Some telephone answering services offer blanket 24 hour cover 7 days a week to all of their customers whilst other telephone answering services only cover business hours. Which telephone answering service package is right for you if you deal mainly with other businesses?
If your clients predominantly work business hours then we would suggest that you only need a business hours service unless your clients are self employed business people (e.g. builders, publicans etc) who may want to be able to contact you in the evenings and weekends. We specialise in providing virtual reception services Monday to Friday from 8am (to catch the early callers) to 6pm. What about cover for public holidays? Our experience is that on these days you might get speculative calls from international callers unaware of our holiday dates but generally if you deal business to business (b2b) then this cover is not needed unless you must be available to overseas contacts irrespective of our holiday dates. Our business hours package includes public holidays.
Let’s say your clients are operating extended hours e.g. you deal with pubs, retailers or cinemas. In this case extending your answering times could help you pick up extra sales enquiries and you should also consider if you are expected to provide customer service to your customers when they are open but you are shut, if these circumstances apply to you then a telephone answering service during extended hours could be a great benefit. We can offer evening and weekend cover to assist you. The hours of cover should be dictated by the hours your clients work.
So who needs a full 24/7 telephone answering service? We feel that there is no need to have full 24 hour telephone answering unless you deal with organisations that are open 24/7 e.g. hospitals and financial service companies and they look to you for service outside of office hours. We rarely get calls to reception numbers outside of normal business hours but we do handle large numbers of what we term “calls outs”. When handling callouts we often take the details form the caller and then alert an on call person to deal with the issue. We ensure our overnight team are kept free to deal with these types of calls which is why we don’t offer blanket 24/7 telephone reception service to our b2b clients.
Let us know what hours you answer your calls.
By Martin Blain
