Frequently Asked Questions

Any business that receives phone calls from customers, prospects or colleagues can benefit from our telephone answering service. Below is an example of a few business areas where we can help…

• Small Businesses Without A Secretary/Receptionist – If you haven’t got a receptionist or secretary then the task of answering the phone may fall to the business owner and key personnel. This can be the cause of constant interruptions when in meetings or trying to complete important tasks.

  As an alternative to employing a secretary or receptionist and taking on the extra costs and responsibility of an employee, a telephone answering and reception service is a more cost-effective and simpler solution to your requirements. You can rely on our PA’s to always be there on time, they won’t be off sick or take holidays and you’ll only pay when you use the service.

• Small Businesses With A Secretary/Receptionist – You may already have reception or admin staff who answer your calls, but what happens when they’re already dealing with a call, are away from their desk, on holiday or off sick?

  You can divert your calls to our reception team who’ll pick up calls when you can’t. You can choose to use our flexible telephone answering service for overflow calls (when your line’s engaged or is not answered within a certain number of rings) or to help cover periods of staff absence.

• Businesses That Require Holiday and Sickness Cover For Call Answering – If staff members are taking time off then you may need support for a short period of time to help answer your calls and take messages. We have no minimum contracts and flexible options that are perfect for short term cover

• Businesses That Require Overflow Call Management – Whatever the size of your business you’ll have times when your reception staff can’t take a call. We can pick up overflow calls and even patch them through to the right person. Your customers won’t even realise their call has been answered off site.

• Mobile Businesses – If your business requires you to be away from the office for most of the day (for example if you’re a plumber, mobile hairdresser or consultant), then a telephone answering service will not only ensure you don’t miss a call, but will also help you provide better service to your customers as you won’t have to worry about answering the phone to a new prospect when you’re in the middle of an important job for another customer.

• Start Up Businesses – Make sure you never miss a call from a valuable customer or a new prospect. Divert your calls to your our reception team when you’re not available to take a call or when you’re already on the line.

  Like many start up businesses you’ll be closely watching the pennies. Our flexible service is a perfect way for you to carefully manage your budget whilst ensuring that you never miss a call. After all, you don’t want to waste money generating leads only to then miss the call!

• Businesses Who Want To Carefully Monitor Marketing Campaigns – If you’re investing in marketing then you need to know whether your money has been well spent. We can carefully log all your enquiries by source to make sure you know which advertising method is working the best; we can even provide you with different telephone numbers to test different campaigns.

• Businesses That Send Out Information/Brochures – We can send out information on your behalf. We’ll take the caller’s details (and send you these in a message) and send the information they have requested (by email or post) without you having to lift a finger!

One of the benefits to you of working with an owner managed business is the flexibility we can offer. We try our best to help our clients in any way we can. If you’re interested in a service that isn’t listed below, then please get in touch and speak directly to the business owners (Chris or Andy) and we’ll see what we can do!

• PA Services

  Firstly, let me say this - we are not a call centre. We are a small (relative to a large call centre) owner managed business and we pride ourselves in getting to know our customers. And because of this we are able to offer a service that is a little more personalised than many of our competitors…

  • You can call in and speak to your receptionist to pick up your most recent messages
  • Our receptionists can make calls on your behalf, perhaps change an appointment time, notify a customer that you’re running late or simply pass on a message

• Virtual Reception

  If you employ a receptionist to answer your calls and put them through to the correct extension, then you could save your company time and money by outsourcing this service.

  Employed receptionists take lunch breaks, holidays, and time off sick, plus you have to pay salaries and national insurance contributions etc. By outsourcing this service you can save yourself the hassle of covering periods of absence as well as saving your company money.

  Your Office & PA can act as your receptionist, answering calls and patching them through. This service is fully flexible, we can answer all your calls or just act as an overflow or back up service when your receptionist is not available.

• Mailing Services

  We can receive, sort and send on your mail, either by post of scanned copies. Businesses who find this service useful:

  • Require a UK postal address – perhaps newly launching in the UK
  • Don’t have the time to sort post or are fed up with receiving junk mail
  • Require post sorting and sending to people at different addresses (perhaps home workers etc)

• Diary Management

If you’re an appointment based business and use (or can move to) an online diary, then we can handle your callers appointment requests immediately, whilst we are on the phone to them.

Our customers who already use this service tell us that this works really well for them and saves them the time and cost of having to return calls themselves or hire a receptionist.

“The team are bright and do so much more than answer the phone. They book and rearrange appointments and return customer calls. They are valued members of our organisation” Helen Wood, Simply Team, London SW12

Our team are experienced at managing diaries for a variety of practice based businesses such as physiotherapists, medical centres, hairdressers and beauty businesses and driving schools (amongst others).

• Online Ordering and Payment Processing

Using your website or other online order and payment terminal, we can process over the phone orders and payments ensuring that you capture the sale immediately without any need for return calls.

“The team process orders, take payments, check stock levels and provide contact information for suppliers” Daren Casey, E Sup, Guilford

Setting up our telephone answering service is simple – just follow the simple steps below…

• Register for our FREE, 14 day no obligation trial (takes 2 mins max!) online or call 0800 433 40 30
• As soon as we receive your details Chris or Andy will call you to explain the process and set up your FREE customer account
• We’ll confirm when we’re ready to go live (usually within a few hours of receiving your free trial registration) and make sure you understand how to divert your calls so you can start using our service

Click here to register for our FREE, no obligation 14 day trial

The only condition of our FREE trial is that you’re not on holiday. If you’re looking for holiday cover only, then we are more than happy to provide this. In fact we don’t tie any customers in with lengthy contracts so you can easily set up the service just to cover holidays.

We are so confident that we can consistently deliver a high standard of customer service to all our clients, that we offer a unique “World Class Service Guarantee”.

Our guarantee is our promise to you that we’ll always live up to our promises – You’ll get free calls for a month if we fail!

Your FREE, 14 day, no obligation trial, can be up and running within a few hours. All the information we require to set your account up, such as preferred greeting, key personnel, contact details etc, can be entered by you via our secure client website or, if you prefer, you can call and complete the form over the phone with one of our receptionists.

Once this is completed it only takes a couple of hours for us to check the details and set you live.

Our telephone answering and reception service is available:

• 08.30 – 19.00 Monday to Friday
• 09.00 - 14.00 Saturday

After hours your lines will be diverted to voicemail. You’ll have your own dedicated service with a greeting personalised for your company (you can record the greeting yourself if required). You can call in to your secure line to pick up messages at anytime. We’ll also check for voicemails each morning (with the exception of Sunday) and send you the details on a message.

You can also choose to have notifications of your voicemails sent directly to you by email. This way you’ll be notified as soon as a caller leaves a message.

Simply click here to complete our online form to set up your FREE 14 day trial, or call 0800 433 40 30 and speak to one of reception team who’ll set up your account for you.