There’s no ideal time to think about outsourcing your business’ telephone answering.

It can help your business at any time by dealing with your incoming calls, freeing you up to spend more time either working on your business or dealing with customers and leads.

However, there are particular times in your business’ life when investing in telephone answering can be a huge benefit.

In these periods you can either spend your time and energy constantly answering the phone and getting distracted from your work, or you can invest in call answering and improve your business.

Here’s the main times you should consider a telephone answering service for your business.

When your business is growing

Growth is always good in business, but sometimes you can find yourself and your resources stretched to breaking point when your business is growing faster than you can keep up with.

At these times, failing to keep up with the growth can either slow it down, or stop it in its tracks.

If it’s call answering and customer service that’s falling behind, your business can quickly get a reputation you don’t want.

At this time, a telephone answering service can either deal with all your incoming calls so you can focus on your business’ growth, or it can be used to deal with excess calls while you find the full-time resources for your business.

When you need strategic investment

Investing in your business is always a risk, and you need to spend your money wisely if you’re going to see a good return.

When it comes to call answering, the ‘traditional’ investment has been in full-time or part-time receptionists.

But this is expensive, especially in today’s world when fewer businesses have a central office or are more open to the idea of having employees working remotely.

Unlike receptionists, with a telephone answering service you only pay for the service you use.

This makes it much more cost effective than a full-time member of staff, meaning you’ll have more to invest in other areas of your business.

When you’re working at capacity

When you or your employees are stretched, dealing with phone calls can seem like more of an inconvenience than a chance to help a customer or secure inbound leads.

If you’re giving the impression over the phone that the caller is an annoyance, your business will suffer.

And your employees will only get more stretched, stressed and overworked if they’re spending more time dealing with calls.

It’s not just the time taken away dealing with the calls either.

According to one study, it takes the average person 23 minutes to refocus after being distracted from what they were doing.

So it only takes a couple of calls during the day to take up a significant amount of your employees’ time.

Rather than using your employees, and taking their time away by asking them to answer the phone, a call answering service can free up their time and ensure the only calls they have to deal with are urgent ones.

When you need specialised business services

While there are many more ways customers can contact your business nowadays, dealing with phone calls professionally remains as important as ever.

When customers have specific enquiries or need help, they still prefer to get in touch over the phone.

For your business, when employees are rushed and trying to complete their work, it can be easy to forget to take certain details in messages, to leave the phone ringing for long periods, or to simply not pick it up.

Bringing in a specialised call answering service solves all these problems.

You’ll never need to worry about an incoming call so you’ll always be available for customers and new business.

And for your employees they’ll always get detailed messages and the information they need to return calls properly – which for your customer service can make all the difference.

If you need a scalable service for a specific period

All businesses go through busy and quiet periods.

Whether it’s seasonal peaks, or simply raised demand during s product launch or sale – there’ll be times when you need additional resources in the long-term but with the flexibility to scale it up or down.

You can’t achieve this with internal hires – your business will go through periods of high employee turnover which can be damaging for service and morale.

Instead, a flexible telephone answering service could provide you with additional phone answering support during your busy periods, which can then be scaled down later.

Get specialised outsourced telephone answering with Face For Business

If you need telephone answering services for your business, then contact us at Face For Business.

Our specialised virtual receptionists can handle all your incoming calls, as well as add additional services like diary management, meeting booking and online chat.

We’ve worked with thousands of businesses across different industries so we can provide a reliable service that can help improve your customer service, and free up your business’ time and resources.

If you’re not convinced telephone answering will work in your business, take advantage of our free trial to see how the service works for you – with no obligation to continue at the end of your trial period.

Get in touch for more information.