Staff Who Do Not Normally Answer the Phone

Who actually answers

In a small business at a busy time, the phone is answered by whoever is free.

That is frequently somebody who does not normally do it: a family member helping out, a seasonal hire, somebody from the workshop, or the person who happened to be standing nearest.

They want to be helpful, they have no script, and they do not know what they are allowed to say.

So they guess, and the guesses become promises, and the promises become the problem you deal with in January.

What goes wrong

• A delivery date invented to be reassuring.
• A price quoted from memory or from last year.
• Stock confirmed without checking.
• A booking made into a slot that is taken.
• A discount offered that nobody authorised.
• A message taken and never passed on.

All six come from the same instinct, which is not wanting to be unhelpful, and all six are prevented by telling somebody in advance what they are allowed to say.

The one page

Everything that person needs fits on a single sheet, and writing it takes half an hour.

How to answer: the business name, their own name, and how can I help.

The five answers they will actually need, written out: current delivery timing, opening hours over the period, whether you are taking new work, roughly what things cost, and where you are.

What they must never do: promise a date, quote a price, confirm stock, or offer a discount.

What to say instead when they do not know.

And who to pass it to, with a name and a number.

Give them the words for not knowing

The most useful sentence on the page, because the alternative is a guess.

Something like: I do not want to give you the wrong information, so let me take your number and have the right person call you back within the hour.

That is a good answer. It sounds competent, it is honest, and it produces a callback rather than a wrong promise.

Say explicitly that using it is expected and that nobody will be criticised for it, because the reason people guess is fear of seeming unhelpful or unqualified.

A member of staff who has been told that not knowing is acceptable will use the sentence. One who has not will invent a delivery date.

A worked example

A shop took on two seasonal staff and gave them till training and nothing else.

Both answered the phone during the busy fortnight, and both told customers that orders placed that week would arrive before Christmas, which was true for some products and not others.

Around a dozen of those arrived late, and two became reviews mentioning that they had been told otherwise on the phone.

The following year the owner wrote a single page and spent twenty minutes going through it with each new person.

It covered the greeting, five answers, four things never to promise, the callback sentence, and a name to pass things to.

There were no equivalent complaints, and the seasonal staff reported finding the phone considerably less stressful, which had not been the intention and was the more useful outcome.

Message taking is the other half

A separate failure and an easily fixed one.

A message written on a scrap of paper, or remembered, is a customer who never hears back and does not phone again.

Give them a fixed place to put messages, whether a pad, a form, or a shared note, and a fixed set of fields: name, number, what it is about, and when they called.

Then name who checks that place and how often, because a well-kept message pad nobody reads is the same failure with extra steps.

Say the number back to the caller before hanging up, which catches most of the errors that make a message useless.

Brief them on tone, briefly

A short section rather than a long one, because most people are naturally fine.

The things worth saying: it is fine to sound like yourself, do not read from the page word for word, and if somebody is annoyed the answer is to listen and pass it on rather than to defend anybody.

Tell them what the business is proud of, in one sentence, since somebody who knows why customers choose you will convey it without being told to.

And tell them the one thing customers most often get wrong about you, so they can correct it naturally.

That is more useful than any amount of scripting and it takes two minutes to explain.

Update it during the season

The step that keeps the page true.

Delivery timings change, cutoffs pass, and stock runs out, and a page written in November is wrong by the middle of December.

Assign the update to whoever changes the website messages, since they are making the same changes and can do both.

Print the current version and keep it by the phone, replacing it rather than annotating it.

A page with three crossings-out is one people stop trusting, and then they start guessing again.

The counter-case

This can be overdone in a way that damages what a small business is good at.

Heavy scripting makes people sound like a call centre, and customers phone a small business partly because they expect not to get one.

Rules that are too tight also produce a frustrating experience, where somebody who plainly knows the answer is not permitted to give it, and the caller is passed around for a simple question.

The distinction is between commitments and information. Anybody can give information. Only certain people should make commitments about dates, prices, and stock.

Write the page around that line rather than around control, and let people be themselves inside it.

The half hour

1. Write one page, not a manual.
2. Include the five answers they will actually need.
3. List four things never to promise.
4. Give them the not-knowing sentence.
5. Name who to pass things to.
6. Fix where messages go and who checks it.
7. Reprint it whenever the timings change.

Step four prevents most of what goes wrong, and it works only if somebody says out loud that using it is fine.

Answering while working is covered in answering the phone when you are on a roof.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.