How an Answering Service Can Help Your Small Business Grow

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How an Answering Service Can Help Your Small Business Grow

Small businesses across the globe have been using answering services for decades. Using an answering service can help your small business grow in a whole host of ways.

An answering service is a useful tool for many small businesses as it fulfils an essential role within a business, at a fraction of the cost required to hire someone in-house.

These are some of the main ways in which an answering service can encourage business growth.

Financially

As a small business, lack of hands and cash can often be a problem. Your small business may be desperate for a receptionist to handle calls but simply not be in a financial position to take someone else on board.

This is where an answering service comes in. An answering service fulfils the function of a receptionist without the financial commitment of taking on an employee, leaving your business with more time and cash to invest in business growth.

Customer Service

Your businesses customer service levels will see a drastic improvement when using an answering or call handling service. Great customer service is of course a huge factor in helping small businesses to grow. Whilst utilising an answering service you will never miss a call during office hours, and out of hours, customers can leave a message in your dedicated voicemail box.

In what can typically be the first point of contact with new and potential customers, you want to make a good impression. A huge bonus to a virtual receptionist is that they come ready trained in telephone manner and customer service, our team will get to know your business and speak to your callers as if they are in-house members of your team.

The Illusion of Size

A receptionist answering incoming calls can make your business appear bigger than it is, especially when combined with one of our virtual office packages. The virtual office packages offer an address for your business so it appears your business has a, or even an additional, physical location.

For smaller and start-up companies this can really help when competing with larger more established companies.

Time and Productivity

A virtual receptionist or answering service can drastically increase your own, and your teams productivity, and free up a huge amount of time day to day.

Phone calls can be a huge disruption and distraction in a work environment. Whilst it is important to take and respond to calls, not all calls are a priority. A virtual receptionist can filter out cold calls and make a note of or forward the calls that matter.

If you are too busy to take calls either because you are travelling, in a meeting or working on an important task, your answering service can pick up the calls and take detailed messages on your behalf. You can choose to divert calls when you don’t want to be disturbed, and prioritise calls in order of importance to you, all whilst maintaining a warm, customer service friendly, personal approach.

 

Telephone Answering Services for Small Businesses

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Telephone Answering Services for Small Businesses

There is an increasing demand for telephone answering services for small businesses and sole traders. This is down to the rapidly growing numbers of people choosing to work for themselves rather than for a large business.

However, the cost of hiring your own office space and fitting it out with all the telecommunications equipment needed, as well as hiring the staff to man your office, can be seriously prohibitive. Instead, it can work out to be far more cost-effective to forgo a traditional bricks and mortar office and hire a professional telephone answering service to handle your incoming business calls for you.

For example, at The Answer Centre, our clients come from lots of different backgrounds, but all want the same thing – to be able to have their business calls answered quickly and professionally by a highly trained virtual receptionist.

In fact, all of the services on offer from The Answer Centre are perfectly crafted for the busy entrepreneur, sole trader or small business owner. We offer you a top-rated telephone answering service with a fully personalised virtual receptionist, along with business address and mail forwarding services and smart state-of-the-art meeting rooms that you can hire by the hour.

 

Professional Image

We understand how important it is for your small business to create the right first impression with your existing clients as well as to prospective new customers. This is why you can impress your callers with our professional telephone answering service. Their call will be answered by a trained virtual receptionist from our small and friendly team.

You can use our answering services for when you are unavailable to take calls yourself, for example when you are in an important meeting or driving between appointments where it would be impractical to take phone calls. You may prefer us to handle all of your incoming business calls to create the impression that you have an established head office in a prestigious location. It is up to you when and how often you would like to use our flexible call answering services.

 

How our call answering services work

When a caller rings your number, their call will pass to your virtual receptionist. Their call will be answered in a friendly and professional manner using your preferred greeting. The call can then be passed to you or one of your colleagues on a specified number. If you are unavailable, a message can be taken and will be forwarded on to you immediately either by email or via text message.

We will know when an incoming call is for your business because we will issue you with a unique telephone number for your clients and customers to use. When your number is called, your receptionist will see a screen notification and will answer the call with your company greeting. The caller will think they are speaking to your own personal company receptionist!

Why not try out our phone answering services for yourself – free of charge! We can offer you a two-week free trial of our service so you can see for yourself how valuable and cost-effective our phone answering services are.

 

 

 

Telephone Answering Service MD discusses Brexit effect

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Companies use a Telephone Answering Service for a variety of reasons, ranging from the fact that it is much more cost effective that employing a full time receptionist to the need to ensure that the right impression is created every time a call is answered .

