How should we answer our phone?
by Nils Menten - May 23, 2007 / 8:25pm
It's an age-old problem in a modern small business. How should we answer our phone? What follows was about 1 second away from being an internal email, but I thought I'd open it up to more general comment. Non-iMarcians and iMarcians alike, please weigh in.
For a little background, we've had a longstanding policy for all 10 years we've been around that a human would answer the phone. It's one of my peccadilloes, but there is something too impersonal for me in serving our customers from behind an auto-attendant. I want our customers to know that we are always accessible to them.
So the policy for all these years has been that we all take turns answering the phone, more or less by the honor system. Inevitably some folks are more willing then others, and that sometimes ends up inequitable, but it has generally worked out fine.
As we've grown however, it's becoming a bit more of a burden and an honest drag on productivity. Let's face it, if you're in the throes of writing the Best Proposal Ever or the Most Elegant Code Object it's frankly disruptive to see if I'm in, try and be polite and helpful to a caller when you're on a deadline, etc. We need a better solution.
Here's the almost-sent email. I would really appreciate your comments:
Gang,
I'm having a chatty evening.
New topic, how we answer the phone. Consider this a request for comment on a proposed change in policy. The goals of a change would be to:
- Spend less time answering the phone.
- Spread the task of answering around better because it becomes less onerous to do so.
- Still provide human contact in nearly all cases, and a prompt, easy-to-access human alternative to voicemail.
This is what I'm suggesting we adopt.
The phone rings, we answer it. We also do a better job about taking our respective turns in doing so :-).
Caller asks for Craig. We say 'just a moment please', and transfer the call to Craig's line. We don't see if he's there, we don't screen. Poof, transferred. 15 seconds elapsed.
Craig answers or not if he's there or not. If he's not it goes to vmail.
Here are the critical factors in this working well:
I DO NOT want us to adopt a culture where we routinely let our calls go to voice mail when we're sitting there and then call folks back. I would accept that no more than 10% of the time. Note the rare use of all caps. We're not doing that.
Our vmail greetings need to be short and sweet, and need to direct them to call another specific extension or 0 if they need immediate assistance. This part needs some consideration because dialing 0 means they all land on Nick and that's not a good default solution either.
Ringing extensions can be annoying. It'd be good if we could shorten up the number of rings before a call goes to vmail. Furthermore, we could all turn our ringers down to the minimum and still hear them fine. In fact, please do that.
We've all got to bone up on transferring calls quickly, and keep the phone rosters handy and up to date.
Last thought: The dreaded auto-attendant answering. My knee-jerk reaction is that I do not want to go there, but let's have a poll of everyone's opinion on that issue too.
Comments please.
Best,
Nils
For a little background, we've had a longstanding policy for all 10 years we've been around that a human would answer the phone. It's one of my peccadilloes, but there is something too impersonal for me in serving our customers from behind an auto-attendant. I want our customers to know that we are always accessible to them.
So the policy for all these years has been that we all take turns answering the phone, more or less by the honor system. Inevitably some folks are more willing then others, and that sometimes ends up inequitable, but it has generally worked out fine.
As we've grown however, it's becoming a bit more of a burden and an honest drag on productivity. Let's face it, if you're in the throes of writing the Best Proposal Ever or the Most Elegant Code Object it's frankly disruptive to see if I'm in, try and be polite and helpful to a caller when you're on a deadline, etc. We need a better solution.
Here's the almost-sent email. I would really appreciate your comments:
Gang,
I'm having a chatty evening.
New topic, how we answer the phone. Consider this a request for comment on a proposed change in policy. The goals of a change would be to:
- Spend less time answering the phone.
- Spread the task of answering around better because it becomes less onerous to do so.
- Still provide human contact in nearly all cases, and a prompt, easy-to-access human alternative to voicemail.
This is what I'm suggesting we adopt.
The phone rings, we answer it. We also do a better job about taking our respective turns in doing so :-).
Caller asks for Craig. We say 'just a moment please', and transfer the call to Craig's line. We don't see if he's there, we don't screen. Poof, transferred. 15 seconds elapsed.
Craig answers or not if he's there or not. If he's not it goes to vmail.
Here are the critical factors in this working well:
I DO NOT want us to adopt a culture where we routinely let our calls go to voice mail when we're sitting there and then call folks back. I would accept that no more than 10% of the time. Note the rare use of all caps. We're not doing that.
Our vmail greetings need to be short and sweet, and need to direct them to call another specific extension or 0 if they need immediate assistance. This part needs some consideration because dialing 0 means they all land on Nick and that's not a good default solution either.
Ringing extensions can be annoying. It'd be good if we could shorten up the number of rings before a call goes to vmail. Furthermore, we could all turn our ringers down to the minimum and still hear them fine. In fact, please do that.
