Ring Ring – Why don’t you give me a call
November 3rd, 2009 by Ingrid Cliff
For some time I have been grappling with the concept of having a live answering service. You see, I love to be accessible to my clients, but when I am deep in thought or writing then I let the phone go through to our message bank. Having an phone answering service seemed like a great idea, until a friend of mine told me of her experience yesterday.
You see, she wanted to get in touch with her excavator operator. When she called the phone went through to what she now knows was a call answering service.
For starters they go the name of the company wrong, and when she asked if to speak with with the excavator guy, the operator fumbled around – not sure if the guy worked for that company. Once he finally was encouraged to check his piece of paper and found out who his client was, he spun into desperation – ranting about the company, how he was only new at the job and hadn’t been trained correctly.
Now remember, all my friend wanted to do was leave her name and number, but instead she ended up making “there, there” noises to a near suicidal phone operator who had no idea who his clients were. It would have made a hilarious recording (unless of course your business happened to be the excavator one and you were paying for a small business answering service).
Another professional colleague found her lovely local answering service had outsourced their services to India. She only discovered this fact after many of her clients complained about the difficulty in leaving a message with the operator due to their broken English (and after many messages about calls had not been forwarded).
But answering machines and message banks are not immune from problems. I have lost count of the bored and depressed cell phone voice messages I have listened to – people sound like they really hate their job which makes me question if I really want to leave my details.
Others struggle with pronouncing their own name without an um or an ah while sounding like Bob Hawke on a bad day, while some are premature message recorders – ratting off the message as if they were calling the Melbourne Cup.
Then of course you have the children’s TV presenter message banks, with very forced cheerfulness and extreme pronunciation of every letter.
The bottom line is all businesses need to periodically call their phone system and hear what their customers hear. Get a few people to try it out for you and tell you what they think. It may be very enlightening.
Until next time
Ingrid Cliff
We put your business into words
This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009 at 12:38 pm and is filed under small business tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
