Live telephone answering service by SwitchboardFREE
Save one of your SwitchboardFREE’s redirect spots for Pocket Receptionist – our new telephone answering service.
Pocket Receptionist employ a team of skilled and experienced in-house receptionists who take calls on your business’ behalf when you can’t. You can put behind the worries of hiring a traditional receptionist and imposing additional pressure on your company’s budget.
Our virtual receptionists work from our office and can do everything an onsite receptionist can do – they will cover your reception, answer your phone, manage your calendar, answer questions and take orders for your business.
With a telephone answering service you get a fully-integrated member of your team whom you may never meet in person, but who will be prepared with all the relevant information about your business to offer outstanding customer service on your behalf.
Voicemail drives callers away
One of the greatest advantages of live telephone answering services is that they rely on real human beings to deal with phone calls. The customers prefer to hear a human voice when they attempt to get hold of a business and it does your enterprise no good if you neglect this fact.
Research has shown that callers are normally unwilling to leave a voicemail and would rather hang up than leave a message. Worse still, they will rarely call for a second time. This inefficient communication, or rather the lack of any communication at all, leads to hundreds of missed sales opportunities. This calls for a change in your telephone answering approach.
Virtual receptionists save you money
Live telephone answering is good for another reason we briefly mentioned earlier – the service is cost-effective. With traditional receptionists you need to have enough office space, purchase a computer, and along with the employee’s wages, the costs can become a burden, especially for smaller businesses with limited financial resources. Moreover, it is improbable that one receptionist would be enough to cover your desk at all times. There are holidays, lunch breaks and unforeseen circumstances that require the employment of a second receptionist to make sure there are no gaps in your telephone answering. And this means additional costs to you.
It is kind of sad because research has shown that receptionists spend only 25% of their time answering phone calls. The figures indicate that it is much too costly to keep a permanent receptionist, especially when there is a proven and cheaper alternative, in the like of a virtual receptionist service.
Smart app for smartphones
The Pocket Receptionist smartphone app is the lifeblood of our telephone answering service. We designed it having in mind that we need a way to relay the call information to the user so quickly that they can respond to it straight away, and if possible, call back without delay.
Once a call is taken by a receptionist, we send a real-time notification to the customer who can have the call transferred to them immediately. If this is not possible, the Pocket Receptionist app ensures that the user is clearly alerted that there has been a call for them, so they can return it as soon as they are available.
The idea behind the app launch was to offer a more workable alternative to the email and SMS notifications we already send. Our reasoning is that our clients must be busy if they resort to telephone answering service, so they probably don’t have much time to constantly check their email. This poses a risk of having the email notifications lost somewhere among the heap of emails that are received every day. The app tackles the issue firmly and ensures no calls are forgotten to deal with.
Call us on 0800 009 6092 and we can sign you up for a 7-day free trial to experience for yourself how you can benefit from Pocket Receptionist.
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