Small Company Challenge

You spend a great deal of money getting your phone to ring. Whether through advertising or marketing, this is where the rubber actually meets the road. What happens when that call comes in says a lot about your company. The customer will end this with a positive impression or a negative one. How your calls are handled says more about your company than all marketing dollars spent to date.

As someone who has made his share of calls in their professional life. I can get an impression about each company I call by the way that call is handled.

• The call that gets answered by a simple voice recorder, with a beep at the end tells the story a one or two person company. Which by the way is fine if that is what you are expecting.

• The Call goes to a personal cell phone voicemail, where the voice mail message is “You’ve reached Bob – leave a message”

• The call that gets answered by auto attendant and it list the employee by extension or tells a similar story. You can also draw your own impressions as you call around.

But what if your calls could be handled differently, what if the impression you give is one of efficiency and effectiveness. What I would like to describe is some ways your calls could be handled if you used a hosted IP PBX solution. I used the hosted model as my platform of choice because many find it the most cost effective way to achieve these type of results.

The call is answered by your personal auto-attendant and present options to the caller. By Example: Pressing “0” they are automatically sent to your cell or someone else covering your phone.

You have a special number set up for an emergency or on call, that call is forward to a specific person that is to cover those calls each ring that they do not answer the call is escalated to include more people.

Your phone rings all at the same time, your cell and home office are ring because you have a simul-ring feature in this way your call is answered in 4 rings or it goes to voice mail where that voice mail is delivered to the inbox of your email account allowing you to return that call from any where with full context of who the caller is and the purpose of the call.

This is far from an exhaustive list just some ideas. I know that every time a customer gets a fast busy, or needs to call another number, does not get the attention they desire, it will open the door for competition to take my customer away.

Using technology in a smart way will allow the customer to perceive the company is a positive way. After spending a great deal of money to get the phone to ring don’t stop the thought process there. Take that call all the way till they hang up the phone.