However, recent activity in the office services market has highlighted other reasons why companies are currently favouring the use of a Telephone Answering Service as their preferred choice for reception cover. With Theresa May having recently triggered Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty at the end of March 2017, many businesses are postponing staff recruitment and similarly do not want to commit to long term office rental agreements. This is where Telephone Answering Services are providing a convenient flexible alternative to the recruitment of permanent admin staff.

Andy Gillen is Managing Director at The Answer Centre and he is noticing an upturn in demand for Telephone Answering Services ahead of Brexit. Since the decision was taken to exit the EU in June of last year we are finding that more and more businesses are choosing to postpone staff recruitment and our service gives them the flexibility that they need in a time of uncertainty. We have been enjoying high levels of growth in recent months and there is no doubt that Brexit has been a factor in driving demand within our sector! he said.

If you are considering using a Telephone Answering Service, or a Virtual Office then please contact The Answer Centre on 0800 093 7333

Telephone Answering Service demand continues to grow

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When The Answer Centre opened for business on 1st June 2000, the Telephone Answering Service was still a relatively new type of service. We would contact a prospective user of the service and they would be both surprised and amazed that we could actually answer their calls in their company name and put calls through to them. Most prospective users of the service would say ‘I didn’t even know that services like this existed’. But of course the Telephone Answering Service sector has grown massively since then and advances in technology and telecoms mean that the possibilities are now endless in terms of the type of services that we can now offer.

From simply answering calls and taking a brief message we can now offer a fully comprehensive Virtual Office service including Telephone Answering Services, a Business Address Service and also Meeting Room Hire.

For more information on how we can help to support your business please give us a call. You can call FREE on 0800 093 7333.

Virtual Office Address Service is a winner for Small Businesses

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Our Virtual Office Address service has turned out to be our top selling service during the first quarter of this year here at The Answer Centre. As small businesses continue to be cautious with their spending in the current downturn, they are continually looking for products and services that will offer them maximum value for money.

And our Virtual Office Address service certainly ticks that box. At only £35 per month for a prestigious business mailing address it is undoubtedly great value for money.

Office Manager Jane Gardner at The Answer Centre’s Wokingham office recently reported that demand for the Virtual Office Address service had even outstripped demand for our core telephone answering service during the first quarter of the year:

“Here at The Answer Centre our core business has traditionally been to provide our customers with a high quality telephone answering service where we answer calls in their company name and provide first class outsourced reception services.

However in the first few months of this year we actually had slightly more new clients signing up for our virtual office service than our call answering service. We think that this is due to the fact that the service is so competitively priced, but it is also partly due to the fact that we actually own our own office buildings and they have impressive reception areas which are all maintained to a very high standard.

Our customers love the fact that if they are going to arrange to meet a client or a prospective new client at our premises then they will be meeting in a prestigious environment and they will be greeted by one of our own receptionists who is trained to be both friendly and professional to all visitors.”

For further information on the Virtual Office Address services offered at The Answer Centre you can call us free on 0800 093 7333.

Virtual Office Service in Edinburgh points to recovery hopes

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The Answer Centre has recently reported a significant increase in demand for it’s virtual office service in Edinburgh.

As Scotland’s capital city and as home to the Scottish parliament and many other offices of state, many businesses looking to set up a business presence north of the border look to Edinburgh as their city of choice.

However The Answer Centre is now noticing that many of the businesses looking to use it’s virtual office service in Edinburgh are doing so because they themselves are expanding and they are seeing an increase in demand for their own products and services. This is yet another sign that the economy is starting to recover as businesses show more confidence and an appetite for expansion.

Using a virtual office service is an extremely cost effective way to get a new office location up and running as quickly as possible. At The Answer Centre you get a city centre address with an impressive EH1 mailing address and access to our Pay As You Go telephone answering service for as little as £35 per month. There are also high quality meeting rooms available to hire by the hour with videoconferencing and free wifi included within the hourly rate of £25 per hour.

One of our new clients recently said “We already have a virtual office in London and a virtual office in Birmingham so when we decided to open a virtual office in Edinburgh The Answer Centre ticked all the boxes. All of the reception staff are extremely helpful and friendly and they provide a highly professional image for our company when we arrange to meet clients there. When we combine the telephone answering service with the business address service and the use of meeting rooms there really is no need to consider renting physical office space in Edinburgh”.

If you are considering opening a virtual office in Edinburgh or if you only require a telephone answering service or a business address service then please do contact us by calling us for Free on 0800 093 7333.

Call Answering Service for IT Consultants

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It is a well known fact that most freelence IT consultants are also budding entrepreneurs and strive to run their own business one day. No one knows this better than The Answer Centre’s MD Andy Gillen who started his career a number of years ago as a freelence IT consultant. Although Andy generally worked at one main clients’ office most of the time he was also building his own IT consultancy business and trying to expand his client base. It was during this period that Andy discovered that the use of a call answering service was an essential service to support the development of his business.

