Does Your Phone System Need a Welcome Greeting?

 

Welcome greetings are a pretty standard feature used by businesses to make a good first impression on their callers. It’s the perfect way to accomplish that, but it doesn’t mean that you should automatically and always use one. There are a few reasons why you may want to skip the welcome greeting altogether.

 

Speed of Service

When it comes to serving customers, we know that every aspect of their experience counts towards sending them away happy, including one of the customer’s most valued qualities, which we know as speed of service.

Doing away with the welcome greeting helps you to give them that speed because instead of adding a delay, albeit a small one, you let the customer go straight through to what they called for in the first place—a friendly voice on the other end of the line.

 

We Tend to Be Verbose

Using a welcome greeting is definitely not a negative thing, but you do have to make a greeting that’s appropriate. One thing that is guaranteed to drive your callers nuts is a long-winded greeting that plays for a full minute before it even starts to ring.

There is usually no need to say anything more than, “Thank you for calling [your business]. A representative will be with you in a moment,” or something to that effect, depending on how you are routing your calls.

 

Callers Won’t Mind If the Greeting is Missing

In fact, they probably won’t miss it at all. A lot of business owners see it as being rude to the caller if there isn’t some kind of greeting when they call in.

There is certainly merit to that belief, but the truth is that a customer calling into your business wants to get something done or obtain information. You can trust the fact that they will be perfectly happy if they immediately hear your phone ringing.

 

 

As always, this isn’t a hard-and-fast rule. It obviously depends on what type of business you’re running and how your phone system is set up. The point is that people who are calling in are eager to speak with you so that they can get what they need, even if that means bypassing a proper greeting.