Should Plumbers Answer The Telephone?

Let me take this title a step deeper. Let’s say you are a smaller plumbing company, you and maybe 1 or 2 other service men. What happens when the three of you are out on a call during business hours or in the sake of homeowners needs, during the day. What I find and this seems to be pretty common in a lot of small contractor businesses, they leave the phone attended by nothing more than an answering machine.
You may not realize it, but this is bad in more ways than you might think. In the plumbing business, more that likely, potential customers are calling because they have a specific problem they need fixed ASAP. If they hear an answering machine pick up, they are gone. I can tell you across the board working with several plumbing contractors across the United States, if no one answers the phone the customer will hang up and move on to the next plumbing contractor. This is a major loss of business. Just calculate it yourself with very small numbers, imagine losing two jobs per week, that’s eight jobs per month, and the minimum that could be a loss of $2000.00. Now calculate that by twelve months. That’s a lot of lost revenue.
Another issue that this poses is that it makes you look like a one man show, not that there is anything wrong with that, in fact I believe it’s the small companies that give the best service. However a lot of people have this idea that it’s always better to deal with bigger companies, bigger companies show stability in their minds. With that said just because you’re small does not mean you cannot look big.
So what can you do to avoid this possible loss of business. You could hire someone to answer your phones, an office person can handle a lot of the little things around the office in addition to answering the telephones. Now before you say that you don’t have the budget to hire someone, take a look at the budget. Having this person just answering your telephone has the potential to increase business just because you won’t miss the hang up calls. They also have the ability to do the little things that are keeping you busy but not generating revenue.
Another option is to hire an answering service. Answering services are hit or miss the more you pay the better quality service you get. Try to avoid looking for the cheapest service, the cheap ones do a really bad job and end up losing business for you. Look around at different services and see if you can listen to their call quality before hiring them.
Another option is a Virtual PBX service. These are very cheap and have the ability to route calls to you. So if you are out in the field rather that having someone call your cell phone you can have the Virtual PBX answer the call and transfer it to you. Services like this can run anywhere from $25.00 to $75.00 per month. One that I recommend is Ring Central (RingCentral.com).
By just adding one of these methods to your business you will stop losing business by not answering the telephone.