Whenever a business decides to expand or move offices, it makes it really difficult to conduct business during that time. It’s a great time for your business in that you’re either moving to a great new location, you’ve found a way to save money each month by moving or you’re expanding because business is going so well. It’s a time-consuming process, just like moving to a new house or making new changes to your life would be.
Expanding business or moving locations is a highly stressful but exciting time and it should be treated with much preparation. One way to prepare is to realize that you won’t be able to keep up with regular business flow during the move or expansion and it’s best to come up with a plan of how your customers will be taken care of during this time.
The best solution would be to bring in a live answering service to help your business during this busy time. They can make sure no customer is left without being helped and can explain in a professional manner that it may take a few days for calls to be returned. Here is a look at why many businesses going through an expansion bring on an answering service to help during the big transition.
What do they do exactly?
Live answering services work to help with incoming calls so that your customers can get helping with frequently asked general questions, scheduling appointments, leaving a message or getting transferred to the correct person.
Someone is staffed to answer your phone calls for as many hours of the day and week that you need and they can be customized to answer the phone the way you’d like or transfer calls that only pertain to something specific. You can have them schedule appointments on your scheduling system or answer questions about hours of operation or directions to the office.
The perk for you is that you don’t have to hire someone to work physically in your office, you don’t have to pay a full-time salary with benefits and you can use them for as many hours as you need. It doesn’t have to replace your secretary, but it allows for your secretary to have more time to help customers that are in your office and handling other administrative tasks for you without the distractions of the phone.
How they will benefit you during the transition
When it’s time to expand or move offices, you’re going to have staff members away from their desks, phone and completely consumed with the moving and expanding tasks. A live answering service is there to help before your work day, during the work day and after hours so that your staff can focus on getting things moved, organized and the expansion started. No one has to wait by a phone or worry about upsetting customers during this transition.
You may be bringing in new employees during this transition. Don’t worry about missing calls during training; your live answering service can handle the work while your staff gets new team members trained.
This is not only convenient, but it’s much cheaper than hiring more staff members or bringing in help from other departments. After the expansion, you could keep the live answering service around so that your secretary can take a sick day, your staff can have vacation time and everyone can enjoy holidays off without upsetting customers that need helped. Plus, your expansion may take longer than expected and you’ll already have the phones covered with this service.
When you’re trying to do great things for your business like moving offices or expanding, don’t allow it to make you feel that you have to rush or can’t enjoy this transition. Simply bring in a live answering service that can help with the phones so that you can focus on what’s going on at the office.
