Digital communication channels are the lifeblood of every modern business. However, the phone is still the most popular method of contact for a lot of UK consumers. The negative aspect of this, however, is that business owners are usually too busy to receive business calls.
When people need help, want a quick answer, or just feel a human touch is needed, they tend to reach out to businesses over the phone. Even though digital technology facilitates life more than in many other ways, not everybody wants or can communicate this way.
Your telephone answering must be as up to par as your digital support channels in order to reflect the needs of all current and future customers.
Your missed calls happen during business hours
Missed calls can bleed your business dry with their respective price tags issued. If this happens regularly, or if you have noticed an uptick over the past few months, it is a clear indication that you are too busy to pick up the phone.
When you run a business by yourself, which many sole traders or small business owners do, it is understandably the case. But letting business calls go unanswered, you risk:
- losing out on a sale or a new customer
- giving up their business to their competitors
- making callers feel deterred from your business
- hurting your brand reputation
- receiving poor online reviews
- alienating present customers, clients, or suppliers
To avoid the above pitfalls and to make sure that every call is answered, you need to make finding a feasible and economical solution a priority. This can mean hiring permanent staff or outsourcing to a third-party set up with a telephone answering service, depending on how many more customers you have on a budget for securing the services.
When Calls Become Too Much for Your Business
Even if inbound calls are a blessing of your calling, getting more calls than you can handle very easily becomes overwhelming and impossible to manage.
Regardless of the above reasons, every business goes through certain ups and downs in the number of calls that they receive on an occasional basis, be it an outcome of a promotional event, seasonal demand, or even cold calls. But on the flip side, your business may have outgrown your plan faster than you would have expected.
However, whatever the cause, it is essential to find a way to manage conversation volume spikes. Apart from ensuring higher customer service standards, scaling your telephone answering capabilities to match demand can also help mitigate employee burnout.
Longer wait times for callers
Longer wait times is yet another obvious indication that you are too busy to answer business calls. If you observe that callers have been waiting on hold for long, they would probably be angry and regretting their choice of your products/services.
And let me just tell you, this does not give off a good impression of your business (as if your hold music playlist took you months to put together). To provide a superior customer experience and keep your callers satisfied, you may need to employ more staff or partially redirect your overflow calls to a telephone answering service provider.
Productivity is affected with the constant calls
A successful business can be both a blessing and a curse, bringing enduring popularity but also becoming a heavy burden around your neck. Frequent breaks in workflow are hugely annoying and can distract from more important matters.
This can be a poor business decision since there is more chance of mistakes happening, and you have to skip important tasks and even deadlines when you get distracted by the phone calls.
Unless you appoint a full-time assistant to deal with calls, prioritize, and answer them, you could end up spending half your day countering simple queries, low-priority asks, and telemarketers over real business, you degraded!
You are fielding after-hours calls
Business owners often put in longer hours — especially in the early days of a new business. But taking business calls outside of working hours regularly is not a long-term solution.
Business owners also need to turn off and not work, the same as when you are an employee. Having work on your mind all the time and people constantly bothering you can create permanent stress and burnout that interferes with your home life and, ultimately, with your ability to properly manage your company.
Sure, your business is going to get a few calls outside of business hours, both before and after, but that doesn’t mean you need to be giving up all your free time. A voicemail or call answering service outside of business hours can allow you to balance good customer service with a healthy personal life.
You’ve got some voicemails to catch up on
Allowing callers to leave a voicemail cannot possibly be worse than nobody answering anyone at all. Your customers expect their calls to be picked up during the day, making it the most appealing time for your business to answer.
Addressing a queue of voicemails that you listen to and respond to in the morning can also be daunting. One other con of the business voicemail is deleting messages, loss of important information due to low call quality or language, or callers just hanging up!
Advantages of a Telephone Answering Service
Now could be the moment where scaling potential with a call answering service could help if you simply cannot answer your business calls. Bizik has a wealth of experience and a professional layout team that can assist you with this. You will get a dedicated virtual PA team to represent your brand and never miss another call with the UK’s leading provider of telephone answering services.
