What Types of Communication Do You Handle?
By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD
You are in the telephone answering service (TAS) industry. Notice the word telephone. Surely your TAS focuses on telephone communications, but do you process more than phone calls? Should you do more? What are the ramifications if you do? What are the risks if you don’t? As communication continues to move to embrace other forms besides the telephone, should your answering service move to adapt?
These are questions to ponder. I leave them for you to contemplate, but you should contemplate them. Consider these options:
Email: It was about two decades ago when I began receiving more emails than phone calls. I suspect nowadays most everyone does. Email can easily overwhelm. Many entrepreneurs and busy executives have a virtual assistant or have tasked an employee to screen their emails, delete the span, reply to easy ones, and forward the critical ones.
This sounds like what we do with phone calls. Now let’s apply this skill set to email. Perhaps you already have.
Chat: Many people, especially the younger crowd, love chat services. They’ll send text messages all day long but will avoid making a phone call. If they have a customer service question, they’ll pick chat every time they can. As the population ages, more and more people will gravitate toward chat.
Answering services already have the needed customer service skills to handle chat. Maybe you’ve already taken the plunge.
Social Media: The most recent communication opportunity is in social media, especially Facebook and Twitter. For those on a social media platform, who isn’t overwhelmed with the deluge of communication.
For individuals this isn’t a big problem, but for businesses it is. Answering services can handle this problem, too. Possibly, you already offer this critical service.
If you take on these service opportunities, you theoretically move from a telephone answering service to a communications facilitator. While I don’t think our industry will rechristen itself as the communications facilitator industry, that could be a more apt description than telephone answering service.
Therefore, we will likely remain as telephone answering services even if communications facilitation is a better description of what we do.
Regardless of what you end up doing or what you call yourself, the key is to serve your clients well. That, after all, is what we’ve been doing since our inception.
Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD, is the publisher and editor-in-chief of TAS Trader. Check out his latest book, Sticky Customer Service.
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4 Tips to Build a Better Business Culture
By Jason Gazaway
In the May issue of TAS Trader the article “Who’s Protecting Your Business Culture?” looked at the importance of building a loyalty-enhancing culture for your telephone answering service. This month we will look at how to do that.
All businesses are different, but there are a few consistent factors that play into building and maintaining a solid business culture:
Trust: Without trust your business is on shaky ground no matter what. If you do not trust your employees and they do not trust your business, then how do you expect your customers to trust you and your services? Trust must be built, nurtured, and handled with care. If you feel there is a lack of trust within your business, sit down with your leadership team, or even some employees who have been there for a while, and figure out what needs to be done to build it.
Be Open: This bleeds over from trust. Communicate with employees. If you let them know where the business is at financially, project wise, future planning, or even business issues you are facing, then they are more likely to buy in and understand you want them to be a part of the business. Openness and honesty build trust. This also helps your employees squash rumors or negative statements that might come up that are not true.
Invest: Build into your employees. When you invest in something you expect to get something greater in return. It is a cycle. Your employees are an investment in your business. Yes, they get a paycheck, but if you want a greater return you must make the investment greater. Your employees want to know you have bought into them just as much as you want them to buy into your business. This could be through training, perks, time off, special events, a better work environment, and even listening to their opinions and acting on their recommendations. It is not always about money.
Celebrate: Applaud the wins of the business, as well as the wins of employees. Make it personal for them. When you make someone feel special, an attachment is formed and from this, appreciation is built. When an employee feels appreciated they will go out of their way to make sure the business, and its customers, are taken care of in the best way possible.
This can be done by celebrating individual sales goals, when a person or group finishes a big project, and birthdays or anniversaries. What about celebrating an employee who has not been doing well, but they turned things around or have made strides to get better? Maybe they are not where they need to be yet, but they have made significant improvements. How do you think celebrating the small wins will make them feel towards getting better and the business as a whole?
These are just a few ideas on how to improve your culture and make sure your employees are culture ambassadors for your business. The nice thing about having buy-in from your employees is that they will end up policing the culture and the business for you without you having to lift a finger. Just be sure to give the encouragement and create the environment for it.
Jason Gazaway is the growth manager for VoiceNation.
Telephone Answering Service News
WTSA Hosts Donna West Workshop
WTSA will host another Donna West workshop in Las Vegas, July 12-13. Donna loves teaching people at the supervisory level. “Supervisors don’t have a lot of educational choices. When they come to one of my two-day workshops they are so excited and just soak up the information. Nothing makes me happier than when I get an email from an attendee letting me know they tried something we talked about and it worked,” Donna said. “I’m looking forward to July’s workshop.”
2017 NAEO Update
The 2017 National Amtelco Equipment Owners (NAEO) Conference took place in San Antonio, Texas, March 12-15. More than 175 NAEO members attended the event. Kevin Beale, Amtelco’s vice president for software, research and development, presented “What’s New with Genesis—Simplify and Grow!” on Monday. This session shared updates about the Genesis Intelligent Series, MergeComm, miSecureMessages 6.5, and miTeamWeb developments. On Tuesday Greg Beale, Amtelco’s vice president for customer service, and Jody Laluzerne, customer service supervisor shared the best practices for maintaining the Infinity IS, Infinity system, and peripherals. Kevin Beale and Pat Dye hosted a question-and-answer session on the final day.
Amtelco Announces Enhancements to miTeamWeb Application
MiTeamWeb is a mobile-friendly Web application that extends the functionality of Amtelco’s suite of Intelligent Series (IS) call center applications across the enterprise and to handheld devices using a Web browser. The widget-based miTeamWeb screen provides access to status, messages, directories, on-call schedules, call log monitoring, and reporting in one convenient package for both desktop computer and mobile device users. Users can view and update their status, view and send messages, view directory information, and view and administer on-call schedules. With miTeamWeb, users are able to contact other users via a range of methods, including email, miSecureMessages, SMS text messaging, pager, fax, and Vocera messaging.
Send us your TAS articles and news for consideration in the next issue.
Quotes for the Month
“One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don’t come home at night.” -Margaret Mead
“Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have.” -Eckhart Tolle
“The math professor went crazy with the blackboard. He did a number on it.” -unknown