One of the most difficult parts of being a small business owner is keeping the business healthy and growing while not letting it overtake your personal life. The most effective way of keeping that balance between work and personal life can be accomplished with the help of an after-hours call service.
Having an after-hours call service is about more than having a live call center agent answer your customers’ calls. It requires a reasonable amount of forethought from the business owner based on customers’/clients’ needs. Although the division of small businesses into service and product providers may seem a little simplistic, it covers the broadest range of possibilities for small businesses in designing after-hours protocols.
For service providers, ensuring that personal time away from work is as fulfilling and uninterrupted as possible starts with creating profiles of the most common customer needs and emergencies. This will inform the scripting for the answering service as well as the protocol for reaching the boss or designated staff person best equipped to handle a given emergency.
The nature of the customer call will dictate whether a customer should be directed to the business owner, voicemail, or another employee. You can provide the call service with information on either how to directly contact the person designated to handling a given problem or how to leave that person a voice message or alert. Having this type of system in place enables business owners to plan their free time around family and activities of their choosing while knowing that customers are being well serviced.
When it comes to small businesses that sell products, an after-hours call service can be set up to handle order fulfillment and answer product questions among other services. Since all calls and orders are logged, the business owner can set aside time each morning to listen to all of the evenings calls and review orders online. This enables them to ensure that the order and answer protocols are working as intended or to see where changes need to be made to address new customer developments or inventory changes.
Maintaining the good health of a small business starts with the owner being able to have a healthy personal life that is free from unnecessary worries about after-hours customer calls. By ensuring that the call service has all of the information that they need, business owners can also have that time away from the business to have a healthy personal life.
