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12thJan2015

3 New Year’s Resolutions Your Small Business Must Look Into | Tips From the Best Answering Service

With the beginning of every New Year, we all have personal New Year’s resolutions to commit to and try our hardest to fulfill in the months to come. However, if you are a small business owner, do you take the time to set aside resolutions and goals for your business as well? We want to help you make this year the most successful and profitable your business has seen yet by providing you tips from the best answering service, A Courteous Communications. We now take you through 3 New Year’s Resolutions Your Small Business Must Look Into. 

When you think of New Year resolutions, you may go straight to the most common American resolutions made year after year. Your business cannot lose weight; quit smoking; eat healthier; or build more muscle mass with a new gym membership. But all is not lost! Your business can still tackle some of the other most common New Year resolutions by focusing and applying these top 3 goals to start 2015 the right way.

New Year’s Resolutions for your small business

Lower Business Expenses and Promote Internally

Every savvy small business owner knows that there is always fat that can be trimmed from their overall expenses and overhead. The problem with trimming the fat is sometimes the quality of your product or service is lowered due to the cutbacks needed to survive another year. So all small business owners must really evaluate their spending habits and where their business can afford to ‘lose some weight.’

The most expensive aspect of owning a small business –and we are sure you will agree– is your payroll. How much is it costing your business to have a single employee act as a receptionist in your office five days a week; answering your business lines? Perhaps that employee is capable of taking on more responsibility than answering your ringing telephones eight hours a day.

Under further investigation, you may realize your current in-house receptionist has excellent qualities that they can contribute to making your business a success in more productive ways. By delegating some of your daily tasks and responsibilities to current valued employees, you are finding new and inventive ways to use the talent your business already has.

You may ask, “Well who is going to answer my business telephone lines if I don’t have a receptionist?” This is where you can make room for even further profit. If you outsource your telephone answering needs to a live receptionist service on a per-call basis, you can really minimize your payroll expenses while enjoying the increased productivity of your current staff. Did you know that you can pay a professional call center to answer your business telephones 24 hours a day for as little as $10 a month? The power of outsourcing your telephone calls to professional telephone representatives doesn’t have to break the bank or negatively affect customer service.

With a reevaluation of your current staff and their potential skill levels, you may find it makes ‘cents’ to promote your in-house receptionist and increase your business’s focus on productivity in any areas that need a little boost.

SAVE your hourly minimum wages for employees that can work on projects, handle specific customer needs and produce work that makes a healthy profit for your small business. Outsource your business lines and only pay for calls taken; not hourly wages of sitting around waiting for the phone to ring.

INVEST in having highly skilled virtual receptionists answer your business telephone lines at a fraction of the cost it would take to have an in-house receptionist doing the same job. Getting the best answering service doesn’t have to break the budget.

RESEARCH all potential telephone answering services and call centers before making a final decision. This small business New Year’s resolution will only work if you outsource your customer calls to a professional, courteous and helpful answering service. If you promote your current receptionist and then send your callers to a call center that does not focus on training their virtual receptionists in customer service, your business will feel the change negatively and you will lose money and customer loyalty.

KNOW that shopping for an answering service is just as difficult as interviewing the perfect in-house receptionist. This New Year’s resolution requires due diligence on your part to find the perfect call center that reflects your business’s culture and overall mission statement.

Quit Handing Business to Your Competitors

All business owners that forward their potential customers and leads to an answering machine is directly handing business to competitors. How can this be? This is a direct result of living on a planet that is connected 24 hours a day through the internet. The average buyer, consumer, human being has a modern mentality of, “we want it and we want it now.”

If you are a business owner that has your telephone lines forwarded to a robot answering machine after normal business hours, you are losing out on new business (period). There are 168 hours in a week. If no one answers your calls after normal business hours, you are losing 128 hours of opportunity to grow your business each week. By the end of the year, you will have lost 6,656 hours of opportunities. Can your business survive that?

