Elizabeth Lockwood

Retention is great, and it’s a critical part of your success. However, you also need to make sure that you have a steady stream of new clients coming in for your construction business to remain profitable and continue growing. The good news is that there are a lot of resources and tools to help you with finding clients these days, saving a lot of time and the stress that comes from things like cold calling.

Each year, small business owners reflect on their successes, opportunities for improvement, and how far they’ve come compared to where they were this time last year. Often, though, they don’t use that insight to make effective resolutions for the coming year. Forget about exercising more, eating healthier, and all those other typical resolutions that usually get abandoned by mid-January.

You only get one chance to make a first impression, so virtual receptionists play a vital role in welcoming a new client to your business. At Smith.ai, our 24/7 virtual receptionists provide complete answering services, including scheduling and intake (plus much more), to give you the edge you need right now. To help you enjoy time to relax this holiday season and hit the ground running come 2023, we're making our receptionist services more accessible than ever with a Black Friday deal that gives you a 30% off discount, good for your first three months of service, as long as you redeem before November 30, 2022.

Year after year, millions of Americans are plagued by spam calls and unfortunately, the issue is far from being resolved. In fact, First Orion reported that, from 2020 to 2021, there was been a 118% increase in spam calls, and that percentage is only expected to grow in the years to come.To help ensure consumers aren’t constantly bombarded with spam calls, phone carriers are starting to offer solutions, like SPAM RISK Caller ID, which is designed to alert customers of incoming spam calls. But spam ID technology isn’t bulletproof. Sometimes, numbers are incorrectly marked as spam. So what happens when your business number gets flagged as spam, and how do you ensure your callers won’t brush off your calls as yet another spam call?

If you find your business missing a lot of valuable calls or spending an inordinate amount of time returning messages, you need an answering service. Of course, that comes with its own set of concerns and considerations, starting with what type of answering service to hire. There are several options out there today, including answering services and virtual receptionist solutions that can handle everything from calls and chats to lead intake, appointment scheduling, and even payment collection for the businesses that need it.

There’s a lot of information out there about answering services for small businesses and solopreneurs because they obviously need the assistance, but what about enterprise organizations that seem to have it all? They might still benefit in several ways from a partnership with an answering service or virtual receptionist.

There are several benefits that come from adding an answering service to your list of partners and outsourced services. For starters, you can choose 24/7 services so that you never miss an opportunity, no matter what time it is or what you may be doing. You’ll also guarantee that people get a professional live person on the other end when they call with a need or concern.

Being a small business doesn’t mean that you can’t find big opportunities to improve things by outsourcing or forming partnerships. In fact, it’s often the small businesses that benefit most from these types of solutions, including the addition of a dedicated answering service.

Retail store owners have a lot to deal with on a daily basis, including all the calls that come into the store seeking information on your hours of operation, location, and other information that can only come from talking to someone at the store. What if you don’t have enough people at the store to handle the call volume? Or maybe you just want to invest in a service that will deliver 24-hour solutions so that you never miss a lead again.