Most People Just Won’t Bother Leaving Voicemail Messages

This exact situation happens to almost all of us on a semi-regular basis. If we’re feeling patient, or if their website or voicemail message was super compelling, we MIGHT leave a message. But oftentimes we just won’t bother, and will instead just call the next business instead.

Have you ever experienced this? I think it happens to all of us. But how about your business? Are you (and your staff) able to answer ALL calls? Or almost all calls? Or do you have frantic days we’re you’re already tied up on another call, out of the office, out on a job, away from your desk or otherwise unavailable? I believe this is a challenge that all businesses deal with. But like many things in business, it’s how you deal with it that makes all the difference.

3 Practical Strategies to Help you Deal with Missed Calls

1. Make use of an Australian ‘live answering’ service

Imagine the peace of mind you’d have knowing that all your calls are being answered 24/7 365 days a year. How does it work? You can easily setup your phone to divert to live answering when you (or your staff) are busy or not answering (for example after 3-5 rings). With live answering, your call will be promptly answered by an Australian operator along the following lines:

You’ll receive a text message and email with the person’s contact details as soon as the call ends, so you’re able to follow them up asap (rather than just ‘giving away’ the business to your competition).

Think about how much it would cost you to employ reception staff to attend to your phones 24/7 X 365. A good call answering service will cost you only a tiny, tiny fraction of that, and is likely to pay for itself over and over, while also giving you peace of mind that your marketing efforts are not just being wasted. We can recommend a service provider we’ve had good experiences with. They have plans starting from only ~$39. Feel free to take a look here, give them a go, and see what you think!

2. If you’re not able to take incoming calls, is there another member of staff you can count on and redirect your phone to?

While option one above tends to be the easiest and most practical option for many businesses, if you’re not ready for that, if possible, why not make another staff member responsible for handling incoming calls when you’re not able to. If possible, automatically redirecting your phone when you’re not answering is often a good idea, or if you’re taking the afternoon off, perhaps just get them to look after your phone?

Here’s a basic example that you can adapt or add to as needed:

Thank you for calling ABC Business (optional business description: e.g. Area Name’s award winning XYZ provider with more than X years experience). We’re really sorry we couldn’t take your call right this minute. We typically follow up within 20 minutes during business hours, so please be sure to leave your details, so we can follow up without delay. Thank you, and talk soon.

I know I’d be much more likely to leave a voicemail message when presented with the above, compared with the generic ‘We’re not available right now. Please leave a message after the tone”. How about you?

In summary:

Sales are the lifeblood of any business. Missed calls = missed business, so make sure you’re not ‘that business’ that has awesome marketing, but then misses out because your phones aren’t answered.

There are a number of affordable (and free) solutions to deal with this challenge (we listed three above). Why not take a minute and put a plan in place for your business and find out for yourself what happens when you never miss another phone enquiry.

But what about the business sector? Businesses need fax machines right? For legal documents, paperwork and so on. As much as we’ve been itching to ditch our fax line, for more than a decade we’ve taken that view. And for much of it, it’s been true. As a business, we’d receive multiple faxes each week from clients with various documents, forms and so on. But that’s just not true anymore.

For some time now, we’ve noticed the number of genuine faxes we receive falling off a cliff, and the number of spam faxes we receive increasing. We’ve held off for a long time, but it’s 2019 and we think it’s time to say farewell to the fax.

We ran the numbers and in more than 2 years, we’ve received only 2 legitimate faxes. That’s an average of 1 fax a year! And very close to zero in the next year we estimate, hardly worth the expense of maintaining a functioning fax system.