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.