How an Answering Service Schedules Staff to Answer Your Calls

Leading Answering Services Schedule Their Staff with Precision

Answering services carefully schedule their staff to make sure they have the right number of people available to answer your calls. Professional answering services have turned this into a science to make sure they serve their clients with excellence.

Here’s how they go about it.

A Shared Service

The reason an answering service can provide you with comprehensive telephone coverage at a small fraction of the price you would pay for a full-time receptionist or customer service professional is that it is a shared service. That is, their employees answer your phone calls, and when they’re not working for you, they’re working for other businesses just like yours.

Together you and these other companies cover the costs to provide the service. The result of this shared-service approach means that you get around-the-clock, full-service telephone answering for only a few dollars a day. That’s the economy that results from using a shared service. The key to making this work is how the answering service schedules staff to answer your calls.

Consider Historical Data

The answering service starts by considering past call traffic. They look at how many calls came in at a particular time last week, last month, and one year ago—maybe even several years. While new answering services and startups have little to no historical data available to use for their staffing projections, established answering services have reams of information at their disposal. The more information, the more accurately they can project how many calls will arrive in the future.

Apply Traffic Trends

Next they look for patterns. Are the number of overall calls from all their clients trending up or trending down? They must adjust to reflect that. For example, assume that one year ago their staffing levels perfectly matched the number of calls that came in, but this year traffic is running 20 percent higher. That means they need to adjust their staffing levels to take 20 percent more calls. With this historical data and trend information, an answering service schedules staff to meet this projection.

Build in Flexibility

Last, their schedule needs flexibility. Though a skilled scheduler can take all this information and produce a highly reliable, accurate schedule, they can’t account for everything. A schedule needs to accommodate unexpected peaks in call traffic without negatively impacting the quality of the service provided.

To handle this they may tap supervisory and management personnel to help with an unexpected influx of calls. Or they may schedule a person to be available just in case. This provides a buffer to make sure they’re as available as possible to answer your calls.

Conclusion

Your answering service works hard to make sure they have the right number of people available around-the-clock to answer the expected number of calls that come in for your organization and the other businesses that use their shared service. If they over schedule, they’re inefficient and that drives up the cost of your service. If they under schedule, the quality of their service suffers.

That’s why the best answering services hit the ideal schedule almost all the time. This allows them to provide you with a quality service at a cost affordable price. This is how an answering service schedules staff to serve you with excellence. Though no answering service can achieve this all the time, the best ones can do it most of the time.

With a decades-long record of offering telephone answering service to the northwest region and across the United States, Redding Answering Service is committed to providing advanced, first-rate telephone answering service to your company. Let us help you maximize your communication effectiveness—at a cost-effective price—to drive bottom-line results. Peter Lyle DeHaan is a freelance writer who covers the answering service industry.

How to Benefit with Advanced Call Forwarding Features

Use Advanced Call Forwarding Features to Route Your Calls to Your Answering Service

In 5 Call Forwarding Tips we talked about how to send calls to your answering service with confidence. In addition to standard call forwarding service, which is available from your local telephone company, there are also advanced call forwarding features to consider. These go by different names depending on your telephone company, and they may have different advanced options, but here are the generic names for the three most common advanced call forwarding features to consider.

Call Forwarding No Answer

The first of our advanced call forwarding features is automatically forwarding your line to a preset number when your phone rings more than a certain number of times. Both the destination phone number and the timing must be set up in advance. But once it’s set, you can forget it, and it will reliably forward your calls each time an incoming call rings too long.

This is a great failsafe option in case you leave your office and forget to forward your phoneline to your answering service. It’s also a nice backup option for during business hours. In the event your staff gets too busy or unable to answer a ringing call, it will route to your answering service. Let them answer when you can’t.

Call Forwarding Busy

The second service on our advanced call forwarding features list automatically forwards your calls if the caller would otherwise encounter a busy signal. Again, you need the forward-to number set up in advance, but this is another one of those set-it-and-forget-it services.

