Whether it is online or by phone, you want your customers to have the flexibility to contact you when and how it suits them.  It’s important that no matter how they choose to contact you that you provide convenient and consistent Customer Service.

With unlimited time and resource this is possible; however the reality is that you have to deliver customer service at a sensible cost.

It’s becoming less common these days for businesses to employ a full-time receptionist (or certainly if there main duty is to meet and greet visitors, answer the phone, manage deliveries, post etc).

Often these tasks are spread out amongst various members of the team.  This works to a degree, but can be inconvenient. We can all think of those times where a courier arrives with a delivery for a colleague, you’re in the middle of concentrating on an important task, but you’re interrupted by needing to play front-of-house!

Use your own experiences to shape the Customer Service you provide

This view of course is very inward looking.   Put the shoe on the other foot, and think of the times that you’ve called a business to make an inquiry, you know they’re open, you know they’re there….but they just won’t pick up the phone.

We’re not for a moment suggesting that people in your business avoid answering the phone.  Well, not always.   But it is distracting and the two minutes you spend on the phone often cost far more in lost productivity by the time you regain your train of thought and refocus on the task in hand.

This isn’t limited to office-based businesses.  Loss of productivity through being interrupted transcends pretty much every market.

You don’t need to be big to be efficient

In many ways, it’s easier to put a solution in place for businesses that receive a high number of calls. Customer Services departments have been around for dozens of years, and whilst in some people’s minds they have a bad reputation, this perception is driven by the very large Financial Services and  Utility companies that have a captive audience and low-grade staff or poor systems.

For SME’s the solution is partnering.  We’ve consciously avoided using the term `outsourcing` as this implies losing control.

Specialist telephone answering businesses with Onit see themselves as partners with their customers, as they have a one-on-one relationship; matching a trained PA to a customer, but providing the flexibility to pay as you go.

This provides the benefit of having a friendly, professional receptionist, but one that may only take 2 or 3 calls a day; and paying accordingly.