As a small business owner, your responsibilities change every minute. You have to find the best vendors, look at project reports, go through accounts, spend time on marketing and manage your team. What you don’t want is to be interrupted by phone calls. The solution? A phone answering service.

With a phone answering service, someone else answers your phone and passes the message on to you. A simple answering service comparison will tell you which service suits your needs. The cost usually depends on the volume of calls you expect them to handle every month.

A phone answering service also won’t make the mistakes that untrained people can make when answering business calls. To make it easy for you, here are the key benefits of a phone answering service.

Why small business owners should consider phone answering services

You stay focused

Distractions kill productivity. You could be doing something important and your phone rings. You have to answer it because it could be a potential client or customer.

But when you answer the call and get back to the task, chances are, you won’t have the same level of focus. With phone answering services, the routine calls will be answered by the agency. You won’t be needlessly interrupted.

You save time

They may only seem like short calls lasting a minute or two. But all those non-urgent calls do add up. And it’s not just the time you spend answering the calls. It’s also the time it takes you to fully get back to what you were doing.

When you get a phone answering service, you ensure that your time is spent only on important tasks. That improves your time management and increases your productivity.

You can time-block tasks

Refreshing your website? Launching your winter collection? Developing a new yoga course? The success or failure of your business will eventually come down to these big decisions.

These require deep thinking and devoted slots of time. When you delegate phone answering to an external agency, you can time-block hours to these projects.

You can measure campaign response

Let’s say you have released Google or Facebook ads or put up hoardings in your locality. You would have given either a link or a phone number for customers to call you. But when you answer their calls, you won’t be able to professionally analyse the response.

When you hand it to a phone answering service, they’ll get back with the total number of calls and what the callers were looking for. This data will help make your digital marketing more focused and productive.

An alternative to phone-answering services

What’s better than an ordinary phone answering service? A feature-rich one that does more than just answering calls. With a second phone number, you get a missed call auto-reply feature that allows you to respond to the caller right then and there.

If you’re busy in a meeting, driving or spending time with your family, you can’t and shouldn’t take calls. But with Chalkboard, you can send an auto-reply text that will show the caller that their call is important to you. It can also inform the caller when you’ll be able to get back to them.

Importantly, it’s inexpensive and exceptionally easy to set up. Download the app and you can have your response system up and running in a few minutes.

In short

Most technologies to increase productivity are rolled out for large enterprises. They can be expensive and needlessly complex. The good news is that as an independent business owner, you don’t need those. Phone answering services can help you to stay focused, productive and more importantly, learn to separate your work and personal lives.