Sales and Marketing Tactics Change, but the Need to Close Sales Doesn’t In the early days of the telephone answering service industry, most all clients were local. This was because a physical off premise extension of the customers’ phone line needed to be installed in the answering service. If the client wasn’t local to the […]
Empower Employees to Excel Regardless of Where Their Office Is We are now approaching one year since many businesses sent employees home to work. Though some staff have returned to the office, either all the time or on select days, many workers continue to toil from their homes. Some have set up fully functional workspaces, […]
What Was Once Optional Is Now Required The potential to have remote operators work off-site from the main answering service location goes back to the 1990s, when I made a presentation about this topic at the ATSI convention. I covered the two key aspects of having a distributed workforce. One was the technology to make […]
Article Repository Consolidates Industry Resources I published my first article in 1982. It was about pagers. Remember them? It was also the hardest piece I’ve ever written, but it set me on a journey for a lifetime of writing. Over the years I authored a couple thousand articles, some of which have been forever lost, […]
Roundup of Articles on Fine-Tuning Your TAS Processes Over the past several months we have addressed several ways to optimize your telephone answering service and help position you to increase your efficacy and enhance the service you provide to clients. Here’s a recap: 1. Optimize Your Sales How long does it take your staff to […]
Discover Why You May Not Want to Follow Conventional Wisdom for Payables The standard business advice when it comes to accounts payable is to delay payment as long as possible, even beyond the stated due date—assuming you can get away with it. This benefits cash flow, making more money available for day-to-day operations. This may […]
Don’t Overlook the Technical Support Component of Optimizing Your TAS In our final article on streamlining your telephone answering service, we’ll look at the technical side of things. For many services, the technology that runs it remains the least favorite aspect of the business. It’s necessary, but it’s not enjoyed. By streamlining the technical aspects, […]
Eliminate, Optimize, and Delegate In past issues, we looked at streamlining various aspects of telephone answering services: sales, client onboarding, and customer service, agent hiring and training, billing and collections, and processes and procedures. Now we turn our attention to upper management: the admin function. Every role in every business carries a bit of fluff, […]
We Should Assume We’ll Never Return to Business as Usual As the telephone answering service industry responded to an unexpected, pandemic-induced spike in call traffic coupled with some workers reluctant to come to the office, changes occurred out of necessity. Many services looked to address this two-pronged threat by pursuing a work-at-home model, either as […]
While Still in the Pandemic Begin Planning for Post-Pandemic During the coronavirus pandemic, healthcare call centers stepped up to take a more prominent role to facilitate patient-facing communications. Though a few missteps may have occurred along the way as they forged into the unknown, overall they met the challenge facing them, ramped up well, and […]