Big Fish in a Little Pond

Big Fish in a Little Pond

You may be only too aware that if you have a small business, if you’re starting up a new business or maybe just working from home, you are a small fish in a very big pond. However, you can project the image of being bigger than you are by managing perception and exceeding customer expectations with little effort and even less expense.  If you think and work smarter than the larger companies, the world can indeed be your oyster. You may not be able to match large businesses by having more staff and more personnel to cope with incoming work, but there are clever ways that can raise your profile and distinguish you from competitors in the market place.

 Remember, David beat Goliath

Being a small business does have its advantages over the bigger companies. Small businesses have a naturally more personal approach and treating your clients as individuals and not just a reference numbers only serves to grow your client’s loyalty and their likelihood to recommend your service to family or friends. However, you may very well be as fully articulate as Stephen Fry, have the telephone manner of Joanna Lumley and be the most knowledgeable person on the planet about your chosen subject, but if your customers and prospective clients can’t get through, then all your talent and hard work inevitably goes to waste.

Getting focused

It’s a fact that lost or badly managed inbound calls directly correlate to a perception of poor customer service, and that’s even before you’ve picked up the phone. In today’s recession filled and frugal times customer focus is winning business hands down. With internet businesses fighting for your money and margins being squeezed harder than ever before; not just communication, but effective communication is now the aspiration of the ‘smart business’. A constant engaged tone, infinite loop menus or being put through to some exotic call centre half way across the world is the best way to lose existing and new customer alike.

 A Solution

So, you find yourself without an off-shore call centre to deal with your sales orders, no in-house technical wizards to deal with support issues and no fleet of enthusiastic sales staff to schmooze your new clients, but you do have a range of free solutions to one of the biggest reasons that small companies lose customers and therefore revenue. With the use of a virtual call manager you can control all your incoming call traffic making you seem a bigger company than you actually are.

Managing your inbound calls effectively is not a complex and expensive procedure reserved for blue chip companies and large conglomerates, you can get a free and easy solution which gives you access to an abundance of useful and practical features that a simple answer phone could never do.

Try a Slice or Take the Whole Cake

 The whole point about a virtual system is that a call manager is bespoke to your needs. You are not constricted by a service, and surely the point of running your own business is to be able to do what you want to do, in a way that you feel is best. Therefore you can take advantage of virtual reception as much or as little as you want; but once you see the advantages for yourself you may wonder why and how you ever did without it.