NEVER ASK A CLIENT TO “PRESS 1” AGAIN
We have all had the frustrating experience of calling a business or professional only to find ourselves being directed to press various buttons leading to various menus with more buttons and then, often finding the end result to be voice mail. If your customer or client has no other option, they will wade through the morass of the directory system, but if given a choice, they may hang up and call someone else.
At a typical “answering service”, a live person will answer your call, however, they are not really trained to know about your business. They are one of perhaps hundreds if not thousands of people working for that answering service, and they will, at best, take a message for you but are not able to contact you, screen the call, announce the call to you, or follow your directive as to whether you want to take the call or wish to have it placed into voicemail.
Moreover, often the people manning the phones at a typical answering service are actually bothered that whatever they are doing is disrupted by having to answer your phone call. This can result in them answering in a brusque, short, bored, annoyed or unfriendly way. And with some answering services you are not assured that your phone will be answered by someone whose native language is English.
Or, take the case of a plumber who is under the sink fixing a leaky pipe. If he is constantly coming out from under the sink to answer the phone, he is never going to get that job done. On the other hand, if someone has an emergency and is unable to reach this plumber, he or she is not going to leave a message and wait for the plumber to call them back. They will simply go to the next name in the yellow pages resulting in a loss of business for our plumber.
All of these scenarios can be avoided by using the Intelligent Office of Melville’s “Intelligent Assistant” communication packages.
At Intelligent Office, our Intelligent Assistants are part of your team. They are trained by you with respect to what you want them to say, and how much information you want them to give. When your client or customer calls your business number, they will hear our live receptionist answer in whatever way you have directed them to. The Intelligent Assistant will then:
- screen the call
- contact you at the offsite number you provide
- have a conversation with you regarding who is on the phone/the subject of the call
If you request that the call be put through to you, it will be seamlessly done as if your receptionist is sitting 50 feet away from you in your own office, even though you may be anywhere.
If you do not wish to take it, a message can be delivered back to the caller and/or the caller can be placed into your private voicemail box. If that happens you will almost immediately receive that voicemail as a .WAV file sent to your email account, whether you receive your emails on your smart phone or computer.
Your Intelligent Assistant can also perform your scheduling, take orders, do intake interviews, or almost anything else that a typical receptionist would do. If you have regular people calling you on a regular basis, your Intelligent Assistant will get to know your primary contacts and really work as a part of your team as opposed to being what is clearly an outside vendor retained to field your calls.
After hours, your calls would be automatically sent to your private voice mail box, which would then be sent to your email address through a .WAV file so that you have instant, 24 hour per day, 7 days per week, 365 days per year access to your voicemail, without having to dial in to a particular number and remember a set of pass codes.
The most important advantage of The Intelligent Office of Melville’s Intelligent Assistant communication programs is that although you have the value of a full-time receptionist, you do not have to pay for a full-time receptionist. In essence, we can help any business by reducing its overhead because they will have a full time team of receptionists without having to pay any one person a full time paycheck with benefits, regardless of whether that person is actually answering calls all day. Moreover, we can help the person who has been answering his or her own phone suddenly have a receptionist, who they pay for only when they get their calls.
We help keep your callers out of a voicemail system unless you direct it, we help you avoid having to answer your own phone calls and/or miss opportunities if you can’t answer the call, and we also help you break the cycle of hire, train, fire, repeat, or hire, train, replace, repeat.
Intelligent, isn’t it?
