Why You Should Stop Sending Every Call To Voicemail
By Matt O'Haver
Last modified: January 22, 2023
Voted Top Call Center for 2024 by Forbes
By Matt O'Haver
Last modified: January 22, 2023
Imagine, for a moment, that your dishwasher is broken. Your kitchen is starting to flood. You panic. You freak out. You try to find your plumber’s number—the same plumber you’ve been going to your entire adult life, someone who’s earned your loyalty—and you call them up. It rings only once. Then you hear on the other end of the line:
We’re sorry. We can’t come to the phone right now…
How frustrating is that? Well, if you’ve ever been sent to voicemail before, you know that it can feel like a punch in the gut. It has a real emotional impact, because it means that someone on the other end couldn’t or didn’t want to talk to you at that moment.
If you’re a paying customer or client, it can be that much more insulting. Here you are, paying that business your money, and they won’t even answer your calls?
If you vow to never do that to your own clients and customers, that’s good. In fact, it can provide you with a serious competitive advantage. Did you know that the majority of businesses don’t even bother to answer client calls? If you simply commit to having a better answering service with your phones, you’ll already be part of the top 36% of businesses that do make it a priority.
What’s more, some client calls are time-sensitive. If a business has an emergency that only your company can handle, and they’re willing to pay you $500 an hour just to help them out, you’re only going to find that out if you pick up the phone.
As the old saying goes, 90% of success in life is in showing up.
Well, in business, the same could be said about picking up the phone when someone important is calling. Here’s exactly why—and how—you can stop sending every call to voicemail.
For everything we said above about voicemail, let’s be honest: it has its uses. Perhaps most importantly, voicemail helps us avoid distractions. In fact, it can cost you about 23 minutes of recovery time just to get over a distraction that interrupts your workflow.
If you work in a focus-sensitive business, it might be hard to see any other option but to send someone to voicemail. Say you’re a freelance writer who needs periods of intense concentration to get work done. You might not be able to answer the phone when another client calls you. Or let’s use the plumbing example from above. It might not be that you have anything against your customers. You simply need to focus on fixing that leaky faucet.
We’re not going to tell you that you need to do away with voicemail permanently. But if you have noticed that many of your most important calls are slipping through the cracks of voicemail, it may be time to reevaluate the communication systems you have in place.
Like all tools, voicemail is here to serve you. The problem occurs when voicemail is becoming your tool for avoiding business, not for getting better at it.
How do you know if you’re relying too heavily on voicemail?
You might already know all this. The question isn’t whether sending people to voicemail is a bad idea. The question is how you can implement a system that both keeps you focused and keeps you responsive. You can’t exactly be in two places at once.
What do you do? Turn to a phone answering service. This gives you the infrastructure you need to accomplish two things at once, even if you’re not the one answering your phones:
Done right, your answering service can be the perfect medium between eliminating distractions and staying in touch with your customers. More importantly, your customers won’t have to wonder where you are. When they call, someone answers. And when it comes time for them to leave that service review, they’ll remember that.
An answering service can also be the perfect solution to ensuring you never miss another opportunity to increase your business. Curious to know how much a missed call is costing you? Find out with our Missed Call Calculator.
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