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Jun08

Will ABS Force 24/7 Legal Services?

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In a recent Law Society Gazette article, Alastair Moyle commented on the importance of marketing management , a point that clearly resonates strongly with Joanna Goodman’s feature “Law Firms Face New Financial Management Challenges”. In her article Joanna quotes Rupert Hawke (FD of Cartwright King) who says “The key is to develop systems and processes that inform operational decision-making”.

The implied focus here being on driving internal efficiencies.

Whilst I agree with Rupert my question is how early in the business process can we start to introduce effective process and exercise real control? The subtext being… did it really need the introduction of ABS to drive consumer focussed change? …continue reading

May09

OR’s 24/7 Effort Pays Dividends For Sue Ryder’s Big Wigs Business Challenge!

Posted in General Business Comments | 2 Comments

 

As you may have previously read here on the blog, Office Response took part in the Sue Ryder Care Big Wigs Challenge which ran from September 2010 until January this year.
For those of you who may not know, the challenge involves each team being presented with a £50 note, the aim is to raise as much as possible by using …continue reading

Apr21

PPI Calls increased here by 100% in the past 24 hours! Are you prepared?

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Here at Office Response we saw a dramatic rise in call volumes for our legal services clients yesterday, with some clients seeing an increase of more than 100% in call volumes relating to PPI Claims!

The decision handed down at the High Court in London means that the potential compensation bill for mis-sold PPI claims is being estimated at around £4.5bn.
As you can imagine, calls for our clients that specialise in legal services (solicitors and claims specialists) are looking to continue …continue reading

Dec21

Call Handling: How to improve it.

Posted in General Business Comments | 1 Comment

 

Boy do some companies do a terrible job answering their calls!

Whilst completing my University degree and working part time answering incoming calls I estimate I’ve answered (roughly) 24,000 calls and I’d like to think I became quite skilled at what I did – perfecting the art of handling all types of calls and in all kinds of situations dealing with a range of callers from the angry to the hysterically.

Now I’ve graduated and I’ve moved on into the mysterious realm of the sales team I am now very much on the other side of the fence. I’ve now made hundreds of calls to different companies and I’m now experiencing all kinds of receptionists and they are not all doing a very good job.

I have pinpointed my top 5 pet peeves …continue reading

Aug05

Small Business Owners – Should you tell your customers that you use a telephone answering service?

Posted in Tips, Knowledge and Experience | 15 Comments

 

Most small business owners face the challenge of deciding when to start letting go of certain tasks to enable their business to reach its potential. When the business is in its infancy you will be protective of your ‘baby’ and feel that you need to do everything for it. However, your business stands a greater chance of becoming a larger, more profitable enterprise by benefitting from the skills and experience of other people.

Letting go of answering your telephone calls can bring huge benefits to a growing business so it’s important that your customers recognise is at a positive change rather than a negative one. Remember that your customers may have got used to speaking with you in person, so what happens when, unexpectedly, there is a new voice on the phone asking them to spell their name?

Unsurprisingly, the customer can be put out by this. Thoughts like ‘why don’t you want to speak to me anymore?’ and ‘I don’t want to feel like just another customer – I want to feel valued’ could start to crop up. Negative moments of truth like this may lead to your valued customer feeling undervalued.

To overcome this there are a number of things you can do to help your customers appreciate why you are using a telephone answering service:

1 – Telling them beforehand – You may want to directly communicate to your customers the positive change you are making by outsourcing your calls. If they can see you are making improvements to your business through a desire to be more successful they should understand and share in the benefits the telephone answering service will bring.

2 – Telling them at the start of each call – Many of our customers choose to have their calls answered with their company name followed by “answering service” or “out-of-hours helpline” to let the caller know that they are not speaking directly with the business. This helps the caller to understand that, although they may not be able to speak directly with the person they require, their needs will still be addressed.

3 – Telling them during the call – Managing the expectations of the caller is something your telephone answering service can do on your behalf. If during a call something crops up that can’t be answered or resolved the call handler can advise the caller they are working on your behalf of your business.

If you use a different technique why not share it here?

By Steve West

Marketing & Business Development Manager

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Jul01

How should you prioritise your incoming telephone calls?

Posted in Tips, Knowledge and Experience | 2 Comments

 

It might seem a bit harsh, but the importance of a telephone call is often greater to the person making the call than to the organisation taking the call. Answering calls costs money so you should consider what return you are going to make from different types of calls and then target your resources accordingly.

