RARE Business

I’ve heard people in organisations try and combat that by asking people to leave a message with a promise that they’ll get back to them in such and such amount of time. Sometimes they do but more often than not they don’t. I think that’s worse. It says so much about how important I am to you.

The fact is that we, as people and customers, much prefer to be answered by a human voice, even if it’s just to take a message.

People are more likely to wait for you to return their call if they think that someone, somewhere, is dealing with it.

Even if you are a small business, that does not necessarily mean employing someone and extra overheads, as these days if you’re too busy to answer the phone (or if you’re out of the office a lot and it’s impractical and inconvenient to have your mobile phone going off every few minutes) there is a solution. For a small amount every month, you can hire a tele-answering company. Some of these offer an excellent personalised service, answering with your company name and responding as if they’re there in the office with you: “I can’t see her at her desk at the moment…”. They will then forward the messages to you in the format of your choice – e-mail is popular.

In this world of increasing technological solutions (many of which I really like), I think we need to be careful that we don’t lose the human touch.

Are you relying on voicemail or call queueing in your business?

What impact is it having on your customer’s experience? Could you do something different to improve the experience?