The Office Response Telephone Answering Blog

Businesses burn the midnight oil

When I started working  Tescos (yes, I’m not that old, there were Tescos even then) would slam the door in your face at 5.30pm, they had a half day on Wednesday, begrudgingly opened Saturday and would have been committing an offence if they opened on a Sunday. Today we expect to be able to ring our bank 24/7 and shop 7 days a week.

Are we heading the same way in the business to business (B2B) world?

Maybe.

Simon Milner, one of our new business guys, forwarded me an article about website data from One Business Insurance revealing that the peak time for online enquiries is between 9pm -2am on a weekday closely followed by between 5-7pm on a Sunday.

In one month alone 62 per cent of those enquiring about business insurance did so outside normal working hours.

“These figures really do highlight the fact that those running small businesses are never off duty,’’ said One Business Insurance Solutions operations director Darren Box.

He said enquiries ranged from shop owners looking at dedicated retail insurance through to those wanting to know more about van insurance, public liability and business interruption insurance.

Research highlights:
•62 per cent of online requests for insurance were made outside normal working hours
•46 per cent of these out of hours requests were at weekends
•The peak time for out of hours requests was between 9pm and 2am on a weekday

These numbers back up our own in that we take 40% of all of our calls outside of traditional office hours.

So if you are B2B what hours should you be answering your calls?

Martin Blain

Sales Director

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He should have scored! Business and Sport

We’re in the same game as those overpaid superstar English footballers. It’s called the achievement game.

During this World Cup how often have we heard the TV pundit proclaim “He should have scored”? Of course he wanted to score, he tried to score but he didn’t and that’s all that counts.

So plan your week, set your goals and then on Friday at 5pm consider if you’ve had a good week because, just like those failed footballers, we’ll all be judged not by how many qualifications we have, not by our past successes or reputations, but by what we achieve this week.

Have a good one.

by Martin Blain

Sales Director

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South West Contact Centre Forum Awards

After cycling the 21 miles to work I was starving, I resisted drinking too much of the free (and rather good) Chablis, and moaned constantly about my hunger until Stuart Coleman, super pushy salesman from the evening’s sponsors Sabio, secured me a second main course. I scoffed it quickly and finally put a halt to my stomach’s grumblings.

It’s easy to be cynical about award ceremonies but watching the unsuccessful finalists’ body language you can see these events mean a lot to the winners and losers. The unsuccessful finalists slump back in their chairs before pretending they did not really want to win anyway.

We won the “People Development Award”. Since October 09 we have been working with young people to give them an introduction to work. They follow a structured training programme leading to National Vocational Qualifications and we pick the best and give them junior positions.

We’ve been through a steep learning curve but after 9 months the best graduates from the scheme are turning into some of our top agents. It’s not a universal sentiment but many of our apprentices are grateful for their chance and are rewarding us with loyalty and a good standard of work.

Congratulations go to our Contact Centre Manager, Heather Dawes and her able assistant Sean Colledge, who run the training scheme and effectively won the award for Office Response.

Martin Blain

Sales Director

For more information;

Apprenticeships, http://www.apprenticeships.org.uk/

South West Contact Centre Forum http://www.swccf.co.uk/

Is UK Economy stalling as Defoe nets?

I thought the World Cup was supposed to be good for the UK economy?

Is this no more than yet another “Social Myth” driven by our gung-ho media?  For a more considered opinion of the economic effects of World Cups read http://bit.ly/bW2Kdp

Yesterday afternoon’s England fixture saw our incoming call volumes plummet during the match and over the entire day our call numbers were down by 13% compared to the other Wednesdays this month. It’s reduced our profitability for sure and my guess is that the retail industry took a big hit yesterday too.

Is it worth it? You bet it is!!!

Bring on the Germans

By Martin Blain

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Top 12 Telephone Answering Tips

Telephone answering skills are critical for businesses. The telephone is still most business’s primary point of contact with customers and the way you answer your company’s phone will form your customer’s first impression of your business. These telephone answering tips will ensure that callers know they’re dealing with a winning business – of course, if you dont want to do it yourself Office Response can handle all your calls for you:

1) Answer all incoming phone calls before the third ring if possible – this shows whoever is calling you that you value their call.

