Any small business venture can be a terrifying jump into the unknown, but there’s nothing quite as trying as being a solopreneur.
Although you don’t have to figure out how to pay payroll on a shoestring, you have other challenges to deal with. Guess what? Your answering service can help you with many of the issues you’re wrestling as you’re trying to increase your productivity.
Distractions: The Mind Killer for Solopreneurs
When you work with other people, it’s hard to get too far off track. Someone is likely to say something to you or poke you to make sure you’re still breathing after the second hour of cat videos from YouTube. Going it alone means you have to be both worker and enforcer, which can be a real trick.
And those distractions are everywhere: the emails, the drop-ins from clients, even grabbing lunch can turn your day on its ear. You have to get on top of this mess or you’re going to be sunk, or at least that’s the mantra you keep repeating. It takes more than sheer will, sometimes you need a little help from your friends.
Answering Services Silence the Noise
If you’ve never used an answering service before, today is a great day to get started.
Solopreneurs can gain a lot of advantages from working with a call answering service, making it easier to focus and build your business at the same time.
The best answering services can:
Make your company look bigger. Your phone line is open 24/7, just like the big guys. This way your clients can call any time they have a thought they want to share or if there’s an emergency taking place. Suddenly you go from a team of one to a business with a public facing team of telephone professionals.
Organize incoming calls so you can prioritize call backs. The constant ringing of the phone is more than most people can handle, especially when they really need to be focusing on work. By taking that away and replacing it with a tidy log of callers and the detailed messages they leave for you, your answering service has created more time in your day and given you a tool from which to triage callbacks.
Handle all your appointment scheduling. If you do work by appointment, adding an appointment setting tool to your answering service package is another way you can get part of your day back. After all, scheduling those appointments can be an involved process, especially if one client decides to reschedule multiple times.
Handle basic customer service duties. Your answering service can also help out with the most common questions that your callers have. All you have to do is arm those operators with the information you want them to disburse and the magic starts to happen right away. Your callers will be thrilled to get a human who can explain policies, give directions and so forth any time of the day.
Your answering service is all about making your solopreneur journey an easier one. By implementing your operators strategically, you can not only give yourself the polish and reach of much larger companies, but take back the quiet time you need to actually do the job all those callers are looking for.
