Call Answering for business. Would it work for your business?  You’d expect us to say yes, of course, and you’d be right! However, allow us to explain just why ‘yes’ is our answer.

In June 2023, Paperclip celebrated its fifteenth anniversary. Over those fifteen years, Paperclip has provided call-answering services to virtually every type of organisation one can imagine. I have come to realise that, contrary to my blinkered view when I first set up Paperclip in 2008, call answering has the potential to benefit each and every organisation, regardless of size, the service or product it provides, whether it is privately or publicly owned and so on.

This article uses examples from Paperclip’s current family of call-answering clients to illustrate the sheer diversity of the organisations we support and the call answering services we provide. I also address some of the reasons given by organisations as to why they believe call answering is not for them, and why I believe they are probably wrong!

Could call answering for business – Different customer types

During a recent Paperclip customer service meeting, we categorised the many different types of organisations for which we provide call answering services. In total, we identified over 70 distinctive organisation types. That is, organisations providing clearly differentiated products, services and support.

We then pooled the different organisation types by sector. The most significant sectors in terms of client numbers, in no particular order, were:

• Law firms and associated legal services
• Property, including estate agents and letting agents
• Private medical professionals such as physiotherapists, podiatrists and osteopaths
• Financial including accountancy practices, mortgage advisors and other financial service providers
• IT and telephony supply and support
• The trades, including plumbers/central heating, electricians and building maintenance
• Franchises
• Not-for-profits, including charities, chambers of commerce and local authorities

Even after this segmentation, there remained fifty different organisation types.

Services provided for different business types

One of the challenges the call answering industry faces is the terminology it uses. In this article, for example, I have used call answering for business as an umbrella term for services as varied as appointment management (private medical practices), issuing service tickets (IT and telephony support) and arranging viewings (estate agents). The common feature for all the services outlined in this article is that they start with the Paperclip team answering a telephone call on behalf of a client.

To retain structure, I have given examples of different services provided for the sector groups defined in the previous section.

Law firms (Legal)

In some cases Paperclip provides full reception desk services (i.e. all calls are directed to Paperclip and are triaged accordingly), or answers calls after an agreed period of time (e.g. ten seconds) because the members of the in-house reception team are busy.

As a previous article argued, answering calls for law firms is a demanding and specialist service. Many calls are time critical – e.g. child custody, calls from prison – and all calls must be dealt with promptly and professionally. In most cases, each lawyer within a law firm client will stipulate how they want their calls to be handled i.e. put straight through, transferred to a legal secretary, message taken etc. These instructions will often be hierarchical i.e. Start with action A, if that cannot be completed move to Action B and so on.

The point I am trying to make here is that Paperclip’s call answering team is able to provide professional and tailored call answering services to organisations operating in pressurised and complex scenarios.

Estate agents (Property)

Estate agents provide an example of how Paperclip’s call answering team can add value to a call. Estate agent clients tend to use one of several estate agency management software packages such as street.co.uk, Alto and Domus. When answering a call, the Paperclip call handler can update the software whilst they are on the call.

Depending on the business model of the particular estate agent client, the Paperclip team records offers, books valuation visits for agents, organises individual and group viewings and more. As with many sectors, the aim should be to free up qualified staff time so they can concentrate on those activities that add real value.

Physiotherapists (Medical)

A large proportion of calls to physiotherapy clients relate to appointments; making them, rearranging them, cancelling them.

There are a large number of medical practice management software packages used by medical therapists such as Cliniko, TM3 and Jane. Each of these packages has an appointments module. The Paperclip call handler accesses the module whilst they are speaking to a physiotherapy client’s patient and is able to handle the appointment request accordingly. This is not as straightforward as it sounds as each practice may have different instructions depending on the category into which the patient falls. For example, many practices have extended appointments for first-time diagnosis visits.

Mortgage Advisor (Financial)

One of the key drivers behind using call answering for business is to ensure every call is answered and no sales opportunities are missed. For certain clients, Paperclip is able to add value by capturing information during the call that can make the follow-up call more effective.

For example, for a lifetime mortgage (equity release) client we make a note of the address of the property in question, clarify if there is any outstanding mortgage, identify the property on Google Maps and capture an image. This data, and more, is passed on to the advisor who can be far more effective when he speaks to the prospect.

IT Support (IT/Telephony)

If you are like me, I find IT problems incredibly frustrating. This frustration can only be compounded if, when contacting your IT Support provider, you are unable to get through!

For several of its IT Support clients, Paperclip issues IT help desk tickets. The caller knows their problem is ‘in the system’ and the ticket is proof of that fact. A problem shared is truly a problem halved. Call answering for business is excellent in this type of customer service scenario across all types of organisations.

Central Heating (Trades)

Paperclip’s trades clients range from sole traders through to regional organisations with multiple vans on the road. As with many sectors, the trades often rely on specialist job management software packages such as ServiceM8, Simpro and Tradify.