2) When you answer the phone be warm and enthusiastic. Your voice at the end of the telephone line is sometimes the only impression of your company a caller will get.

3) When answering the phone,welcome callers courteously and identify yourself and your organization. Say, for instance, “Good morning. ABC Construction’, Andrew speaking, How may I help you?” No one should ever have to ask if they’ve reached such and such a business.

4) Enunciate clearly, keep your voice volume moderate, and speak slowly and clearly when answering the phone, so your caller can understand you easily.

5) Control your language. Don’t use slang or jargon. Instead of saying, “OK”, or “No problem”, for instance, say “Certainly”, “Very well”, or “All right”. If you’re a person who uses fillers (known as vias) when you speak, such as “uh huh”, “um”, or phrases such as “like” or “you know”, train yourself carefully not to use these when you speak on the phone.

6) Train your voice and vocabulary to be positive when phone answering, even on a “down” day. For example, rather than saying, “I don’t know”, say, “Let me find out about that for you.”

7) Take telephone messages completely and accurately. If there’s something you don’t understand or can’t spell, such as a person’s surname, ask the caller to repeat it or spell it for you. Then make sure the message gets to the intended recipient.

Answer all your calls within one business day. The early caller can get the contract, the sale, the problem solved… and reinforce the favorable impression of your business that you want to circulate.

9) Always ask the caller if it’s all right to put her on hold when answering the phone and don’t leave people on hold. Provide callers on hold with progress reports as the call progresses. Offer them choices if possible, such as “That line is still busy. Will you continue to hold or should I have ________ call you back?”

10) Don’t use a speaker phone unless absolutely necessary. Speaker phones give the caller the impression that you’re not fully concentrating on his call and make him think that his call isn’t private. The only time to use a speaker phone is when you need more than one person to be in on the conversation at your end.

11) If you must use an answering machine to answer calls when you can’t make sure that you have a professional message recorded and gives callers any other pertinent information before it records their messages. Update your answering machine message as needed. For instance, if your business is going to be closed for a holiday, update your recorded answering machine message to say so and to say when your business will reopen.

12) Train everyone else who answers the phone to answer the same way, including other family members if you’re running a home-based business. Check on how your business’s phone is being answered by calling in and seeing if the phone is being answered in a professional manner. If they don’t pass the test, go over this telephone answering tips list with them.

Voicemail Survey – And the winner is…

After receiving over 500 responses to our Voicemail Survey we have decided to compile the results and pick the winner of the iPod Touch. To keep things fair, all the email addresses of the entries were put into a basket and Jo Davies, our Accounts Manager, was blindfolded and asked to pick the lucky winner.

Well Done to to Bob Code of MJP Solicitors in Liverpool who is the lucky recipient of the iPod Touch!

The Voicemail Survey has uncovered some very interesting facts about the telephone habits of  businesses and consumers so a big thank you to everyone who took part. We will be publishing the results through our Blog very shortly so click here to subscribe to our RSS feed and learn the truth about Voicemail.

Steve West

Marketing & Business Development Manager

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Should you advertise your telephone number on your website?

One might think that the answer to this is an obvious one and that all websites should have a contact telephone number but there are points to consider;

Who are your customers?

If you sell business to business (B2B) then the answer if a definite ‘yes’! Even though buyers will use email or your website contact form to make their first enquiry some will want to call you. Whereas we think telephone numbers should be visible across all business sectors it seems to be common for companies within the internet marketing world not to use phone numbers on their sites. They do all the work to get the search engines to find their sites and then they don’t pubilcise a number. To me it’s lunacy.

And another small thing; when you do publish a phone number make sure you answer the calls!!!! I was looking for examples of business websites without telephone numbers so I’ve just searched Google for “internet marketing Bristol”, I was surprised that the first three sites all displayed telephone numbers so as a test I rang them all, would you believe that my first two calls went unanswered?

Now if your business deals directly with consumers (B2C) the decision to advertise a number or not depends on a few things;

How much money are you making per customer?

Over the many years that we have been managing calls we’ve had a fair few enquiries from companies where the average sale value has been so low that there has just been insufficient margin to justify the cost of call answering; either in house or by outsourcing it to us. Some business models just don’t warrant the cost of call answering.

