Instructions to Give Your Call Answering Service
The ability to customize a call answering service is perhaps the greatest benefit they can provide. Instructions to give your call answering service can vary greatly depending on your type of business and personal preferences. It’s probably fair to say that every user of a call answering service wants things done a slightly different way.
Instructions to give your call answering service might include:
- Priority: This is perhaps the cornerstone of instructions to give your call answering service. After all, a large portion of their job is, bluntly, to prevent low-priority callers from wasting your time. With a call answering service, you have total control over who gets to talk to you and when. Everyone’s priorities will be different. You can tell your service precisely who may always be transferred to you immediately and who you’d like them to take a message from at all times. You could then say, “unless …” and fill in the blank with conditions that would warrant these people being put directly through to you. Callers who are unknown will be required to tell your call answering service the reason for their call, and you can then decide whether to talk to them or transfer them to voicemail. Priority instructions to give your call answering service can be as complex as you wish. After all, this is precisely what you’re paying for.
- Time of Day Restrictions: Instructions to give your call answering service can also include how to treat callers based on the time of day. You might set aside a couple hours in the afternoon to deal with low priority callers. You might say that you are not to be disturbed except in a dire emergency between certain hours. You could quickly notify your call answering service that you’re headed to lunch and only the people on your always-talk list should be forwarded to your cell phone. There are any number of time-based schemes you could use to maximize your productivity every day.
- Message Delivery: One of the biggest time savers provided by a call answering service is the fact that your messages can be delivered to you in a number of ways. Instructions to give your call answering service might include that your overnight messages be transcribed and faxed to your home so you can easily skim through them over breakfast. More than likely, you’re not going to want to hear your messages In the order they were received. You can ask the operator to deliver your messages in any order you wish: those from certain numbers first, those from potential new clients only, those from your oldest clients first, etc.. As far as instructions to give your call answering service regarding message delivery, the sky’s the limit.
