SME business owners are doing it tough these days and end up needing to wear a lot of hats in the business. One second you are having to deal with a difficult supplier then the next you are answering incoming telephone calls. An hour after that you could be acting as an in-house computer specialist and 10 minutes later trying to get some work done to earn some revenue. The constant switching from one task to another can be really exhausting.
Research in the USA has shown that an average business manager can spend up to 25% of his/her time looking after admin related tasks like answering those incoming calls and attending to minor admin matters. Unfortunately, the way things are going with incoming phone calls there is probably only 1 in 10 of those incoming calls that really needs some immediate attention. Instead of you having to waste all of your valuable time working on the 90% that are just a distraction you could consider engaging a professional message service like Ivy Answering Service to answer those incoming telephone calls and give you back your time.
Your own USA based answering service team
Our live professional staff who will be taking your calls are all experienced telephonists. We think it is really important for companies to have receptionists with good local knowledge. We can certainly save money if we offshore our work to cheap Asian call centres however we think that it is worth paying a bit extra to have staff with good English skills because it provides our customers with a much better experience. A message that we get regularly from our clients is that when one of their callers tells them that they think that the receptionists answering the calls is actually sitting in the office with them.
Outsourcing phone call answering to Ivy really makes positive business sense. Our service will be a variable cost to your company (as opposed to a fixed cost of having in-house staff). If you only need to use our service occasionally then you will end up only paying a small amount of money for our service, if you need to use our service all of the time then the cost will be more however it will still be a low $ number compared to having your own in-house staff. If you need some time off or if it is the school holidays and you want to spend time with the kids then you should find that your costs drop for that time period. Here at Ivy our aim is to be as transparent as possible when it comes to our pricing, we intend to be in this industry for the long term and want to build a long term relationship with our clients.
The way our service operates is really very easy. Firstly, you sign up for a 7 day free trial and get allocated a unique telephone number. This number can either be a local number (in an area specified by you) or a toll free number (for a small monthly fee). Once you have your telephone number you then have the option of diverting your existing telephone number to our number, diverting after a number of rings or simply diverting to that number during busy periods. It is totally under your control and in line with your requirements. Once your number is sorted, you will need to work out what greeting you would like us to recite when we answer your calls. The greeting is specific to your business and you can change it whenever you want using our iPhone or Android App. Once you have your greeting sorted you just need to tell us how to deliver your messages. The options you have here are to either receive an SMS (at a small fee) or an email. Once again, it’s all up to you.
Our telephone answering service has been custom built by industry specialists. We completely understand how you and your in-house staff really don’t have a lot of spare time to learn new software so we have built it to be very intuitive to use. If you really don’t have time to set things up for yourself then you can call one of our customer support staff and we will happily help you to get things working the way you want.
When you sign up for our live message service and you are a new customer then we will give your business a FREE 7 day trial of our service. We are happy giving customers a 7 day trial as we want you to be able to check out our systems and their capabilities before you commit. We know, that along with our 4,000 plus clients worldwide you will genuinely love our service.