It is very important for an entrepreneur to establish standard hours of operation. Many start-ups are run out of the founder's house (garage) at first and may not have offices or a store front. For this particular group, having discpilined business hours is vital. Credibility is hard to drum-up, especially if a potential customer is calling you in the middle of the day and you're catching "z's" cause you were up until 4am setting up your merchant account, filing for an LLC, and reading start-up blogs. Now, I realize that oftentimes we entrepreneurs have things to do that require us to be out of the office. So, the key is to leverage technology and other methods to create a virtual presence during those times.
Tips to ensuring an appropriate presence:
- Use a live answering service. These are reasonably priced now-a-days and it raises your credibility to customers, potential partners, and investors.
- Upgrade your voicemail. There are services that will send you an email message (to your handheld if necessary) when you just received a voicemail on your work-line.
- Set your autoresponder on your email when you are out of the office. When a customer emails you they get a quick reply stating something like, "We are currently out of the office and on-sight with a client. We will reply to you by 8am tomorrow morning."
- Hire a temp, cousin, sister, etc. to reply to customers with quick answers, if possible. For example, we have a client who trained his niece on how to answer "frequently asked questions." She was trustworthy and did a great job. The customer thought she was a project manager.
- or DON'T EVER LEAVE!
5 comments:
I have to agree about the answering service. Not only because we own and operate Remote Virtual Assistant but just as you've said, people and organizations that use the services 1) look like a much larger organization, and 2) look more professional tho their clients.
Sure, it's more expensive than and answering machine. But you really have to look at this issue from your customer's point of view.
What would YOU want if you had to call a company and get some information?
This is an excellent post. I know you were joking, but the available hours issue is a lot more complicated than the embarrassment of having clients call during a catnap. For example, there's the problem of timezones -- especially for companies based online. Business owners like me, on the west coast, have it the worst, since we've gotta be very early birds to catch that east coast worm.
That having been said, a LIVE answering service isn't entirely necessary. Most large corporations now have automated advanced 800 numbers that allow you to connect to the appropriate team member. I've worked for several small businesses and they all follow this suit through virtual attendants -- Gotvmail, for example, is a standout provider. I agree with Michael J -- look at it from the client's perspective.
Another note: a good voicemail service, being virtual, follows you around. I can get business voicemail and even take business calls now wherever I am -- my iPhone is its own private extension. So I'd argue that a good advanced voicemail service enables perpetual availability.
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I strongly contend that most people would rather talk to a person than have to punch a phone button to try and get an automated answer or find a person.
For example, an Auto Attendant might say something like, "Press 1 if you're a Gold Member with Dedicated Hosting. Press 2 if you're a Gold Member with Virtual Hosting. Etc."
You know what? The customer might have no idea if they have dedicated hosting or virtual hosting.
They just want to know, "How much was my bill last month?" And they don't want to have to press "#" to hear the options again if they missed the one that the want.
Also, perpetual availability is not always a good thing. If someone is in a meeting and their iPhone rings, should that person stop talking to the person in the room to answer the phone? Or would be better to silence the phone before the meeting starts and have your Virtual Secretary (who is trained to answer your business questions) take care of certain things so you can continue to work?
I strongly believe that most people would rather talk to a "knowledgeable" live person than to a machine.
Carl Fox, who does PR and marketing for my company, posted some good arguments for Why you Should use an Answering Service on Squidoo.
Also, the poll that we have on that site says that, out of 50 people who have answered the post, 94% of them would rather talk to a Live Person.
Let me know what you think.
Michael J
Michael:
You make some good points and in essence I agree with you that live answering can be beneficial -- however, I was talking primarily about small to medium businesses in my last post, and I think for many of these companies (and other start-ups) live answering just isn't an option. The cost of a receptionist against a service like gotvmail is a night and day margin. Plus there's the added expense, labor and time of the hiring and training process with a live person. When you're a large corporation with the infrastructure to handle all of that then I think it's a real plus, but for smaller businesses it's not always realistic.
Also, I don't totally agree with the point that customers would rather talk to a live person on the phone. The squidoo lens' poll is a little misleading. Of course if given the option between an answering service and a human being, human beings will pick the human being. Answering services have a reputation for giving clients the runaround when they have serious issues. I, however, have experienced just as many poor receptionists and/or live technical help reps who were poorly trained and could not answer my questions or forward me to the appropriate department after much frustrating conversation. So I think it goes both ways. To me, funneling customers through an automated system is necessary to forward them to the appropriate team member with the least amount of difficulty. And all automated services should have an option for general questions so the situation you mention above doesn't occur (dedicated vs. virtual hosting, ie product confusion).
Finally: the perpetual availability point. Obviously the range of this will always be limited. Business owners need to sleep, eat, go to meetings, and run their businesses. They can't always take calls. But an answering service keeps you perpetually available as far as voicemail is concerned. So when you get out of your meeting, your messages are waiting for you on your iPhone or blackberry...and you may even be able to call back and address a client's question on the way to the next meeting. That, to me, is a lot more convenient than phoning a receptionist, asking if there were any calls, and being barraged with customer info that then has to be written down and/or remembered to be addressed in due time.
In essence, my point is that I see the virtues of both advanced voicemail AND live answering, and I just happen to think that the former is more appropriate, efficient and cost-effective for small businesses. One of the companies I'm currently working for is using gotvmail and we've never had one complaint about customer service yet. Of course, others may have experience to the contrary but this is what mine has shown.
Thanks for your excellent points, michael, it's important for business owners to be thinking about these issues...
The gotvmail services looks very interesting and worth a serious look. Thanks for sharing the info and thanks to both of you for the discussion!
Now...off to trade in my rotary phone...
Joe
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