Be “In” when you are “Out”

In “Frozen Britain” many of us struggled to get into the office or indeed just get out of our driveways or make it across the un-gritted road! As swathes of Britain were hit by fresh waves of snow, drivers faced treacherous conditions amid cutbacks in road gritting while rail or bus services buckled under the strain. And we are promised more of the same by the men at the Met Office. The Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) claims that bad weather over the past few weeks has brought the economy to a standstill. It estimates that the snow-induced commercial paralysis cost the UK economy at least £600 million a day.

Many businesses could be losing out simply because there’s no-one in the office to take the incoming sales calls. For some businesses, that may not be too much of an issue because they list a mobile as their main business contact number, mainly because they are out and about a lot or work outside “normal” business hours. But for many others, a fixed landline and number is an essential communications and marketing tool, not least because of cost, company IT integration issues and the fact that a mobile contact number somehow seems less “legitimate” for a business of substantial size.

That’s especially the case if you have an 0800 number to encourage your customers to contact you without them having to incur any telephone call costs. Many companies also employ 0870 or 0845 non geographical numbers (NGN) to present a “national number” that confers credibility to any business, no matter where they are based. It’s relatively easy and cheap to have those incoming calls redirected to a convenient mobile or other landline number for the duration of adverse weather, so you don’t need to change the main contact number in your promotional or sales literature. Indeed many VoIP-based business telephone systems have features that will automatically and completely seamlessly redirect incoming calls on the established VoIP contact number to a pre-programmed mobile (or any other telephone handset or mobile device) after a set number of rings whether you use 0800 numbers or not.

Even if your business has multiple and differently named operations that share the same general contact number, you can still work as normal when you can’t reach the office with a virtual assistant package. This identifies the inbound call from your client so you can greet the caller in the name of the company or division they expect to contact without the need to install additional telephone lines. With all of these options, redirection is completely invisible to any caller, so you can continue to carry on business as usual and appear to be “in” even when you are “out”, no matter what Mother Nature may throw at us over the next few weeks!