You’ve worked hard to build your small business, but sometimes you get the feeling that you could be doing more to expand your reach.
You get a lot of calls during the day, but you’ve noticed that if you don’t answer right away, callers don’t tend to leave voicemails or even bother to call back.
You may not realize it, but missing those calls is one of the biggest mistakes that many small business owners make. Sure, a voicemail system or answering machine worked wonders in the 1990s, but today’s world of immediate information also demands immediate answers from small businesses like yours.
That’s where an answering service for small businesses can help.
Missing Calls Can Have Huge Repercussions
There’s every reason you can’t answer each call that comes down the wire, but that doesn’t make the impact any smaller.
Of course you need time to yourself, and absolutely you deserve to be able to focus when you’re practicing your trade, but something has to give. Missing phone calls means big trouble for small businesses like yours, for reasons like:
New leads may get the wrong impression. You know that you have the time and energy to service another account or a new patient, but when your new callers are immediately dumped into voicemail or trapped in a phone tree, they may feel like you’re either too busy to help them or you just really don’t care about them.
Existing customers complain about a lack of communication. When things are going right, you’re everybody’s favorite, but the moment something starts to slip, you may be in hot water, especially if you’re not answering the phone consistently.
Customers that are really frustrated or frightened may start telling their friends and family about your lack of communication, even if that’s because they refuse to leave messages for you to respond to.
Wasting your ad spend. When you contracted with your marketing agency or decided to do your own marketing, your goal was to improve your lead generation, wasn’t it?
You’ve succeeded at that, but because you’re not answering the phone, you’ll never know what kind of leads you might have captured. It’s not uncommon that SMBs (small- and medium-sized businesses) will spend a lot on marketing only to forget to implement some sort of system to ensure every person who calls is handled by a real person right away. Without adequate lead capture, that ad spend is just wasted money.
The absolute worst result of missing a lot of calls is that you can literally drive your customers away and into the arms of your competition. Sure, you like them, they’re pretty good people, but your ad spend was meant to improve your ROI, not that of another company.
Turn Your Small Business Around With a Little Help From The Answering Service
Clearly what you’re doing isn’t working for you, but you can’t afford to hire someone full-time. That’s ok, there is middle ground. A answering service for small businesses can handle your calls, whether you want them to take total control and just send you a call log to work from or you’d prefer they answer when you can’t, live professional telephone operators are a relatively low expense/high value way to make sure every single call is answered.
An answering service could be the solution you need. After all, adding one to your team means your reputation grows, your ROI increases and everybody, except maybe your competition, is super happy.