I write about how to empower your team with customer-centred processes so you can overcome your fear of disruption and take breaks from your business with complete peace of mind.
Is your smartphone keeping you a prisoner in your business?Hey there, One of the things that can really tie a small-business owner to their business is their phone. Whether it's dealing with new enquiries or answering questions from existing clients, or, heaven forbid, dealing with a complaint, the owner often feels like they are the only 'competent' person to answer. Worse, by hogging the phone-answering role, owners miss calls, which could be costing them business:
Answering the phone is one of those seemingly obvious processes we take for granted. It seems as natural as walking. Yet natural doesn't automatically mean optimal. So today we're going to talk about how to make answering the phone optimal for your business:
How to make sure calls always get answered:First, realise that if you are the only person who takes phone calls, there's a very good chance some calls will be missed. Or that you will find it difficult to take a proper break. So you need to enable other people to take calls as well as you can. Next, decide whether you want to answer in-house or get a third party to do it. Basically, you have 3 options here:
Which you choose depends on what your business does and how much you have to spend. What you do:If keeping your Promise to your clients involves having an experienced and qualified team, who need to spend much of their time concentrating on the work they are doing for your clients, then having them answering random phone calls may be too much of a distraction. On the other hand, if most of your calls are queries, that require the team's expertise to answer, they may be the best people to answer random phone calls. How much you can spend:If by answering all your calls, you could increase your client base, and therefore your monthly income, you might be able to afford to hire a dedicated person to be your first line of support for phone calls. Or you might be able to afford to pay a third party to do this for you. Here's how to work out how much you could afford:
How much of that extra monthly income would you have to spend per month to hire a dedicated phone answerer? How much of that extra monthly income would you have to spend per month to pay a third party answering service? In any case, it's probably worth designing and testing your call-handling processes before you hand them over to a third party, so I recommend starting in-house and enabling everyone in your team to answer calls well. How to make sure your phone always gets answered wellYou might think that phone calls are old hat, that people prefer to text or email, but you'd be wrong. A 2023 study found that 54% of consumers reported losing trust in a business that frequently fails to answer phone calls. At the same time, it is true that many young people don't like answering phone calls from unknown people. This is where having a process for answering the phone (and for dealing with what comes next) really pays off. Not only are you building confidence in prospects and clients, you're building your team's confidence too. So how do you make sure calls are answered promptly, answered consistently and still feel like a proper conversation between 2 human beings? Use a proven format for answering calls:Let the phone ring twice, then answer before the third ring. Why: so the caller can hear their call 'going through' as it were, but aren't kept hanging on. Before you answer, smile. Why: believe it or not people can hear your mood in your voice - even if the words you say don't match. It's well known that putting your face into a smile actually makes you feel more cheerful. The caller will hear that when you speak. When you answer, use the following form of words: "Good morning/afternoon, Why: the 'good morning/afternoon' let's the caller get used to your voice, if that takes a few seconds, they still get the warmness of the greeting without having to actually understand the words. Saying your business name next, lets them know immediately that they've come through to the right place (or not). Finally, giving your name narrows down their search further, so they know who they're talking to. And simply giving your name, without the usual 'how can I help you?' naturally prompts the caller to start telling you why they called. And, as a bonus, it also stops you from turning that 'how can I help you?' into a meaningless jingle - a jingle which will only annoy your caller if they are calling because they aren't happy. This form of words will feel odd at first, but get people to persevere, and it will soon feel, and sound, perfectly natural. How to make sure what happens next is always positiveFirst, a couple of really simple rules of behaviour:
Next, triage.A phone call is essentially an interruption in the work you are doing for other clients. And just because a phone is hard to ignore doesn't necessarily mean the call should take higher priority. So it's a good idea to apply some simple triage to calls as they come in. Especially if you are a services business, where people are naturally disposed to want to give answers, however long it takes, and however much that impinges on other clients' work. A good rule of thumb is that if the caller's reason for calling can be dealt with in 'X' minutes or less, deal with it immediately. This would cover putting them through to a colleague, taking a message or answering a simple question. Of course 'X' can vary, dependent on your business - anywhere between 5 and 15 minutes. Why:
This means that if you can, you should always aim to resolve things on the first call. A first step would be to start using the answers to FAQs you've started collecting after the last newsletter! If the call cannot be resolved within your chosen timescale, let the caller know this, take enough information to enable you (or someone else) to resolve the issue, then let them know how you will go about getting a resolution, and when you will contact them to let them know the result. This could be as simple as 'I'll talk to X/ look it up for you and call you back with an answer by X 'o clock, give me your preferred phone number', or as complex as 'I'll investigate that for you and get back to you when I have an answer. I think it should take about <time>. I'll call you back after then regardless and let you know where I'm at with it.'</time> Make sure you do follow up. Even it's only to give them a new deadline for resolution. According to a 2023 survey, about 40% of customers expressed frustration when they had to make follow-up calls to resolve issues. Here's how this process might look as a diagram: Finally, keep a record of all calls and actions taken, and make sure everyone has access to it. Why: Making promises and keeping them is what businesses like ours are all about.
That’s it. Here’s what you learned today:
Why not get started by drafting your own 'Answer Client Question' process? Sketch it out on a big sheet of paper, put a few bullet points under each Activity 'bubble' as a reminder of what to do. E.g. under 'Recieve Question' you could have:
Under 'Notify of Progress' you could have:
And under 'Notify of Answer' you could have:
At this stage you don't need to add anything to the other Activities, since your team probably already know how to Find Answer and Answer Question. One final, important point. The process covers the usual case. If a client calls with a genuinely urgent enquiry, of course you are going to deal with it immediately. Just make sure the urgency really is genuine. Let me know how you get on. Thanks for reading! |
I write about how to empower your team with customer-centred processes so you can overcome your fear of disruption and take breaks from your business with complete peace of mind.