How Should A Telephone Answering Service Answer The Phone?
How to Answer the Phone Tips
- Answer all incoming phone calls after the second ring.
- Be warm, enthusiastic and polite when answering your phone. Often your voice on the phone is the only impression a caller gets from you.
- Welcome callers courteously when answering the phone, and immediately identify yourself and your organization.
- Speak clearly, keep your voice volume moderate, and speak slowly and clearly when answering your phone so your caller can easily understand you.
- When answering your phone, check your language. Do not use slang or buzzwords. Try to speak in a more professional manner. Instead of saying, “OK”, or “No problem”, for instance, say “Certainly”, “Very well”, or “All right”. If you’re a person who uses fillers when you speak, such as “uh huh”, “um”, or phrases such as “like” or “you know”, train yourself carefully not to use these when you speak on the phone. (Learn more about the speech problem of using fillers and how to solve the problem.)
- Train your voice and vocabulary to be optimistic, even on a “down” day, while answering by phone. A positive vocabulary is one which focuses on customer support. For example, rather than saying, “I don’t know”, you can say, “I’d be happy to help you. Let me find out about that for you.”
- Take phone calls completely and correctly when answering the phone. If there is something you don’t understand, or you can’t spell, like the surname of a person, ask the caller to repeat it or spell it for you. Instead, ensure that the message reaches the intended recipient.
- If people have had to leave messages for you, respond to all their phone calls within one business day. I can’t stress enough on this one. Remember the early bird? The early caller can get a deal, an offer, a solution to the problem… And reinforce the favorable impression that you want to circulate in your business. Few things annoy callers trying to reach your business more than unreturned calls.
- When answering the phone, please ask the caller if it’s okay to put her on hold, and don’t leave people on hold. Provide forward progress reports to callers on hold every 30 to 45 seconds. Offer them choices if possible, such as “That line is still busy. Will you continue to hold or should I have ________ call you back?”
- If absolutely necessary, do not use a Speaker Phone. Speaker phones give the caller the feeling that you don’t concentrate entirely on his call, and make him think his call isn’t private. The only reason you have to use a speaker phone is when you need more than one person to be in at the end of the conversation. Ask the caller if you can put them before you do it on the speaker phone.
- If you’re using voicemail or answering machine to respond to calls when you can’t, make sure you’ve sent a professional message, doing the same thing as tip #3, and give callers any other relevant information before capturing their messages. Update your message to voice mail as needed. For example, if you are going to close your business for a holiday, update your voicemail message to say so and say when your business will reopen.
- Train anyone else who is able to answer the phone in the same way, including other family members, if you are running a home business. Check if your business phone gets answered by calling in and seeing if the phone is answered professionally. If they don’t pass the test, go over this list of “how to answer the phone” with them to ensure everyone in your business knows how to respond properly to phone calls.
By Jeffreymendel Jeffrey Nash – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50308966
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