A key benefit of call answering for business, is that it minimises the disruption that answering the phone can cause. In many trades scenarios, answering a call is not only disruptive, it can be downright dangerous.

For one central heating client, we have access to their price list for standard activities, such as servicing a boiler. We can therefore answer the householder’s call, advise them of the cost, and then book the service without any need to disturb the trades person.

Franchises

The different franchise operations supported by Paperclip cut across several sectors. Their inclusion as a separate business segment in this list is principally down to Paperclip’s longstanding involvement with this form of business model.

The call answering services provided to franchises by Paperclip are typically dictated by the philosophy of the franchisor and the maturity of the franchise. Some, particularly during start-up, prefer all calls to come through Paperclip so activity can be recorded and measured centrally.

Other franchisors are happy to offer Paperclip’s services to franchisees as an ‘optional extra’. In many cases the franchisee is actively delivering the service being offered and welcomes Paperclip handling calls and enquiries. Although not the subject of this article, Paperclip provides admin support services for many of its franchise clients.

Village Hall (Not-for-Profits)

An area in which call answering can provide particularly strong benefits is the not-for-profit sector. This could cover answering calls on behalf of local authority departments (we all know how hard they are to reach when we need them!), charities, chambers of commerce and more.

Paperclip provides reception desk services for a local parish hall owned and operated by the parish council. The hall is incredibly busy with numerous groups looking to hire it for a variety of activities. By holding the diary centrally, and ensuring all calls are answered by the Paperclip team, the council has greatly improved the usage of an important local amenity.

If call answering services are so good for all types and sizes of organisation, why don’t more organisations take advantage of them?

It’s a good question, and one that I discussed at length in a previous article. Firstly, whilst this article has focussed on variety of customer and segmentation, all Paperclip customers share at least one common characteristic; they all genuinely believe in customer service and have bought into the customer service benefits delivered by call answering.

As I read in an article recently, if your organisation actively promotes its phone number via its website, brochure and social media you are encouraging prospects to call it. Surely, therefore, it is incumbent on the organisation to complete the loop by answering calls. To move outside business-speak for a minute, surely it is also a simple common decency!

Here are some of the most common reasons for not considering call answering:

We don’t get many calls

The important question is not how many calls are received, but how many calls are missed. Organisations that receive few calls are, paradoxically, often the worst culprits when it comes to not answering them.

In many cases, this is because the call volume is insufficient to warrant a dedicated reception resource. This makes call answering everyone’s responsibility and, as we all know, when something is everyone’s responsibility it tends to fall between the cracks.

Our calls are too technical or too complex

By definition, Paperclip’s call handlers cannot be experts in the products and services of over 70 different organisation types; we don’t claim to be. However, we can answer FAQs, and we can direct calls to the most appropriate resource – just as one would expect from an in-house reception desk.

Paperclip has handled calls for many manufacturing companies in sectors ranging from heavy engineering through to hi-tech electronics. Our role is not to be a foundryman or electronics engineer. It is to capture that call and ensure that by doing so we avoid creating a customer for the competition.

We have our own receptionists

Paperclip recognises the skills and service provided by dedicated reception staff. Many of our larger clients, particularly those with multiple offices, have well-trained, well-resourced and experienced reception staff. However, they also recognise that, however well resourced, at peak times calls will be missed. The number of calls missed will fluctuate depending on the time of day, illness, holidays, resignations and any other number of variables.

In such cases, Paperclip’s role is to act as the ‘shock absorber’, capturing calls that would otherwise be missed.

We offer a voicemail option

I’m not sure this has ever been a valid reason for not considering call answering but, if it ever was, it stopped being so about the time Paperclip started out in 2008.

Callers don’t like leaving voicemail messages and they don’t trust the recipient to respond to it. Organisations are poor at managing voicemails and often fail to respond in a timely manner, if at all. Furthermore, it can often take multiple calls before contact is re-established with the leaver of the message i.e. voicemail is a work creation scheme.

Just to hammer home the point, nobody aged 35 or under has left a voicemail, other than for their grandparents, in the last 15 years.

Conclusion

There are grounds for all organisations that truly value customer service to seriously consider the role call answering for business can play in improving the prospect and customer journey. Paperclip’s experience is that the benefits that accrue from call answering are sector-agnostic i.e. they are open to all organisations.

In turn, it is the challenge for Paperclip, and the call answering sector in general, to do a better job in conveying the range and scope of services covered by the term ‘call answering’.

If you believe your organisation could benefit from professional, tailored and affordable call answering services then please call me on 01246 418181. I am happy to discuss the opportunities and challenges you wish to address and to see how Paperclip can help.

You may also like

• How a good estate agent stands out from the crowd
• What makes a good estate agency?
• Why call answering and call management for law firms is a specialist service
• The benefits of an ‘outsourced switchboard’ for law firms

The post Could call answering work for your business? appeared first on Paperclip.