'Assistant' to answer the phone!!

[marcandal]

Hi All

I am looking to sign up to one of these companies that answer the phone for you! - Where they answer it - take the enquiry then email it to you (something like that anyway!!) There seem to be a few companies out there but I would prefer to use a recommened one, so if anyone could let me know of one that would be great. Hope you can understand what I mean!! I don't know the 'proper' term for them!!!

Alison

[MerrilyMe]

I did find the people at www.jam.co.uk to be excellent in many ways and used the towards the end of last year. In all honesty the main things that were a problem were that a) i didn't have time to give them all the info they really needed and b) because it sounded like a call centre (albeit one answering as me) people assumed i was much bigger than i am and seemed to immediately into "fix this, damn you" mindsets rather than being friendly.

But that really wasn't Jam's issue, more mine!

[Seren]

not sure if they are still going but 20 years ago my old boss used British Monomarks, they also provided a postal service, you would get a BCM address and the post would be collected or sent on to you. They also did a telephone service not sure if they are still around

[Miranda]

We have tried several with inherent problems, eg:
Small company of secretarial services/payroll/phone answering type, local to us, 2 ladies always there to answer which was good, were inteligent enough to be taught a lot of what to say and knew where to look for the info which was very good, however non-automated service meant sometimes they forgot to fax the info to us but the real no-go was their cleaner used to unplug the phone (we had a direct line we diverted to) in order that her hoover cable would reach. As we didn't use the service very often, it could be unplugged and not answered for several days on the trot!!! Not good. So we ditched them.

Large call centre charged 'a flat fee per call' + 'x pence per minute'. All well and good but even when told to say we are not advertising until next year they insisted in taking down every minutae of detail so that we got charged an average £1 a call. As by this point a Mr Howell had decided to give our phone number out as his number (and borrowed a load of money and not paid it back by the sound of it) Mr H was costing us about £8 a day in calls even though they were told to say Mr H is nothing to do with us we still got a message eg 'John Smith from xyz Finance number 0123456789 would like Mr Howeel to call him back before 5.30'. Was sure that despite our instructuions the staff were incentivised to be slow! Was interesting that calls made over lunchtime were noticeably shorter as presumably they were shorter staffed and had to be quicker! So we ditched answering services and just use BT callminder, ringing back everyone that rings us even if they don't leave a message. there is normally someone here apart from school holidays every morning anyway, and with the number of competitors about we really don't get as many calls as we used to.