Andy comments: “While I was working at my main clients’ site, I would generally be located in an open plan office environment so it was extremely difficult to take calls and in particular new business enquiries while I was simultaneously charging my main client for my time on an hourly basis.

So I decided to utilise the services of a small personalised call answering service which meant that my calls were answered in my company name and gave the caller the impression that I was a well established IT consultancy with my own receptionist.

Messages were sent through to me by email so I could easily pick up my messages while at the same time developing and coding systems for my main client. This was an ideal set up and allowed me to then pop out of the office at a convenient time to make a call and follow up on the enquiry.

I had a number of colleagues who were in a similar position and it became very clear that there was a real demand for a call answering service for IT Consultants in a similar position to myself”.

The Answer Centre opened for business on 1st June 2000 and as well as providing a call answering service for IT Consultants we now answer calls for businesses of all types.

To find out more about the Call Answering Services and Virtual Office Services provided by The Answer Centre you can call us Free on 0800 093 7333.

 

Telephone Answering Service for Small Businesses

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Demand for a professional telephone answering service for small businesses has continued to grow in the first two months of 2013. The Answer Centre has revealed that small businesses are increasingly discovering that there is a considerable cost saving available to them by using the services of a dedicated call answering service.

The alternative option of employing their own receptionist to answer their calls is proving to be more expensive and time consuming to manage for small businesses.

The Answer Centre specialises in providing a Telephone Answering Service for Small Businesses and has found that enquiry levels for their service has increased by in excess of 8% throughout the period from the start of the year to the end of February 2013.

Office Manager Sarah Brown commented:

“We do normally find January and February to be relatively busy months with a significant number of new clients coming on board to use our service.

This is mainly due to the fact that a number of small businesses wait until the new year to launch a new business venture or a new service. But notwithstanding this we have noticed that our enquiry levels this year are up by more than 8% for the same period in 2012.

We believe that this is largely due to the fact that we are continuing to operate in difficult economic conditions and small businesses are increasingly aware of the cost savings that our service brings to their business”

To find put more about the call answering service offered by The Answer Centre please call us FREE on 0800 093 7333.

Call Answering Service for Accountants Special Offer proves popular.

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Our January special offer of additional savings on our call answering service for Accountants has proved very popular here at The Answer Centre.

During the month of January any accountancy business signing up for our Pay As You Go call answering service received a discount of 50% on their first service invoice.

Several accountancy firms decided to take up the offer and initial feedback has been very positive.

The proprietor of one of those firms who runs her own accountancy business in Birmingham took advantage of the offer and commented:

“To be completely honest I was already considering using a call answering service, so when The Answer Centre contacted me at the start of the year with details of their discount offer on their call answering service for accountants it was perfect timing! January is a very busy month for most accountants as we need to meet the 31st January HMRC deadline for submitting tax returns so it is extremely helpful to have a professional call answering service like The Answer Centre pick up my calls and takes messages. This frees me up and allows me to work uninterrupted in the knowledge that if something really important does crop up I will receive a message from my Virtual Assistant”.

“The other thing that has surprised me is that since starting to use The Answer Centre’s call answering service, many of my existing clients have started to view my business in a different light. One client asked if I was expanding as I now had my own dedicated receptionist while another remarked at how professional and friendly my new receptionist sounded!”

To find put more about the call answering services offered by The Answer Centre please call us FREE on 0800 093 7333.

Telephone Answering Services Can Help Small Businesses to Grow Faster

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Telephone answering services are playing a bigger part than ever before in helping small businesses to grow in the early stages of development.

Research has now shown that when a small business is in the early stages of growth, missing inbound calls can have a detrimental effect on the growth of the business.

Small businesses with up to two or three members of staff cannot normally justify having an employee dedicated to answering incoming telephone calls, which means that new business enquiries will inevitably get lost.

By employing the services of a Telephone Answering Service provider such as The Answer Centre a small business can ensure that new sales enquiries are not missed, thus ensuring that the business will grow at the optimum rate. Having access to a Virtual Assistant or Virtual PA to answer your calls means that as a small business owner you can get on with building your business without worrying about missed calls.

Additional benefits of using such a call answering service include the fact that when calls are received they are always handled consistently and professionally thus creating a good first impression to callers. How often do you call a small business and hear a voicemail greeting before hanging up and calling the next supplier in the list?

To find out more about the Telephone Answering Services and virtual office services provided by The Answer Centre you can call us Free on 0800 093 7333.