Christmas is just around the corner now, Merry Christmas everybody!

Here it is…. the final instalment!

Tip 10

Let the caller hang up first! Nothing worse than ending a perfect call by hanging up on the customer!

Heavy snowfall has disrupted commuters nationwide, shut about 2,000 schools and caused traffic chaos in many parts of the UK.

So what if your staff can’t get into work? Do you have a plan for when things go wrong?

Disaster recovery is the process of restoring operations critical to the resumption of your business. One of the main factors this includes is communications, both incoming and outgoing calls. Frontline Telephone Answering Service specialise in disaster recovery and emergency response, we could be crucial to your disaster recovery plan.

A disaster recovery plan includes plans for coping with the unexpected, including the sudden loss of communications. Disaster recovery planning is an essential part of any business.

We are here 24/7 365 days a year ensuring we are always on standby for you!

Setting up a disaster recovery plan is not as complicated as it may seem. If this is a service you are interested in then feel free to come down to our premises in Hampshire to discuss your requirements.

Tip 9

Tell the caller what you’ve done and what you’re going to do next. For example “Thank you for your call Mr. Jones. I will now pass the details onto our sales team who will be in touch by end of business today. If you don’t hear from anyone or have any questions please feel free to contact me, on any one of my colleagues, on the helpdesk. My name is David.”

Tip 8

Go that extra mile. As the first point of contact for the company it is important that the call handler displays an ingenuity and enthusiasm that will make a positive and lasting impression on the caller. For example; a caller

Tip number 7

Mirror the caller – Mirroring the callers tone and pace helps build rapport.

PS. Its snowing yey!!

We hired someone to handle SEO for our company. That person agreed to generate more traffic to our site, and build back links for us. The “expert” we hired went about generating traffic through spamming various blogs.

One of these blogs was the hpHosts blog, at http://hphosts.blogspot.com. The admin of that blog contacted our company to let us know the person we’d hired was spamming. A staff member at our company who did not have a full understanding of what SEO entails, and how white hat vs. black hat SEO works, responded on our behalf. He defended the spammer.

We fully recognize that our staff member responded inappropriately. Frontline is a respectable, family-owned business, and our reputation, the integrity of our work, and how we are perceived are incredibly important to us. That’s why we wanted to take the time to respond to the blog posting, and to publicly apologize to those who have been affected by this situation.

In attempt to rectify this situation, Frontline Telephone Answering service has taken the following steps:

· We acknowledge that spamming is an unethical and unacceptable way to generate traffic. We have ended our working relationship with the expert we hired to assist us with SEO, and are in the process of recovering the records of sites the spammer attempted to link to. Our relationship with the person we contracted has stopped, and so will any further spamming.

· We are reviewing internal policies in our company relative to PR and communication. We will go over policy changes with our staff to ensure a situation such as this is never poorly handled again.

· Our executives have hired experts to help consult with us about ethical ways of online marketing. We run extensive reference and work quality checks on these experts before hiring, and ensure that any expert we hire is willing to give us a “white hat” guarantee – meaning, he or she will use only ethical methods in order to generate traffic and get us higher in the rankings.

· We would like to publicly apologise to MysteryFCM at hpHosts blog. You were right to call us out, and we were wrong in mishandling complaints about the quality of the work done, and in how we monitored the person who was handling our SEO work.

If your blog has been spammed by someone claiming to be a representative of Frontline, please contact us at spam@frontlinecom.co.uk. We will do everything possible to make things right. We understand there are no excuses for the poor business practices that have happened here, and this has resulted in a hefty lesson for us.

To MysteryFCM, we apologise for wasting your time, as well as transgressing implicit rules of online conduct. We are a small, ethical business, and it’s upsetting to feel that we’ve hurt small businesses by allowing the spam to take place, and responding inappropriately once a staff member was notified.

Thank you so much for your time, and for bringing our focus back to where it should be – serving our customers with quality business solutions here in the UK.

Managing Director David Jones

Tip 6

Use clear English and avoid jargon. Nothing puts a layman off more than being subjected to a barrage of acronyms or technical jargon. You can’t expect a customer to always know what you are talking about.

Tip 5

Mind your manners. Good telephone etiquette is essential. Refer to the caller by name or using Sir/Madam. Always remember your please and thank yous. Avoid interrupting the caller whilst they are talking and most importantly, be nice.

Tip 4

Listen to what the customer really wants. Remember the caller’s name it really demonstrates that you have listened – use it throughout the conversation. Many callers will express their intent at the beginning of the call, it is important that you are listening and understanding what has been said.

Tip 3!

Get a Smile in your voice – a smile is contagious. You can really tell when someone is smiling ask they speak. This is something that gets lost in large and anonymous call centres or organisations and something we insist on at Frontline Telephone Answering service. How do you instigate the smile? Keep your team happy and motivated or just simply ask them to try, once they experience what a difference it makes it’ll make them smile!