The benefits of automatically call forwarding your calls if your lines are busy are twofold. First, if, for example, you have three lines and three calls, a fourth incoming call will automatically go to your answering service.

The other benefit is if your phone lines have a technical problem and return a busy signal. Instead of frustrating callers by not being able to get through, calls will automatically route to your answering service.

Remote Call Forwarding Activation

Last on our list of key advanced call forwarding features is being able to remotely activate call forwarding. This is a great tool to have if you get home only to remember that you forgot to forward your lines when you left the office. Without this time-saving convenience, you must drive back to the office to activate call forwarding.

It’s also nice to have the service if your call forwarding drops off after you set it. Though this doesn’t happen often, it does happen on occasion. Being able to quickly reactivate call forwarding will be a lifesaver in these situations.

Once you have this set up, let your answering service know your password so they can access it for you. This will save even more time and get things resolved faster if they discover a problem with your call forwarding.

Summary

These, and other, advanced call forwarding features can save you time and add value to the work your telephone answering service does for you. Your local telephone company provides these features, so they may vary from one carrier to the next. These features may or may not be available, and they may go by different names. However, your local telephone company may offer some other interesting advanced features as well.

Your answering service may be able to guide you in this, so check with them first.

With a decades-long record of offering telephone answering service to the northwest region and across the United States, Redding Answering Service is committed to providing advanced, first-rate telephone answering service to your company. Let us help you maximize your communication effectiveness—at a cost-effective price—to drive bottom-line results. Peter Lyle DeHaan is a freelance writer who covers the answering service industry.

5 Key Call Forwarding Tips

Send Calls to Your Answering Service with Confidence

There are many options to send your calls to your answering service. However, the most common method, by far, is call forwarding. Call forwarding is easy to use, provides flexibility, and is available from most phone companies. To get the most out of call forwarding, follow these key call forwarding tips.

1. Appoint Someone to Activate Call Forwarding Each Evening

The most critical aspect of using a telephone answering service is to remember to activate call forwarding each night, so that your calls will ring into them. This is the most important of our call forwarding tips. If your phone isn’t forwarded, your answering service can’t answer your calls.

It’s best to include this task as part of a responsible employee’s regular duties. If you have a receptionist, this is a logical person to tap. Other considerations might be an administrative assistant or customer service manager. Or maybe it should fall to you. It’s that important. Regardless, give someone the primary responsibility of activating call forwarding each time you want your answering service to handle your calls.

2. Assign Someone to Serve as Backup

Once you’ve selected a primary call forwarder, assign a backup. The backup can handle this key responsibility when the primary is on vacation, takes a personal day, or is home sick. In some offices the backup person serves as a nice doublecheck on the primary.

3. Determine Who Cancels Call Forwarding Each Morning

Though not as critical as activating call forwarding when you leave the office, you do want to remember to deactivate call forwarding when you return each morning or after lunch. Depending on your staffing and their schedule, this may fall to your primary call forwarder or their backup. However, if these people aren’t working when your office opens, you must assign this task to someone else.

4. Post Instructions by Your Main Telephone

The people who activate and deactivate call forwarding on a regular basis will quickly master the process. It’s not hard after you’ve done it a couple times, but if you need someone to fill in who isn’t familiar with it, it can be a frustrating process that produces mixed results.

Therefore, write out clear instructions on how to activate and deactivate call forwarding as it applies to your phone system and your business. Post these instructions next year main telephone. That way any employee can turn on or turn off call forwarding with confidence.

5. Use Advanced Call Forwarding Features

In addition to standard call forwarding service from your phone company, the fifth of our call forwarding tips is to see what advanced call forwarding features they may offer. We’ll cover these in a future post, but to give you an idea of what to expect, these can include call forwarding if a line is busy, call forwarding if no one answers, and remote activation of call forwarding.

Conclusion

Call forwarding is a simple, flexible way to route your calls to your answering service when you want them to answer. Though it’s easy to use, problems can occasionally occur. Follow these five key call forwarding tips to minimize call forwarding errors and maximize answering service results.

