Discover Why You May Not Want to Follow Conventional Wisdom for Payables By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD 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 […]
Category: Telephone Answering Service
Telephone answering service articles by Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD
Don’t Overlook the Technical Support Component of Optimizing Your TAS By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD 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. […]
Streamline Your Answering Service Administration By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD 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 […]
We Should Assume We’ll Never Return to Business as Usual By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD 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 […]
With More Reasons to Have Operators Work at Home Comes the Need to Better Oversee Them By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD Around the world, many jurisdictions have enacted stay-at-home mandates to deal with the coronavirus pandemic. Other areas are pursuing a “stay home, stay safe” recommendation. This scenario hits answering services doubly hard. First, as […]
Two Tips to Streamline Your Answering Service’s Procedures By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD Last year I shared several articles about finetuning the processes in your telephone answering service. The three key areas are streamlining sales, streamlining client onboarding, and streamlining customer service. Beyond that, we looked at fine-tuning billing and collections, agent hiring, and agent […]
Balance the Need to Protect Your Client List with Your Desire to Close Sales By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD When telephone answering services overhaul their websites or seek to tweak its content, many services wonder if they should post a partial list of some of their major accounts. Some answering services do this, and I […]
Sometimes Posting Too Much Information Can Work Against Us By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD Over the years I’ve looked at hundreds of telephone answering service websites. A few are great, many are good, and some need improvement. A common page for many answering service sites covers pricing. There are different ways to handle rate information, […]
Having Great Content on Your Website Means Nothing If No One Can Find It By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD A few months ago we looked at SEO (search engine optimization) for telephone answering service websites. In that short column, we touched on the essential SEO elements: page or post title, description, and keyword or keyword […]
Increase Cash Flow by Shortening the Time Between Billing Cut Off and Payment Receipt By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD As we look at ways to be a responsive answering service, one critical, but too-often overlooked, the area is billing and collections. This affects cash flow and is a critical consideration in maintaining the financial viability […]