If someone calls your offices on a Saturday and you advise through a recorded message, “Thank you for calling. We are currently closed at the moment and ask that you call back during normal business hours so that we may assist you further. If you would like us to call you back, please leave your name, number and a detailed message and we will…..” Chances are your potential customer has already hung up; leaving no message and no hot lead for you to follow up on.

You can be assured; your leads will go to the very next website on Google search results to find your direct competitor, a company that uses a live receptionist service to answer their calls on the first ring 24 hours a day. And that, my busy business owners, is how you indirectly give business right to your competitor; making their business stronger and yours weaker.

SAVE your business by creating a 24-hour, 7-day a week commitment to your potential and current customers. Just by accepting questions, orders and customer service requests on their timetable, you are showing them how important their happiness is to your brand.

INVEST in having highly skilled, professional and courteous virtual receptionists answer your business telephone lines all day, every day. If you have a 24 hour call center attending to your customers, you will create a business that makes money even while you sleep.

RESEARCH your potential and current customer’s frequently asked questions and supply the answers and policies to your own team of virtual receptionists. With answering services like A Courteous Communications, you can strive to make each call a uniquely pleasant and incredibly helpful experience for your customers.

KNOW that opening your business 24 hours a day doesn’t mean that you will have to give up your weekend and personal time with your family. If you outsource your after-hour calls, we can independently stop your potential customer in the research phase of their overall buying process. Normally, those same leads will keep calling businesses in your industry until they have the answer they are seeking. Allow us to step up to the plate, answer their question and make them feel like your company is exactly what they have been looking for.

Balancing Your Personal Life With Your Business Needs

This business New Year’s resolution should fit nicely into your personal resolutions. Successful small business owners must devote so much time to grow their business, which can often lead to neglecting family, friends and even your own health.

Last year, we posted a special article, Forbes 7 Habits of Great Business Owners. In it, we summarized Forbes top habits that included:

• Taking Care of Your Health and Well-Being

• Having a Life Outside of Your Business

• Looking Forward Towards Efficiency and Technology

• Being and Staying Organized

<p”>• Nurturing Professional Relationships

• Making Tough Decisions to Better Your Business

• Cutting the Fat From Business Expenses

The greatest thing about being a professional live receptionist service is that we can assist you and your business with balancing all of these difficult tasks. When you outsource your ringing telephone calls, you also have the ability to just “turn off.”

When you turn your cell phone off at the dinner table or during your child’s school play, you are making time for those very important moments in life that cannot be missed. You have a responsibility to your business and a responsibility to your family and you never have to choose between one and the other when you hire a talented group of employees to oversee your customer needs when you cannot.

SAVE your personal relationships and commitments by powering down often and allowing the ship to sail the course without you at the helm. Although it seems that every task needs to be handled personally, that just isn’t so. The perfect business is a business that can run efficiently and effectively without the President’s continued 24 hour efforts.

INVEST in hiring a team of professionals that you can trust to get the job done without the constant need for micro-managing on your part. Virtual receptionists, customer service representatives and outsourced appointment schedulers can support your business callers’ needs at a fraction of the cost a full in-house team would require.

RESEARCH all business telephone answering services and call centers to find the best match for your business. Seasoned answering services, like A Courteous Communications, have spent thirty years in developing the right customer service guidelines, protocols and procedures to help your calling customers with all of their needs. For example, a lot of our current clients researched call centers and found that our U.S. based answering service was the right option for them. They preferred our answering service, with a corporate office located right here in Orlando, Florida, because they wanted to hire an American, English speaking answering service.

KNOW that you can delegate your telecommunication and scheduling needs to answering services like A Courteous Communication. You don’t have to do it all on your own and publications like Forbes agree with us! Don’t spend another night or weekend answering your ringing telephone when we, the best answering service, can handle that task for you. We are the experts in customer service and ask that you trust in our 30-year old company to represent your business when you cannot. We hope this special New Year’s Resolution article for small businesses has helped you look closer at three ways your business can benefit from hiring the support your business needs to survive in today’s market.

If you have any questions at all about our special custom rates and services, we look forward to being there for you in your time of need. Give us a call (day or night); we are here to help you and your business succeed this year!

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