David Houghton //May 10, 2012//
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If you’re like me, you spend a good part of your day navigating the voicemail gauntlet. Make sure to keep those 3-digit codes handy. Each system is different—pay attention or you’ll get chopped!
Isn’t there a better way to manage land-line calls? For our company, there is—we call it, “answering the phone.”
Our 10-person engineering firm, like most of our competitors, has a “voice jail” system. However, we use it as a backstop, rather than a concertina-topped fence between our clients and us. We’ve developed a method that usually allows a live person to answer the phone after no more than a few rings—often by the person the caller actually wants to speak with. Here’s how it works.
Our phone protocol starts with Caller ID. When the phones ring, we glance at the screen. If the call is from a firm or person someone thinks is calling for them, that person grabs it. Done! After three rings, it’s fair game for anyone in the office (including principals or the president) to pick up and play receptionist, usually for about 15-30 seconds. At that point, we can send the call to someone’s extension, directly to their voicemail, or to their cellphone. If nobody answers the call, it does go to the automated attendant, but that is rare during business hours. We use a relatively inexpensive VOIP-based phone system with a gateway to analog phone lines, but this method should work with other phone setups.
This might seem like a bother, more than a decade into a post-receptionist world. But we’ve found several advantages to our system.
There are a few drawbacks to this phone protocol, the biggest being managing a somewhat interrupted workflow. But in today’s world that’s happening anyway, whether it’s an email chime, a text from your teenager, or a colleague that pops over to your desk. Then there are the robo-calls, live sales calls, and wrong numbers, but they can be dispatched quickly, and thanks to improvements in caller ID rules, they generally betray themselves on the little screen. We often let suspicious calls (i.e. from 800 numbers, political parties, or that guy trying to sell us keyrings with our logo on them) ring through five times, at which point they do get the usual voicemail greeting “press 10 for Zack, etc.).
We’ve found that answering the phone is an “old school” touch that clients really appreciate, and that combined with a bit of modern technology, it can be properly managed. Aside from the spurious, every call is either from an existing client (opportunity to help them) or a potential client (opportunity to hear what they need). Either way, it’s an opportunity.