A good example of this is a great business called worldstores.co.uk. They are very smart internet retailers selling products as diverse as beds for hundreds to Ipod accessories for just a few pounds. They’ll answer calls 24/7 on the bed’s sales line but you won’t find a telephone number anywhere on the Ipod site. The sites are run by the same management team but they’ve made very different decisions about telephone calls based on the economics of the products they are selling.

How well known is your brand?

Brands are all about trust and loyalty. Consider that you are going to use the internet to buy a bed. Tesco sells them online and there’s no telephone sales line number on their site. They are doing away with the cost of manning a call centre over long hours and letting their brand do the selling. Unsurprisingly the lesser known independent suppliers who are competing need to publilise telephone numbers to give buyers the confidence that the Tesco brand delivers. Many of our online retail customers find it hard to quantify the benefit we give them by having a 24 hour answering service supporting their online selling but they know it helps them to make sales by giving buyers confidence.

E-commerce businesses should beware of falling into the trap of thinking that everyone will order over the internet. Whereas lots of buyers are happy to tap in their credit card details others will want to order over the telephone if they are not comfortable about who you are or what type of service you provide.

By Martin Blain

Sales Director

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Green’s error effects telephone answering stats!

Our contest to beat our call volume predictions has been won by Salisbury based Natallie Davies.

Natallie is a consultant for business cost reduction consultants, Auditel, and her prediction that we would receive 35% of our normal calls was one of the highest that we received. The actual percentage of normal call volumes that we received during the game was 65% – much higher than we anticipated. As England took the lead from Gerrard’s neat finish, call numbers were well down, but after Robert Green’s goalkeeping howler led to the USA’s equaliser our call volumes started to climb and almost reached normal levels towards the end of the game as the country’s optimism started to slide.

Let’s hope that England’s next matches retain the attention of the great British public for the whole match and our call numbers stay low throughout. Thank you to everyone who emailed us with their predictions.

Come on England!!!!

By Martin Blain

Sales Director

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Office Response’s World Cup Predictions

For a long time now our staff  planning managers, Simon Ede and Chantelle Davies, have been pouring over the World Cup fixtures and entering data into our resourcing software. The strange thing is there has been no discussion about who will start in goal or what Capello’s formation will be in the first game. Instead, they have been concentrating on what will happen to incoming call volumes during the key games.

Will South Africa’s match with Mexico on Friday afternoon have an impact and will lots of people choose to wait until half time to report faults with the air conditioning? The important thing for Simon and Chantelle is to ensure that we have the correct number of people available to answer the calls when they come in and we use market leading workforce management software that calculates its accurate predictions through complicated formulas.

Fortunately, this is Simon’s 3rd World Cup at Office Response and he’s already made his prediction of what % of our normal call volumes we expect to receive during England’s first match and the staffing rotas were planned a long time ago.

As a bit of fun we’ll give an England football shirt to the closest prediction for the % of calls we’ll get from 7pm to 10pm compared to our normal call volume on a Saturday. To give you a fair chance, the competition is not open to Office Response employees.

Please send entries to business.support@office-response.co.uk and we’ll announce the winner through the blog.

By Martin Blain

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Why is the Government spending on Google Ads?

Previous readers will know that I’m no fan of too much government interference in business or life and I’ve always had particular issues when my tax pounds are squandered. I’ve done something daft and I’ve been driving with my car windows open and guess what? My tax disc has blown out of the car.

So off I go to my PC to research getting a new one, type into Google “tax disc” and guess what? The first organic listing is vehiclelicence.gov.uk, which gives me all of the information I need, and then above it, yes you’ve guessed it there’s an Adwords entry for direct.gov.uk.

It’s ridiculous that should I choose to click on the paid advert then some of my tax goes to the States to make Google just a little richer when all of the information is there with no cost. With our new coalition Government looking for ways to save money here’s an easy one. The ridiculous thing is that just one civil servant with an ounce of commonsense could stop this waste today.

It’s not just the search term ‘tax disc’ where our money is being thrown away. Here are some more keywords – search for ‘driving license’,'child benefit’ or ‘income support’.

Please add your own examples to the blog. What can be done to stop this lunacy?

Martin Blain

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