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Telephone Answering Service?
We have several "satelite" offices that handle some of our clients in cities where we do not need a full-time staff. We want to provide normal phone hours for those offices. Are there any telephone answering services that could handle incoming calls, schedule interviews and appointments or route certain calls to fully staffed offices to handle immediate requests?
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8 Answers
First of all, there are various answering services, just "Google" and you will see at least few. Some charge per-minute rates, some per-call.
The other option could be a "Toll-free" (800) number which will be routed to the nearest full-time office. This way your customers will not even know where the call is terminated.
Also it is possible to use automatic call forwarding to a full-time office if local office is not answering within some short period of time. I recommend not to exceed 10 seconds (two rings) because when call is being forwrded you need to add the responce time of the next operator. Normally, if a call is answered in less then 20-25 seconds it is acceptable in most of the cases.
Hi Lindsey
We are an Information technology company based in India. We are into System Integration, Voip calling card operations and International Call centres. We can provide you Telephone answering facility. You can visit to our International call centre website www.eurocallcentres.com and our group/corporate website at www.gmaxindia.com to understand our operations.
We have our own switch located in US Las Vegas for routing all incoming calls to our call centre faciltiy in India.
regards
Amit Jain
Getmax Technologies Pvt. ltd.
MSN: voipcall@hotmail.com
www.gmaxindia.com
www.eurocallcentres.com
Mobile: +91 98151 00154
It sounds like you can get a lot of mileage by using services such as google voice, in that it can forward the call to any other that you like.
http://www.google.com/voice
You can also check out, Grasshopper, which offers similar services. Given that their goal is to have entrepreneurs sound professional.
http://grasshopper.com/features/
If you have any developer resources, even taking a look at Twilio might not be a bad idea.
http://www.twilio.com/
There is a company that I am very familiar with that provides live incoming call answering that might help your situation. The company is Ansercom, contact is Michele Moeken and their number is 856-722-8813.
You have a number of options which should be chosen by what is best for your business model.
The first, cheapest and most effect is to use existing staff in locations which you have staff based during normal office hours. They will know the business, have access to diaries etc and propbably know the staff in the location sthey are remotely covering for.
The second is to use your part-time staff to cover the other offices when they are working their hours and vise versa. This will build up knowledge of all locations and enhance your staffs moral by knowing the other staff better as they support each other.
The third is the outsource model where you set up a personalised answering service to cover the overflow calls. The best service to choose is one which can provide assigned PAs who work for your team all the time. There fore they build up knowledge of your staff and company whilst answering calls and booking appointments etc..
I run this type of service in the UK and therefore can't help in point 3 but you will find a copst effective servie in the US by recommendation and I am sure if this is the way you go you will be pleasantly surprised.
Good Luck.
It seems you may want a local, personal and friendly Answering service. Jet Virtual is based Locally and highly recommended.
http://www.jetvirtual.co.uk
Good luck.
A lot of call centre outsourcing and telephone answering services do operate 24/7 365 days a year, so can answer your calls even outside of office hours. Most call centres will be able to handle all what you have requested, with appointment scheduling, make sure you specify this as a requirement as some may not do this. A lot of call centres advertise this as a 'diary management' service so you may want to look out for this.
http://www.callcare247.com
A further suggestion for you, Lindsey (and anybody else) is alldayPA, you can find their site here http://www.alldaypa.com/call-answering-service
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