How To Start a Telephone Answering BusinessWritten by Jose Valdez
A telephone answering service business is relatively inexpensive and is a home based business that you can operate without having to leave comfort of your home. It offers great money making potential and is one easiest to operate. Any business that relies on telephone is a potential customer. However, your target market will most likely be small businesses and professionals with a busy schedule that relies on incoming telephone calls yet cannot take these calls themselves during certain periods of day. Some of best prospective customers to target are small businesses and/or professionals that operate long or odd hours. Examples of such professionals and/or businesses are repair service businesses such as plumbers and electricians. The needs of an answering service business will vary from one business to another. Most answering services only receive incoming calls on behalf of businesses or professionals for whom they are working. There are some answering services that offer services beyond this, such as doing some administrative tasks and/or making outbound calls. A business may want or need to have a telephone answering service handle telephone calls that it receives during a certain period of day or 24 hours a day. You should choose in advance, hours that your business will operate and services that you will provide. This will help you better determine needs of your business. Setting up Your Business If you will be operating a telephone answering service business by yourself, it may best to solicit business of businesses and/or professionals that need such a service during only certain time of day. For example, you can choose to have your hours of operation be from 8AM to 6PM. This will allow you to more easily operate your home business by yourself. You should also choose in advance number of clients and services that your business will be providing for them. If all that you will be doing is receiving inbound calls, this will make it easier to handle responsibilities of more than one business at a time. If your business will be providing The number of clients that you will take on and services that you will offer will determine how you will set up your home based business. Phone Lines The way most home based business telephone answering services are set up, is for there to be a separate phone line for each for each client. Each telephone is then marked with company name to help you identify which client phone line is ringing. Having separate phone lines installed should run you $100 to $200 each. There will also be an additional monthly charge of roughly $35 to $40. You can buy telephones at a local store. If you intend to expand your home based business into a small business, you will want to lease a switchboard and possibly move to a small office. This allows you to take on a higher volume of calls and therefore more clients. For purpose of this article however, only aspect of starting and operating a home based business telephone answering will be discussed. Switchboards An alternative to having multiple phone lines installed, is to lease a switchboard from your phone company. You will want to carefully consider location of switchboard. Once a switchboard is set up, it can be costly to move due to penalty fees that phone companies will charge to relocate service. If you plan to have someone else to help you receive phones calls, this may be a better option for you than having multiple phone lines.
| | 7 Benefits Of Working At Home Written by Barry Redfearn
1. Cut Out The commute Time.According to a recent survey average person in U.S. spends 51 minutes a day commuting to work. That’s 221 hours a year, or 9.2 days. According to US Census Bureau, average commute time varies from state to state. The longest commute time are in largest cities. New York City residents take an average of 38.4 minutes to get to work each day. Unless you are lucky enough to live in Lancaster County, Nebrasa your one way commute is only 15 minutes. This ads up to a lot of time over space of a year. Working at home cuts out this major headache of that dreary commute to work everyday. 2. Spend More Time With Your Family. With ever increased pressure in today’s work place. Parents are spending more time at work at less time with their family. This puts pressure on you, employee and more pressure on family unit. It is increasingly difficult to get Work-Life balance correct. Working at home gives you opportunity to get that balance correct so as it does not interfere with your family life. 3. Be The Boss. How many times have you complained about your boss behind their back. This is a common occurrence with many people in full time employment. At times you can clash with your boss, and no matter what you do, your boss is never pleased. No more having to meet up to other people’s expectations and deadlines. You set targets you want to achieve. 4. Get Rewarded For The Work You Do.
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