A good answering service or call handling service will flex with you and most telephone answering companies can help provide great telephone support whilst your company expands.
About Pocket Receptionist
Pocket Receptionist is a fully managed call answering service. We allocate a team of at least six dedicated receptionists to help with your call handling, telephone answering, live chat and Facebook customer service messages.
Our telephone answering team consist of only highly trained and office-based receptionist on hand to answer your calls in a professional way. Each team has a single point of contact to aid management
Our answering service is able to provide FAQ responses and customer service, diary bookings and payments, provide full call recording and real-time notification via our management app.
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