How call forwarding leaves you able to make an impact on other areas of your business

When it comes to virtual offices, the key benefit is time. This is possibly the most precious commodity in business. It’s so valuable because there is, quite obviously, a limited amount of it. The days are short, particularly in business – and it’s easy to feel like there aren’t enough hours in the day.

As a result of this need for time, it’s all the more important that you spend your time working effectively – otherwise you’re likely to find that you can’t juggle all aspects of running a business and find may yourself out of balance.

One thing business owners spend a lot of time with – and often find distracting in terms of running their business – is calls. This post will explore how making use call forwarding options can really help to free you up and make an impact on other, more mission critical areas of your business.

What’s the big deal with calls?

You might be asking yourself, why are calls so problematic? Well, it’s possible that they aren’t crucial to your business – however there are many types of business that have a big emphasis on calls and customer service, particularly as they grow.

So, whilst you might think that calls are manageable as a business owner the following issues can arise which make them much harder to manage:

• Volume – When you have a high volume of calls to deal with, it takes substantial resources to deal with them all effectively. Many startups don’t have the resources, with many entrepreneurs working on their company by themselves or with 1 or 2 others, to deal with even small levels of volume.
• Frequency – The frequency of calls can also be a problem. It would be less of an issue to handle 25 calls in infrequent bursts than it is to deal with them over the course of a day. There are a lot of businesses that have specific opening hours and committing yourself to dealing with such calls all day can be overreaching.
• Complexity – Sales calls or basic customer service and reception calls are usually relatively simple, but if you have a complicated product or one that many people find requires ongoing support then the complexity of the calls can be problematic.

All in all, calls are unpredictable – and you never quite know when the phones are going to start ringing off the hook. This can be problematic if you are an owner operator and want to devote certain amounts of time to specific tasks.

How do phone services and call forwarding help the process of managing a business?

When you choose your phone services – there are a variety of different options. Each of them help the process of managing a business in different ways. As a result, depending on your business, the best option is dependent on the nature of your call related tasks.

Depending on your needs, the different phone options help in the following ways:

• Answer & Patch – The most flexible diverse package – this allows calls to be answered and patched through to you. Perfect for busy entrepreneurs who are not often in the office or are travelling frequently.
• Answer 24/7 – A 24 hour answering service in which messages are taken and sent to you via email or SMS. This is beneficial for people looking to deal with calls in a regimented and compartmentalised way.
• Office Answer – The most popular option, allows your calls to be answered and messages to be sent to you during business hours  (9am – 5:30pm Mon – Fri). This means you can deal with calls at a time that is convenient to you.

Phone services are helpful for business as they allow small companies to outsource their call handling needs to an experienced team with more resources than most startups can provide. This means they benefit from the experience, as well as the flexibility that shared solutions can provide.

Phone Services That Serve Entrepreneurs’ Needs

There are many ways that a virtual office can help entrepreneurs become more empowered, by freeing them from the less mission critical aspects of business such as calls and mail. Phone services are a big part of that. When you choose your telephone answering options remember that the best option is the one that frees you the most and gives you the most freedom.

If you’d like more great information and updates make sure you check out the rest of our blog, especially the ‘Virtual Office’ section.

By Alex Novakovic at MadeSimple – Follow Alex on Google+