With 75% of customers annoyed when they cannot contact a real person, you can guess how they feel about not even getting through at all. Missed calls are the bane of any small business, and it is important to reduce them to as few as possible. So, how can you go about that while remaining professional and without overburdening yourself?

The following are a few solutions you can try. Each one has its own benefits, so make sure you find the one that best suits your needs.

Call Queueing

Nobody likes to be in a call queue, but sometimes it is the only way to handle a sudden influx of phone calls. If you are offering a discount, or some other time-sensitive benefit to customers, this can happen more often than otherwise.

Call queueing allows you to know how many people are waiting at any time and can also give you clarity on how popular you are. The downside, though, is it wastes customers’ time and often causes them to resent contacting you. This can often lead to them jumping to a competitor.

Call Forwarding

If people call outside of your opening times, they may still want to deal with a human. Leaving answering machine messages is not always good enough, especially if there is an emergency.

You could set up call forwarding to your cellphone and deal with the issue at any time of the day. The problem with this is that it does not leave you with any “downtime”, especially if many customers all have a similar issue at the same time. You might need to put any forwarded calls into an answering machine to deal with the problem after all.

Train Customer Service Staff

Instead of you dealing with the customers, you could hire and train staff to perform this role for you. While this gives you dedicated staff who can handle the issue, it will cost you not only wages but also time for hiring and onboarding. Not everyone has the budget, nor the capacity, to choose this option.

Hire a Professional Answering Service

A dedicated service can prevent missed business calls by being available at any time of the day. They can also scale to your needs, depending on the number of calls you get in a short space of time.

Any service you hire should also be able to use your own branding and company voice. This might even involve using a standardized greeting to help people know they called you.

Such services are often much cheaper than in-house staff and come pre-trained in professional call handling. Thus, you do need not to concern yourself with issues like training.

Avoid Missed Calls Forever

It is obvious that missed calls are one of the most troubling concepts for a small business. With these solutions, you now have several options available for how to move forward. Still, we want to help you get the best for your customers.

We provide call answering services to help you avoid missed calls at work and ensure your clients get the treatment and answers they need. So, give us a call today and learn more about how we can help you avoid lost calls in the future.