Wednesday 25 July 2012

Tone of Voice is Crucial

When you are talking to someone face to face, you pick up all sorts of clues about their mood and meaning from their body language and facial expression as well as their tone of voice and choice of words. Unfortunately, you have much less to go on when you are answering the telephone. Tone of voice becomes much more important, which is one of the reasons why all our call answering operatives are trained to smile before they even answer the phone.

It is very easy to give the wrong impression over the phone, simply by sounding slightly distracted (perhaps when you are typing the message, or taking the caller's details). You can come across as bored and uninterested. It is worthwhile over-compensating slightly so that you sound lively, interested and friendly. But don't go too far the other way or you could give the impression that you are being sarcastic, which will quickly irritate the caller.

Whatever your role in your business, if you are talking to a client on the phone they are building an impression of the business as a whole from the way they perceive you. If you aren't sure how you come across on the phone, ask someone to listen in and give you an honest opinion.

Wednesday 18 July 2012

Risky Business

Running your own business requires taking a few risks but finding a call answering service doesn't need to be one of them. Starting a business is itself a massive risk, but if you are running your own business, you know it is a risk well worth taking! Even when your business is up and running, you will still find yourself taking risks. As the economy is still recovering, there is always the risk that it will all unravel somehow.

Using a call answering service can save you both time and money by freeing up you and your staff to focus on the profit-making part of your business. However, it does require a certain degree of trust. When someone answers your calls for you, they become the first point of contact for many of your clients and potential clients. As such, you want someone who is professional, friendly, and understands your company.

How can you find a service like this without risking your money trialling different call answering companies until you find one that suits you? Well, with Zoom there is no risk! You can have a 7 day free trial at no risk to yourself. You can set up your trial in a matter of minutes, just by calling Zoom. We are confident that if you try before you buy, we can convince you to choose us!

Wednesday 11 July 2012

Need To Save Some Money?

Many companies are finding they need to streamline their processes to save time and money, and enable them to focus on growing their business in the current economic climate. As a business owner it is well worth spending a bit of time considering which parts of your business really need to be carried out by yourself or your employees and which parts could be outsourced. Often you will find that you and your staff spend an inordinate amount of time answering telephone calls, many of which are not productive (the ever present sales calls in particular). This can be disruptive when you are in the middle of a project and have to pause to answer the telephone and deal with the call. Outsourcing to a call answering service lets you focus on your work when you need to, and deal with phone calls at a time that is convenient to you.

Giving your staff the opportunity to spend more of their time on the high value work that you actually get paid for has multiple benefits. The biggest is that they will be able to be more productive in the time they have available. A side benefit you may not think of straight away is that your calls will still be answered promptly and professionally, even when you have unexpected absences due to sickness. As your telephone answering service would already be set up, you wouldn't need to worry about that aspect of an absence and could instead focus on sharing out the work you do for your clients.

Successful businesses are those which respond well to change and come out of adversity stronger and even more successful. As such, downsizing is an opportunity to focus your efforts on keeping your business strong and growing within today's economic conditions.

Wednesday 4 July 2012

Almost Summer Holiday Time!

The season of summer holidays is almost on us again! Many of us are planning our holidays abroad (although some exceptionally organised people have had theirs booked for months!), and no doubt it is the same in companies up and down the country. Suddenly everyone wants to book time off for the same brief period and managers find themselves trying to work out when everyone can have holiday without affecting the smooth running of the business. This is where a call answering service can help.

Whether you have already got the Zoomettes working for you, or you just want to be able to use Zoom as an ad hoc back up for those times when you need cover and you need it now, we can help! So if you find that all your reception staff want to go away at the same time, their holidays overlap, or someone falls sick while they are the only one covering the telephones, one phone call to Zoom and you can be covered until your employees return.

All you need to do is sign up to our ad hoc service now, and you will be a member forever, so whatever unexpected situation you find yourself dealing with you will be able to turn on your call answering service with just one phone call.