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Posts Tagged ‘Call Answering’
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
Love ‘em or loathe ‘em, the mobile phone has become the personal communication medium of choice. We all have a mobile phone, and it’s never far away from our clutches. Whether it’s making or taking calls, sending or receiving texts, or surfing the Net, the mobile phone enables us to stay in touch with the rest of the world, wherever we happen to be. And whatever we do, we’re doing more of it. From the first text message sent by a Vodafone engineer in 1992, the good old SMS text message has become ubiquitous, with barely a day going by without most of us sending or receiving a message.
A few interesting SMS facts:
- There are more registered handsets in the UK than people
- Twice as many people have a mobile phone than have email
- 97 billion text messages were sent in the UK in 2009
- 441 million messages were sent on Christmas Day 2009
At Office Response we handle over 1 million calls per year and for the majority of these calls a message or information is passed onto our customers. Although most messages are relayed by email or call transfer we also use SMS to ensure customers receive information wherever they are. During the past year we have sent over 200,000 SMS messages as the demand for instant notification becomes an increasing priority for businesses.
One of the main changes in the use of text messaging is by organisations wishing to stay in touch with those that are important to them: hospitals contacting patients, businesses contacting customers, and councils contacting residents to name but a few.
This is the growth area of SMS. Businesses and public sector bodies are recognising the value of contacting their audience by text. Why?
- You can get a message in to the palm of a recipient’s hand
- And you can get it there in a few seconds
- As we all have a phone, anyone can be contacted
- It’s a low cost communication means
- It’s a two-way medium, enabling organisations to receive texts too
Who can benefit from using text messaging within their organisation? Well, pretty much everyone in some shape or form. Our customers that use SMS for message delivery and wider customer communications report:
- Increased revenue
- Reduce cost
- Improved service
- Improved Customer Satisfaction
A long standing customer of Office Responses telephone answering services is Text Anywhere Ltd. If you are thinking of sending messages to individuals or groups from an online service, create bulk SMS marketing campaigns, or send SMS messages from any email system, TextAnywhere has the business solution for you. You can visit them at www.textanywhere.net
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