With a decades-long record of offering telephone answering service to the northwest region and across the United States, Redding Answering Service is committed to providing advanced, first-rate telephone answering service to your company. Let us help you maximize your communication effectiveness—at a cost-effective price—to drive bottom-line results. Peter Lyle DeHaan is a freelance writer who covers the answering service industry.

Redding Answering Service, a Call Center Sales Pro Company

Industry Leader Enhances Answering Service Operations to Enhance Client Value

 As announced this summer, Call Center Sales Pro, a leading call center and answering service support company, acquired Redding Answering Service in July 2018. The answering of all calls continued without interruption, and the change of ownership was seamless for both clients and staff.

Redding Answering Service remains located in Redding California. There was, however, a slight tweak of the name to Redding Answering Service, a Call Center Sales Pro Company.

Janet Livingston, a long-time industry veteran of the answering service and call center industry, founded Call Center Sales Pro in 2014. Among her many accomplishments, Janet is a growth expert who has landed two companies on the prestigious Inc. 5000 list on multiple occasions, as well as once on the Inc. 500 list. She’s excited for this opportunity Redding Answering Service provides and looks forward to helping the service grow and become all it can be.

Now under the Call Center Sales Pro umbrella, Livingston plans to introduce new technology to better support the customer service efforts of the staff. With simpler, faster, and smarter technology, the Redding Answering Service employees will be able to serve clients more effectively, both now and in the future. She and her team are also in the process of updating Redding’s procedures to result in increased accuracy and enhance their overall effectiveness.

Livingston wants to build on the legacy of Redding Answering Service. By optimizing their operations, they will be able to produce better outcomes for their clients. In addition to owning and operating answering services and call centers in the United States, Call Center Sales Pro is a full-service call center consultancy that provides a wide array of services to its clients. All this expertise will benefit the operations at Redding Answering Service, which will produce enhanced service and better outcomes for clients.

With a decades-long record of offering telephone answering service to the northwest region and across the United States, Redding Answering Service is committed to providing advanced, first-rate telephone answering service to your company. Let them help you maximize your communication effectiveness—at a cost-effective price—to drive bottom-line results. Peter Lyle DeHaan is a freelance writer who covers the answering service industry.

Welcome to the Redding Answering Service Blog

Answering Service Blog to Cover Key Information About Using Telephone Answering Services

Thanks for checking out our blog! Whether you’re a current client, a possible future client, or someone looking for telephone answering service information, the Redding Answering Service blog is for you.

We have many interesting and helpful posts planned for the upcoming weeks and months. We’ll talk about what an answering service can do for you, how to select the right one, and share tips on how to get the most out of your relationship with your answering service. Plus, we’ll include special bonus content as it becomes available.

Here’s What to Expect from the Redding Answering Service Blog

Helpful Information: Having a successful working relationship with your answering service seldom happens by chance. But it’s not hard either. It just requires a little bit of work by both parties. On the Redding Answering Service blog we’ll share ideas about how you can get the most out of your telephone answering service to achieve outstanding outcomes for your business.

Useful Hints: We’ll also share valuable ideas about how to communicate more effectively using the telephone, as well as other forms of communication, such as email, text, and social media. We’re pretty good at what we do, and we’ll share what we’ve learned over the years with you. Then you can apply it to your business communications.

Insider Insight: Ever wonder how an answering service operates? You shouldn’t have to guess or speculate. We’ll give you the inside scoop. This knowledge will help you interact better with us, which will help us serve you more fully.

Again, thanks for checking out the Redding Answering Service blog. Check back each week for more info. We look forward to serving you and working with you.

Thank you.

With a decades-long record of offering telephone answering service to the northwest region and across the United States, Redding Answering Service is committed to providing advanced, first-rate telephone answering service to your company. Let them help you maximize your communication effectiveness—at a cost-effective price—to drive bottom-line results. Peter Lyle DeHaan is a freelance writer who covers the answering service industry.