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How To Beat Telephone Interruptions

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The telephone can be a tremendous time saver as well as a time waster. The important point is to make it your servant, not your master....you must take control, or suffer the loss of wasteful consequences.

You need to schedule time to deal effectively with phone calls, not take them on a chance basis, at the caller's convenience. Step one is avoiding the knowledge of an incoming call. Choose a method that suits your personality and your work situation.

1. Get your secretary to hold all your calls. Ask for a report or paper message slips at a time of your scheduling, once or twice each day. Allow yourself enough time to return those which are important, or to give instructions for your secretary to handle responses.

If possible, your secretary should be located far enough away from you that you never hear the phone ring, or hear him/her talking on the phone.

3. Use voicemail or an answering machine. It should be located where you cannot hear it and phones should be turned off. Your machine can offer a courteous voicemail message that simply explains that in order to work better and serve each person with undivided attention, you return phone calls between 10:00 and 11:00 A.M. And 3:00 to 4:00 P.M., for example. It's also a good idea to encourage the caller to contact you using email. Of course, you check email no more often than twice daily, just before or after you handle your phone calls would be a good time.

Obviously, customer service and order taking lines should be very responsive. A good plan for this is to farm this work out to a company that charges per minute and specializes in these tasks, such as:

1. Jim Buck at Direct Connect at 402-758-1200. Just follow the voice mail instructions to speak to Jim

2. Live Ops (www.liveops.com) utilizes home based reps to keep costs reasonable

3.West Teleservices www.west.com. This is a big company.

4. InPulse www.inpulseresponse.com All the services to put together a big direct marketing campaign and handle response.

To cover all the bases and not miss important calls, establish a second phone number (I use a pre-paid cell phone) Share this number only with a few special people...the ones you can trust to call only for important business. This allows the few truly important calls to get through to you directly. Few of my friends, associates and customers know the number for my cell phone. For those calls that do get through at times other than your scheduled phone time, be courteous, efficient and businesslike.

Don't answer in a social manner like "Hi, John, how are you?" Get direct and to the point: "Hi, John, it's good to hear from you; what can I do for you today?

If John gets chatty you might say: "John, it's a really busy day and I have an appointment/meeting/phone call to make in three/five minutes. How can I help you?"

If John is really, really off course, you might say: "John, it was nice to hear from you, but I am late for a meeting, I've really got to go."

Summary:

1. Keep plenty of space between yourself and the phone. Turn the ringer off.

2. Give your secretary specific instructions and leave the phone work to him or her, then get a report at your scheduled phone time

3.Establish a special "urgent" line. Give this number to a few select people you can trust to respect your time.

4. When you must get on the phone, or if a call slips through to you, be businesslike, direct and to the point. Know the purpose and scope of a call before you answer or return a call, then take care of business and get off.

5. Encourage callers to use email instead. This will allow you to better prepare responses to questions, etc. and allows more effective use of your communication time.

Article Source: http://www.uberarticles.com/articles

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