How A Phone Service Can Help Your Small Business
Technology has a way of shrinking the world. You are more connected to those around you than ever before. For small business owners, the work phone and the personal phone are often the same phone. When you go home at night, your work follows you. Because humans are so connected, your clients and customers often expect quick responses to messages. If you take your phone home with you to ensure that you can respond quickly to your customers, the workday never ends, and your life starts to revolve around your work. You don’t get time for your friends, family, or yourself. That kind of stress is not actually helpful to your quality of life or to your business.
Small businesses stand to benefit greatly from a telephone answering service. It is one of the most underutilised tools at your disposal. They are useful for holidays, busy seasons, or just nights off. Here’s how they work.
How They Work
The service employs committed professionals who have a series of skills. They are largely responsible for answering your phone calls, taking messages, and forwarding those messages to you so you can decide if you want to respond immediately or wait. Some services ask for a contract, but it is better to work with one that doesn’t require that. You simply contact the service provider and set up your call forwarding. When a phone call comes into your business, the professionals will answer it and take a message. They will then forward that message to you in whichever form you choose: text, email, or a phone call. You can also have them hold those messages for a limited amount of time if you really don’t want to be bothered with work.
When you no longer need your phone calls answered, you just let the service know and stop forwarding your calls.
Why This Helps
Getting a break from work is important to maintaining healthy relationships and being rested enough to do a good job when you are at work. Additionally, some businesses have slowdowns and busy periods that prevent you from hiring permanent staff to answer your phones. If you’re in a busy period, you can hire the professional service to pick up some or all of your calls until they slow down to a point where you can answer them yourself.
If you do not have the available time to train and equip staff to answer phones professionally and courteously, you can hire a service to do it for you. Your phone calls are often the first point of contact between you and clients; you want to ensure that your clients are hearing a professional on the other end.
Answering phones is one of the simplest and most basic tasks at a business. However, when that task starts to follow you home and on holiday, it can become seriously disruptive. A professional service will free you from having to answer all those phone calls and allow you to focus on what’s at hand.