How to Answer The Phone At Your Business

Positive telephone interactions help improve your business's reputation with customers.

Your business showcases its products or services using advertising, marketing or promotional techniques. A powerful but often overlooked promotional opportunity begins when you or your staff answers the business's telephone. With competing businesses often equal in technology and capability, business etiquette expert Marjorie Brody feels strongly that a business's attitude toward its customers provides the competitive edge. Brody emphasizes that business owners who provide excellent customer service, including good telephone etiquette, make a big impact on customers. This "win-win" behavior may help these businesses succeed.

Things You'll Need

• Company brochures, mission statements and other company-specific documents
• Employee telephone directory
• Updated locations list for managers, outside staff and sales representatives
• Notepaper and pen

Instructions

1. Acquire general business operations information. Prepare yourself and your staff for telephone calls by assembling company brochures, mission statements and other documents that explain the company's business operations. Obtain an employee telephone directory so you do not keep callers on hold while you search for employee extension numbers. Maintain an updated list of managers' and outside staff's locations as well as sales representatives' daily client appointments.

2. Establish your business identity immediately. Begin your telephone conversation with a time-of-day greeting, if you desire. Follow this optional greeting by confirming the caller has reached your business, and consider a tag line that briefly describes your company. State your name and ask how you can be of service. For example, state, "Good morning. Smith Office Supplies, your full-service office supplies partner. This is Karen. How may I help you?

3. Accept responsibility for the call's outcome. Understand that the caller is depending on you to answer his question, order his product or resolve his problem. Do not alienate the caller, and jeopardize future company business, by stating that his request falls outside your job description or is handled by another department. Do not allow your surrounding office chaos, an uncooperative computer system or a backed-up workload to affect your concern for the caller's needs. Asking a potential customer to call back at another time is a tactic that rarely produces desirable results.

4. Address the caller's request quickly and efficiently. Listen carefully to the caller's request to ensure you understand all the details. Write down relevant notes if necessary. Do not interrupt him or begin to formulate a response prematurely; you may not have all essential information and you may appear disrespectful. Respond by connecting him to the appropriate person within your company, answering his question or summarizing the details of his order. If you are unable to provide all the information he requires, promise to call back as soon as you obtain those details. Fulfill your promise as quickly as possible.

References

• Entrepreneur; Business Etiquette Expert Marjorie Brody; Lori Francisco; October 2000
• Online Business Degree: Business Telephone Etiquette
• Microsoft Business; 10 Things Never to Say on a Business Call; Joanna L. Krotz