3 Ways to Make Sure You Never Miss a Voicemail

  We all make it a top priority to never miss a phone call, but it can be just as detrimental to miss a voicemail. If a voicemail gets overlooked or accidentally deleted, you never know what opportunity was lost with that message. That’s why you’ve got to have some protocol and sensible habits in place to make absolutely sure that you receive every message your customers leave for you.   1. Don’t Rely on Consumer Voicemail Services It’s pretty risky to only utilize the voice mailbox that comes with your cell phone, or the one that comes with any of your phones, for that matter. Your phone may malfunction and delete all of your messages for no apparent reason; the caller might get the dreaded, “mailbox is full” automated response—and there are a number of other things that can cause you to miss messages when using the internal voicemail …

What Makes Your Business Special? That’s Your Key

Think of all the businesses in the world as species of fish in an ocean, and then imagine all of the individual fish within each species. In the current corporate climate, there are more species and families than there have ever been before, filling the ocean with all kinds of colors and types of fish so that it is densely populated. Now imagine your customers as ocean divers who are each searching for the fish that they need. The only way that each diver can pick out the one they are looking for is to recognize a simple, crucial difference that sets it apart from all the other fish in the ocean. Yes, You Need a Differentiator If you’re not familiar with the concept already, then commit this to memory. It doesn’t even matter if you’re entering a completely saturated industry–you can do very, very well, but only if you’ve …

Starting Second Business

3 Questions to Ask Before Starting a Second Business

  When a business owner finds that they have a successful small business, they have a tendency to look beyond it and consider opening up another one. That can either turn out to be a massive triumph or a dismal failure; it depends on a variety of factors. The bottom line is that ambitious entrepreneurs should think very carefully about the decision to take a leap into adding another business.   Is it an Emotional Decision? There’s a good chance, when you decide to open another small business, that you don’t realize what your true motivation is for doing it. You will tell yourself that you’ve found another great business model, but it could very well be a subconscious, emotional response to the success of your first business. It behooves you to take a close look at what is motivating this decision because you may find that, rather than creative …

How to Create the Perfect Welcome Greeting

Some of the simplest and most common elements of your business’ phone system can be the most nuanced and difficult to make right. The welcome greeting is usually the first thing a caller will hear, making it a pretty important impression on calling customers. There are a few things to keep in mind when creating and setting this greeting. 1. Keep it Brief Depending on how the structure of your system is laid out, you may either have it set to ring your phones right away when someone dials your main business number, or to bring them to some kind of menu first. If routing calls to a menu, your “welcome” message may just be tacked onto the beginning of the main menu prompt which describes to the caller what number they need to press to be connected to the correct department—but even then, it should be brief. Your callers …

4 Ways You Can Mess Up Your Phone Tree

  Even though the whole idea behind a phone tree, or auto attendant, for your phone system is to simplify things and minimize errors, you can still mess it up before you even start using it; that is—when you set it up. This post will point out all of the common mistakes that people make when they’re setting up the phone tree for their phone system.   1. Too Many Options People just don’t want to stick it out if you have a ton of different menu selections, especially if their option ends up being the last one in the list. Try to keep your phone tree down to as few options to choose from as possible. If you have a situation where you need one option for each of your employees, and there are a lot of them, then it’s best to create an actual extension for them. Then, …

Don’t Let Adversity Throw You Off Your Game

  Maintaining a successful small business is fraught with battles every day, that threaten to compromise what you’ve worked so hard to build, and it is enough to injure your confidence or even make you feel as if you need to change course. It’s just resistance, otherwise known as adversity, and it’s important to remember that it is something you can overcome.   Put It In Perspective When you are trying to expand, for example, and your investors won’t part with any more dough, no matter how lucrative you propose it to be, that’s not the end of the story for your expansion. You can come up with a more convincing proposal, sell it to other investors, and at the very least, continue to be successful at your company’s current size & scope and expand it later on. That’s just one example, but the point is that you can’t let …

How the Auto Attendant Changed the Game

  Adding an auto attendant to your phone system gives you a great advantage over the typical system that simply rings your phones directly for a staff member to pick up your calls. For some organizations, sending calls directly to your phones works very well and suits the nature of the business; however, an auto attendant can, in many scenarios, save time for your employees and manage calls far more efficiently. An auto attendant has many names. You might call it a phone tree, IVR (Interactive Voice Response), or as we call it at Talkroute, a Call Menu. Whatever you call it, the auto attendant was a groundbreaking innovation that provides businesses with massive benefits. These are a few.   Block Spammers & Robo-Dialers One of the most common reasons that people want a service with an auto attendant is to use it as a first line of defense against …

Is Greater Technology Becoming a Distraction?

Do you ever get the feeling that you’re not operating at full capacity? It’s difficult to pin down what the reason for that is, and though there is sometimes an event or personal hardship that takes you down a notch, it usually happens gradually. You’re plugging along, putting out the daily fires, but you wake up one day and suddenly realize that you haven’t been getting as much done as you were before. There are a variety of things that may be holding you back, most of which are totally fixable. The Distracted Age More than ever, we all have to be aware of the many things that can distract us from our work these days, especially environmental and technological factors. We’re living in the Information Age, but we could well call it the Distracted Age. There are so many things that constantly vie for our attention, from political and …

Toll Free Numbers

Toll Free Numbers Make Your Business Seem Bigger

Obviously, a simple phone number isn’t going to grow your business in a literal sense, but a toll free number will give customers the impression that you have a larger reach. There is a reason that toll free numbers exist today, and it goes beyond the original purpose of advertising a phone number that people knew was not going to cost them anything if they dialed it. These numbers convey a very effective message, telling them that the business attached to it is a solid, established business with a broad reach. The Power of Association In the memory of most people, a toll free number is what they always saw attached to large companies, like the phone company or a big-box retail store, to name a couple. A toll free number has a certain feel that seems omni-regional, large-scale, national. It is a programmed psychological connection of which we can …

How to Be Calm When Dealing with Customers

Do your customers ever make you angry? It’s pretty much guaranteed that it will happen sometimes, which is why it’s imperative that you have a plan to manage it. Some CSRs have a talent for this, and some do not; so, if you’re not talented with the endless capacity for kindness, then this post will give you some tools not just to act the part of someone who is kind (which will come off as sarcastic and disingenuous, anyway), but to truly quell your anger when dealing with tough customers. Put Our Weapons Down It’s the solution to so many different problems, where it concerns people. When you put yourself in the position of the person with whom you’re speaking and try to see the situation through their eyes, it will disarm you most of the time. That’s when you can actually help them, which then makes them treat you …