Phone Calls and Call Centers
My husband and I run a web development company that services brick-and-mortar businesses such as dental offices, cosmetic surgeons, doctors, etc.
As our business grows, we are getting an increasing volume of clients. We outsource more and more of the web development work so that we can service more clients and expand our business.
Where it breaks down is that some of our clients have issues on the subject of phone calls and insist on calling us constantly to have short or long conversations which interrupt our work. (Even when a simple email would be more than sufficient). We don't have time to have 3, 4, or 5 30-minute to one-hour conversations every day, and still run our business.
They also don't expect to be billed for the time they spend on the phone with us, even though our time on the phone with them is much more expensive to us than the time spent by our coders on their websites - as that can at least be outsourced. My husband and I only have so many hours in the day and if it is all spent on the phone, we can't get much else done.
The more clients we get, the more this becomes an issue.
We aren't big enough yet to hire a full-time receptionist, but we are getting too big to continue handling all these phone calls ourselves.
We have outsourcing lines set up to handle just almost every other aspect of the services we deliver, so what really gluts our workflow is the increasing volume of phone calls.
Does anyone have any good suggestions for this? Is there an affordable service to help answer phone calls, state-side, without us paying for a full-time service yet?
I don't need an answering service, or an automated call-forwarding service, but someone state-side who can take the phone calls when they come in, and handle the questions according to agreed-upon answers - or gather the data from the client by phone and send it to us by email, etc.
Any suggestions?
As our business grows, we are getting an increasing volume of clients. We outsource more and more of the web development work so that we can service more clients and expand our business.
Where it breaks down is that some of our clients have issues on the subject of phone calls and insist on calling us constantly to have short or long conversations which interrupt our work. (Even when a simple email would be more than sufficient). We don't have time to have 3, 4, or 5 30-minute to one-hour conversations every day, and still run our business.
They also don't expect to be billed for the time they spend on the phone with us, even though our time on the phone with them is much more expensive to us than the time spent by our coders on their websites - as that can at least be outsourced. My husband and I only have so many hours in the day and if it is all spent on the phone, we can't get much else done.
The more clients we get, the more this becomes an issue.
We aren't big enough yet to hire a full-time receptionist, but we are getting too big to continue handling all these phone calls ourselves.
We have outsourcing lines set up to handle just almost every other aspect of the services we deliver, so what really gluts our workflow is the increasing volume of phone calls.
Does anyone have any good suggestions for this? Is there an affordable service to help answer phone calls, state-side, without us paying for a full-time service yet?
I don't need an answering service, or an automated call-forwarding service, but someone state-side who can take the phone calls when they come in, and handle the questions according to agreed-upon answers - or gather the data from the client by phone and send it to us by email, etc.
Any suggestions?
“An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field†Niels Bohr