Phone answering services

callthatgirl said:
Chad, that's the company I am using right now. I ended up in the "middle" of the $230 and $430 plan.

:(

I did sign the deal for the shopping mall place and we are getting 2 phone lines. I will work them out so if one is missed, it flips to the other phone and that one should never go to voicemail as I have 5 people located there.

Then I just have nights and weekends, but that store is open Saturday and Sundays, so I can hope. I am glad no one gets my voicemail anymore, but $315 is steep holy crap.

@corner....my main tech who does the calls with me never misses a call if he can help it, but he also doesn't take the blackberry home. And I don't want it either all night and weekends lol

btw...I just got dumped the other day because the new guy I was seeing didn't know I owned a company (just started dating) and he got my service when I missed a call. He said he wasn't into dating women that had so much going on in their lives.

:confused::confused:
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Don't worry Lisa. He was just one of those guys that isn't comfortable with a woman that makes more money than he does. I'm not saying he should take advantage of, but if he was smart he wouldn't of dumped you. He could have been like "WOW! She really has her s**t together!"

Anyway, I need an answering service. I have no choice because I'm the only one. I can't have someone else cover my calls, not even another one of my personalities LOL! :D

Voicenation is WAYYYY to expensive though.
 
LOL@cquill. I know how that goes, I was alone way too long. As for the dude, yeah..he's probaby insecure a smidge. :)

@andcorp I feel the same way, dodged a war probably haha.
 
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Steve202 said:
I'm using a company in the UK. Its a pay as you go service and the more money you spend when topping up, the cheaper it is. They charge per call and not by the minute, so I can keep an eye on the cost.
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Which service is that you are using? I am with alldayPA at the moment but always on the look out for a cheaper deal.
 
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Looks about the same for pricing for what I am using.:(

Now I am in the new office and I hope to not miss any calls! We will see how this half months goes.
 
Yeah, that's why I'm worried about trying to catch calls if things pick up.
Being the only person makes it impossible to catch most of my calls.
If my hands aren't free, or I'm in the middle of something important, the call goes unanswered. :P
 
hey, if you don't try it...you don't know how many calls you're missing. I think the key for this for us is that we get way less hang ups (as they did on our vm system before) and I get the emails in 3-5 min with the message, so I know what is important or not.

Still loving the service, scared of the bill :eek:
 
I have a huge problem with missing calls. I missed 2 today alone. What I have set up is a 30 for 30 plan with voicenation and I have my google voice number forward to a grasshopper number that forwards to the answering service. The plan is that once I get close to my limit, I will just not forward my number there anymore.

We will see how this goes.
 
Maybe I should get my wife to do this for you'll

What would be a price everyone would like to pay a month that you seem is fair?

Seems $1 a minute is the going rate?
 
krtechsolutions said:
Maybe I should get my wife to do this for you'll

What would be a price everyone would like to pay a month that you seem is fair?

Seems $1 a minute is the going rate?
Click to expand...

That wouldn't be a bad idea, as long you could set up some system to pull up the appropriate scripts associated with the number.

I may look into coding something up.
 
my evolution for staffing phones (long post)

At one point I utilized an answering service. I thought they were great. They answered the phone 24X7. Customers "knew" that they had reached someone instead of just leaving an urgent message in my vm mailbox not knowing when I would hear it. It really took a lot of stress off of me at first.

Then customers started to get wise to the fact that it was an answering service. When they couldn't get a hold of me, the answering service couldn't get a hold of me either and they would still call my cell phone. Most of my customers realized I was a small shop and didn't have an office staff so they knew right away and a few confided in me that they didn't like the answering service.

Later I got a PT office person and she was great because she was personable and customers got to know her. Since she was actually sitting in my office she could (tentatively) schedule calls or text me and the other techs to try to manage workflow/expectations. I also tried to utilize her to do admin stuff, business reports, work order management, and some marketing stuff. At the end of the day though she eventually needed a FT job and I didn't have the money to keep her FT. Also, I was getting behind on jobs and what I really needed was another tech.

