Get your calls answered

Starting a small business consumes a huge amount of time and resources. You have equipment to buy, offices to establish, people to employ and decisions to make. One of the biggest decisions that you will have to make when setting up a small business is what tasks are going to be completed by internal staff members and which tasks are going to be outsourced.

One of the big issues that you need to work out when starting your new business is who or what is going to deal with your incoming calls. The options are quite clear with telephone answering, either you leave it to the individual to try to answer their own calls and you have some sort of automated system in the background, you employ your own internal receptionist who answers calls, forwards calls to appropriate staff members or you employ an external virtual receptionist service that has a live telephonist answer those incoming calls and then either takes a message or forwards the call to the appropriate staff member.

Below we compare the benefits and the shortfalls of the 3 potential options.

Automated Answering Service

An automated answering service can be a useful resource for a small business if you have limited resources. At the low end you have answering machines where you simply record a message to be played to your incoming callers and you then play back those messages by clicking a button on the machine. The next level up from these basic machines are the services operated by Telecoms companies. These services will allow you to receive your messages over the phone and will send you an SMS telling you that you have received a phone message.

At the higher end of the spectrum of automated answering services are the IVR (Interactive Voice Response) based services that will interact with the caller to determine what service or department the caller is after and then either attempt to resolve the issue at hand or direct the call to a specific extension. Good IVR systems can save large companies significant amounts of money by reducing the amount of human contact needed, however these systems can be quite expensive to implement.

Unfortunately, the majority of people don't like talking to a machine and get frustrated quite quickly. Research carried out in Europe showed that more than 60% of people will simply hang up the phone rather than go through the bother of leaving a message. What this means is that a caller who is ringing around to find a specific product or service will hang up the phone and then look down the list of results and ring the next one that jumps out at them. What this means is that you are not only losing a call but you are also losing a call to one of your competitors.

Automated services certainly have a place in business. The high level IVR systems work well for service based businesses that need to filter the calls on the way through to work out the best process for them. Generally these companies will use the IVR service for more service or problem solving purposes rather than for generating sales. Companies like Foxtel and the big telecoms companies make good use of IVR services. Unfortunately, if you are a small business that is hoping to make sales from it's incoming calls then you are probably not going to do yourself too many favours by going with an automated service.

In-House Receptionist

Back in the old days this was the only option. You would lease yourself some office space and place a big wooden reception desk next to the door. Sitting behind the desk would be a receptionist or two and in from of her/them would be a telephone system console that would allow the receptionist to organise the calls. The in-house receptionist would also generally deal with any visitors to the company and would be the one who takes receipt of any mail and deals with any incoming or outgoing courier parcels. The receptionist may also make tea and coffee for visitors who are coming for meetings and might also have organised the outgoing mail.

One of the problems with having an in house receptionist (both back in the good old days and now) is that they are never fully busy for the entire day. Inevitably you would have 5 people turning up at the same time for meetings or you would have 3 incoming calls at the same time. What this means is that the receptionist either needs some sort of backup plan or they simply have a queue of people to deal with. At the opposite end of the spectrum there are also times when the receptionist is sitting around with nothing to do. What used to happen in the old days is that staff members used to wander out to the receptionists desk and gossip about a range of things or catch up with gossip that the receptionist has heard from others. Nowadays, receptionists not only catch up on gossip in their idle time but they also now have time to catch up with social media on their smart phones.

There are a lot of benefits of having a live receptionist sitting at the front door of your business. If you have the right person then you will present a professional image to your customers and business associates and they can take the pressure off your management by organising meeting rooms and refreshments etc. Unfortunately, due to the high cost of employing receptionists (around $50k plus on-costs) it is something of a luxury for businesses to actually have them these days.

An in-house receptionist can make good sense to a large multi-office business. With cloud technology you can now have one centrally located receptionist dealing with staff and calls from a broad range of locations. For a small business however a live internal receptionist is a very costly luxury.

The other issue to consider with an in-house receptionist is the cost of change. When you want to change your in-house receptionist or make the position redundant you could be up for months worth of salaries and on-costs.

Live Answering Service

A live answering service is not suitable for all businesses however they can make a significant impact for most small to medium sized businesses. The way a live answering service works is that you divert your current incoming telephone number to a number that has been provided by the answering service company. You can either transfer the number directly or you can transfer after a specific number of rings. When the answering service picks up the call, they greet the caller with a personalised greeting that you have previously agreed. They can then potentially answer some simple questions, give some basic information to the caller or take a message from the caller. Once the receptionist has taken the message from the caller they then forward that message on to you, either in the form of an email or as an SMS. With a live telephone answering service you are receiving your calls within minutes of the caller making the call.

There are a number of area's where a live telephone answering service provides a better service than an automated service. Firstly, you are far less likely to have the caller hang up if they are presented with a live person on the other end of the line. Secondly, when a live person answers your phone and interacts with your callers it is far more likely that the caller will think that the receptionist is a part of your team and will likely think that your business is much bigger than it is. For a larger business that is taking a lot of service calls for which there are a high percentage that are relatively simple to resolve then it probably makes a lot of sense to look at a sophisticated IVR system as opposed to a live answering service.

When you have an in-house receptionist working for your business there are lot's of benefits. Firstly, your callers get a more personal "live" service when they call. The receptionist is usually quite familiar with the products and services that you offer and the staff that you employ. While a virtual receptionist can't totally replace a live in-house receptionist, they can provide a significant portion at only a fraction of the cost. Also, with a virtual receptionist you get scale. If you are running a marketing campaign and your call volume triples then your virtual team can handle it easily while your in-house team would likely fall over. With a virtual telephonist you also get the benefit of your customers talking to a live person and the VA being able to answer basic queries.

At the end of the day it is usually about value for money. With a live answering service you get significant benefits at a relatively low price. It just makes good business sense in this modern internet age.