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Its unfortunate that many large companies have given auto-attendants a bad image. When most people think of auto-attendants they think of automated systems with so many options, levels, and long holds that one would think they were designed to prevent you from talking to a person.
The reality is auto-attendants are the fastest, least expensive, and most consistent way for a small business to greet and route inbound calls. While many small businesses like to have the “human touch,” it does come with a serious downside - people have bad days, get overloaded, or stay home sick.
Small businesses are ideally suited for auto-attendants - their short staff/department lists means auto-attendants are simple and quick to navigate. Auto-attendants give callers an impression of being established, organized, and substantial - usually good traits. Professional recordings cost just a few hundred dollars and ensure customers always get a helpful and pleasant greeting.
On the flip side, most small businesses without an auto-attendant have calls ring to a group of staff who then route the call. But having valuable staff regularly distracted routing calls just doesn’t make sense, these distractions add up to a serious loss of productivity. And lets face it, not all staff members are well suited to answering callers.
As for the callers, most don’t care if their call routing is human or automated - they just want to quickly talk to the right person to fulfill their need. Even some small business phone systems now support multi-language prompts (english, spanish, and french) making communicating with anyone in North America easier. Those who don’t like auto-attendants usually know to press 0 anyway, which can then go to a person to route the call appropriately.
I’m sure we’ll all had the experience of calling a company to be “greeted” unenthusiastically or incomprehensibly, or greeted only to be put immediately on hold. Auto-attendants never do these things, day in and day out (and night!) they answer your calls in an effective, efficient, and pleasant manner.
The Author: rothman
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This entry was posted by rothman, on Tuesday, November 6th, 2007 at 11:07 am and is filed under Phone Systems. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response on the right, or trackback from your own site.
