Time management is vital to your success as a business owner, but there’s so much to get done that every day can feel completely overwhelming.
Although there are some things you’ll need to handle yourself, at least one vital service can be turned over to other trained professionals. When you contract with an answering service company, you’ll find that time management gets a lot easier.
These are just a few ways that an answering service can make your days more manageable:
You’ll avoid constant interruptions from phone calls. On a very basic level, the reason you hire an answering service is to answer the phone that keeps ringing. It’s not just that the phone won’t stop, but that you’re always thinking about having to answer it, even if only subconsciously. With each ring, you’re forced to drop whatever you’re doing, answer the telephone, help the caller and then try to figure out where you were before the phone rang.
When an answering service is in charge of answering the telephone, managing your time gets a lot easier. Not only are you better able to complete tasks without interruption, you can focus on the job in front of you before moving to the next one, increasing your productivity dramatically.
They’ll create call logs that tell you exactly how to help each caller. Inevitably, some callers will want to speak to you directly — but that’s ok, because your answering service has your back. Instead of listening to a long string of answering machine messages that simply ask for you to return a call with no specific information, your answering service asks questions so you know exactly how to help each caller. When you have an itemized call log to work from, prioritizing calls becomes a simple task, making it easier to manage the rest of your day.
You can let your answering service do the heavy lifting. Many businesses have certain types of calls that come in all day long, every day. For a retail location, that might be calls about store hours or product availability, medical and law offices might get calls to schedule appointments and property managers could get lots of calls asking how to change a furnace filter or about available properties. You don’t have to be the one to constantly hand out these same answers — instead, give the details to your answering service and let them help these common callers.
They can handle emergencies on your behalf. Emergencies happen, but when you’re the one always answering the phone they can seriously eat into your day. Instead of juggling the phone and trying to pass a panicked caller to the person who can help, you can let your trained telephone answering service professionals calm the caller and route them to person in your organization that’s experienced in handling their situation.
Answering services are one of the best friends a time-strapped small- to medium-sized business can have. They act like a trusted and efficient right hand, even when you can’t afford to hire another staff member. Since you only pay answering services when they’re answering calls, it’s an affordable option that can help you focus on work and better manage your limited time.