Instead of replacing the PT office person I made a decision to hire an entry-level tech who could field phone calls and do remote and phone support. I almost hired an outsourced tech support firm but decided against it. If my phone support tech couldn't fix a problem remotely, he could escalate it to an onsite tech. I was a little worried at first that I would be paying for a tech to sit there on some days with nothing to do but so far it has been amazing. I often get phone calls while my head is under someone's desk or in a noisy server rack. Now I've trained most of my customers to call tech support first or I ask them to hold on and I'll have my tech support call them back since I'm currently tied up. The customers are happier because they don't have to wait as long for support and all those little questions and remote tasks that I used to "finish up" after I came home are now handled by tech support.

Looking back, there are a few key things that I had in place beforehand which really enabled this model to soar. Obviously we had to have a good remote access solution in place (we use a mixture of GFI, HelpdeskVNC, and logmein free) and also we have some customers on maintenance contracts which means if things are slow we at least have a list of server maintenance we can do.

Right now I'm looking to expand this model in a few ways. I'm hiring an additional helpdesk guy and I've offered to contract out my helpdesk to some others that might be interested. We've made our caller ID just say "IT Support" so we can make it pretty generic. I've also tried to find others who have a decent helpdesk they would like to contract out but it never panned out so I had to staff one myself. I'm still open to using another company's helpdesk to cover busy times. If anyone else is at this point and interested in partnering options, let me know!

-Den
 
The bill is coming up next week, and I fear the auto pay! LOL. But I am still working on the new system. Unfortunately I had a major complaint from a client....

Client calls, gets the service.
"Hi, I need to know what number to call to get the XXXX store"

Service lady, "How would I know, I'm 1000 miles away"

WTF? :eek:

I called and comlained and said if I ever get a client report like that again I will stop payment and leave immediately.
 
So it seems that most of you are mobile techs or remote support techs, which seems appropriate to have an answering service for, but what do you guys think about shops? Lately, I feel like we have been getting so many calls that we spend more time on the phone than we do working on computers.

Keep in mind that we are men over here who cannot multitask for crap . . . although we can work on a crap load of computers at once no problem as long as we do not have to actually talk.

Anyways, It is getting harder and harder to get crap done around here because of this. My main concern is that we will lose that personal relationship communication thing if we are no longer the ones answering the phone or in the very least, something will be lost in the communication with the middle man.

I know some of you will ask why not hire someone else, but that fact is, we are not quite there yet and I want to get someone who is a TV tech that I can also cross train to computer repair. Finding a computer tech was hard enough and took long enough, so I can only imagine how hard it will be to find a TV tech is is willing and competent enough to cross train on computers.
 
PCX said:
So it seems that most of you are mobile techs or remote support techs, which seems appropriate to have an answering service for, but what do you guys think about shops? Lately, I feel like we have been getting so many calls that we spend more time on the phone than we do working on computers.

Keep in mind that we are men over here who cannot multitask for crap . . . although we can work on a crap load of computers at once no problem as long as we do not have to actually talk.

Anyways, It is getting harder and harder to get crap done around here because of this. My main concern is that we will lose that personal relationship communication thing if we are no longer the ones answering the phone or in the very least, something will be lost in the communication with the middle man.

I know some of you will ask why not hire someone else, but that fact is, we are not quite there yet and I want to get someone who is a TV tech that I can also cross train to computer repair. Finding a computer tech was hard enough and took long enough, so I can only imagine how hard it will be to find a TV tech is is willing and competent enough to cross train on computers.
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While i'm a mobile tech for one/two days a week. i'm in the shop the rest of the week. and I do use an answering service when i'm away for the day or busy. just eases the workload.
 
PBComputer said:
While i'm a mobile tech for one/two days a week. i'm in the shop the rest of the week. and I do use an answering service when i'm away for the day or busy. just eases the workload.
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I imagine that one of the hardest things will be finding a company that does not sub out their calling service to India or some other country that does not speak proper English. Do you find that your customers are comfortable with talking with someone else other than you or someone that works at the shop? Do you know if its affected your business?
 
PCX, after you hire someone PT to even help, you will grow. Trust me on that....my sales last week hit $10,000 for the first time ever and it was because I had someone working the phones, upselling, and booking appts while the techs worked. It's wonderful. :)
 
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