You can prioritise different types of calls in a number of different ways:

• Consider using some sort of a IVR call platform before calls are answered e.g. press 1 for sales, press 2 for customer services etc.

• Use unique telephone numbers for different types of calls e.g. for sales, customer service and reception.

• If your telephone system allows it, set up ringing groups for each call type to present certain calls ahead of others.

• You could also use the routing facilities of “intelligent” telephone numbers to ensure your most important calls get picked up quickest.

But how should you rank your call types? Let’s look at some examples:

New Business Enquiries – Spending money on advertising and marketing without answering your calls is like trying to fill a bath up with water but forgetting to put the plug in. The leads will go down the plug hole – quite literally ‘money down the drain’. You can recognise companies that maybe haven’t considered this if you pick up a Sunday newspaper and telephone some of the advertisements. Those that don’t answer have forgotten to put the plug in the bath! It makes sense to answer new enquiry calls but ignore existing customers at your peril.

Customer Service Calls – Deciding what impact your handling of customer service calls will make on your business profitability is another complicated issue. How unique is your product or service? If you are the TV licensing authority then you can get away with answering 50% of your calls confident that people will call back but for most commercial organisations this level of poor service would be suicidal. Commercial realities play a part in deciding how much you should invest in telephone customer support. If you are in a very price sensitive market you may not be able to invest in post-sale support and even if you did would it encourage buyers to pay you 20% more when they are next in the market? It’s not for no reason that many PC manufacturers base telephone customer support offshore to reduce costs. The point to remember here is ‘how are my existing customers going to react if I don’t meet their customer service expectations?’

By Steve West

Marketing & Business Development Manager

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Jun21

Should you advertise your telephone number on your website?

Posted in Tips, Knowledge and Experience | 2 Comments

 

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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Jun15

Green’s error effects telephone answering stats!

Posted in Staffing & Resources | 1 Comment

 

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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May28

How to manage your calls whilst away on holiday

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With half term next week, many people will be packing up the camping gear or jetting off abroad. If you are a business owner, or have responsibilities that involve having to be available on the phone, what options are there to manage your calls whilst you are away?

Divert calls to your Mobile phone – It won’t be much of a holiday if you’re lying on the beach talking business all day, but technology now allows your calls to follow you wherever you are. You need to consider what the network coverage, reception signal and diversion costs are going to be. If you are holidaying with family you can also expect some moans…

Divert all calls to Voicemail – If you leave a voicemail message explaining that you won’t be available then at least they have an expectation of when you will be able to respond. This could work for you if your caller’s needs are not critical and can wait. Most voicemails have the option to ‘dial in’ remotely so you can pick up your messages and deal with them.

Get someone you know to ‘man the phones’ – This solution can work for you if you have competent employees, business associates or friends that can represent you and your business. Brief them on common call types, what to say and who to contact if there is an issue.

Divert your calls to a telephone answering service – If you already use an answering service it’s a simple case of letting them know how to handle your calls whilst you are away. If you don’t have one you might want to call us.

By Steve West

Marketing & Business Development Manager

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May10

Top 10 Telephone Answering Tips

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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 you. These telephone answering tips will ensure that callers know they’re dealing with a winning business – of course, if you don’t want to do it yourself, Office Response can handle all your calls for you:

1) If possible, answer all incoming phone calls before the third ring – this shows whoever is calling that you really do 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 organisation. You could say “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) Control your language. Don’t use slang or jargon. Instead of saying, “OK”, or “No problem”, for instance, say “Certainly”, or “Alright”. If you’re a person who uses fillers (known as vias) when you speak, such as “basically” or “um” or phrases such as “like” or “you know”, train yourself carefully not to use these when you speak on the phone.

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

6) 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. Read it back to the caller to confirm accuracy. Then make sure the message gets to the intended recipient.

7) Respond to all your calls within one business day. The early caller can get the contract, the sale, the problem solved… and reinforce the favourable impression of your business.

8 ) Always ask the caller if it’s alright to put them on hold and don’t leave them on hold for a long time. If you are having trouble locating someone go back to the caller and let them know.  Offer them choices such as “That line is still busy. Do you want to continue to hold or should I have Mr West call you back?”

9) Don’t use a speaker phone unless absolutely necessary. Speaker phones give the caller the impression that you’re not fully concentrating on their call and make them think that the 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.

10) 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 list with them.

By Steve West

Marketing & Business Development Manager

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