Document Your Call Forwarding Instructions

Make Sure Everyone in Your Office Can Easily Turn On and Off Call Forwarding

Most answering service clients use call forwarding to route their calls to their service. Call forwarding is a smart, effective, and reliable method to send your calls to your answering service whenever you want them to answer your phone.

Call Forwarding Is Fast and Simple

Call forwarding is also easy to use. It only takes a few seconds to activate call forwarding when you leave your office in the evening. And it takes even less time to deactivate call forwarding when you arrive in the morning.

The people who regularly turn on and off call forwarding learn to do it without even thinking. However, what happens if the person who regularly does this isn’t available? It may not be so quick or so easy for someone else to figure out. And this is especially true if your activation and deactivation process requires an extra step or two that the phone company’s standard instructions don’t cover.

Write Out Call Forwarding Instructions

Therefore you need to write down the steps to activate and deactivate call forwarding. Once you’ve done this, ask someone who’s never done it before to see if they can follow the written steps to turn on and then turn off call forwarding, without any prompting or assistance.

Based on that experience, fine-tune the instructions. Then repeat this process until you have it perfect. Now anyone in your office can easily follow the instructions to successfully activate and deactivate call forwarding.

Post Call Forwarding Instructions by Your Phone

Now that you have a set of can’t-miss steps to activate and deactivate call forwarding, prominently post this procedure next to your primary telephone in the office. Don’t leave this piece of paper laying loose on the desk, stuffed into a folder, or filed in the operations manual. Fasten it to your phone or right above it. Bonus points if you laminate it. This will make it look more important and less likely for someone to accidently throw it away.

Prepare for Holidays, Vacations, and Absences

Just because one person regularly handles activating call forwarding each evening and deactivating call forwarding each morning, doesn’t mean they’re always going to be available to do it. You may even have a backup person to handle this when the primary person isn’t there.

But what happens when neither one of them are in the office? During holidays, vacations, and special employee schedules, you’ll run into times when the people who’ve mastered call forwarding aren’t around to do it. That’s why we’ve gone through these steps to be prepared.

Conclusion

It may seem like a hassle to write out your call forwarding instructions and post it by the phone. But you’ll be glad you have it when it’s time to go home in the evening and there’s no one there who’s ever turned on call forwarding. Take these steps now, and save yourself aggravation later.

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.