We've all got to bone up on transferring calls quickly, and keep the phone rosters handy and up to date.
Last thought: The dreaded auto-attendant answering. My knee-jerk reaction is that I do not want to go there, but let's have a poll of everyone's opinion on that issue too.
Comments please.
Best,
Nils
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36 Comments
Have you considered hiring a receptionist/operator/coffee gereration technician? Sure would save Rob a lot of time.
;)
Chief
On one hand:
Most of the time for me, to interrupt train-of-thought is to interrupt train-of-thought. I'd think that cutting away from work even while still in mid-thought may accidentally result in someone sounding bothered or distracted on the phone. I think the situation described above (of writing the best proposal, etc.) may be true, but in a company of 13ish other people, you'd think that at any given time someone would be free to pick up the phone.
On another hand:
I've had more and more people lately asking for "direct lines" to people so that they didn't have to call the main line. Would simple forwarding take care of this? Would people rather be greeted automatically and choose their own adventure from there?
On a third hand:
The biggest derailer of thought-trains for me is the company-wide intercom. It forces you to stop whatever you're doing immediately and focus on something else (regardless of how simple it is).
I'm not sure that what we do now isn't working, and if we were to change it at all, this would be my suggestion: we answer the phone as normal and check at someone's desk for them, but if you aren't at your desk, then we assume that you're not available and ask to help the person or forward to voicemail. The biggest commotion in the entire process is tracking people down, so we eliminate that step. If you really mid-unbreakable concentration then don't pick up the phone, just answer your fair share of calls when you aren't as deep in thought and it feels like things should be alright... right?
If you get lots of phone calls, answer the phone a lot. Why bother having me field a call than has a 25% chance to go to Nick, 25% change to go to Dave, or 50% change to go to Karin, Rob, or yourself? One of you is going to have to interrupt your work to handle the call anyway, so why bother interrupting my concentration also? In total, I have probably actually handled less than 50 phone calls in the two and a half years I have been here. That’s about two a month, or less than one per week. I certainly answer the phone a lot more than that.
Recently I have probably been answering the phone less than in the past, but I can’t say I feel bad about that. If I am deep in thought, often times I don’t even really register the phone is ringing. I probably have 20+ variables queued up in my head and am in the middle of writing code in three different files. Answering the phone will probably result in a 5+ minute slowdown. The general concept of task switching for programmers is nicely covered at http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000022.html.
Obviously there are sometimes when I am checking my mail, or visiting a web site. In those situations I usually answer the phone a much larger percentage of the time than when I am in the middle of thought.
I have noticed that recently more calls are getting to the four ring limit before being handled by the automatic system. This should probably be upped to like six since that would increase the hit rate.
Also, is it possible for a caller directly enter an extension as soon as the call rings? This probably isn't possible, but would be really nice since 95% of the people know exactly who they want to call. Then if they didn't enter an extension it would ring everyone just as it does now.
Oddly enough I've worked in places where all three possibilities have been the standard. The irony is that in each case the process was bothersome. The issue is not HOW the phone is answered but WHEN the phone is answered. Fred has a good point, mid-conscious stream-of-thought is the WORST time to be interrupted for a programmer. The logical connections we're trying to form are fragile when in the early phases and a "Hey Fred, phone dude" is like the proverbial Bull in a China Shop to our brain. I can't speak for Sales Departments, Management, or any other "titles".
My current situation is a main line that is picked up by an auto-answering mechanism. The caller is prompted to speak the name of the person they are trying to reach and the computer does a "best guess" and forwards them. Sounds Futuristic and cool right? NOT SO, especially when you work for a company that sends out bills and you live in an area where the spoken language is not always 100% articulated. Having the last name of HILL I can't tell you how many times my day has gone like this:
*Brilliant life saving logical algorythm processing*
*Huge potential time-saving process forming*
RING, RING
*CRASH*
*Hey, caller ID, I don't know that number*
*pickup*
me: "Data Resources, this is Nick"
caller: "mumble mumble mumble Bill"
me: "I'm sorry, could you repeat that"
caller *rubbing phone on the asphalt as they drive at 45* "kkrrrsshh crseessssh Bill"
me: "Sir, are you trying to pay your bill?"
caller: *apparently calling from an undersear evil lair* "yes, bill, si, how to pay"
*start down long process of translating correct phone number*
*bow*
1: 35% of iMarcians answer 85% of the calls
2: the "system-wide-page".
There's already an informal policy regarding #1, so I'm not sure what can be done to improve the situation. I do know that a general announcement to everyone saying "hey, please answer the phone your fair share" falls on deaf ears for people that don't answer the phone much anyways and irritates the people that do answer the phone more than their fair share. That's coming from someone who didn't answer the phone the first 6 weeks they were here. There are grains of salt in the kitchen if anyone needs them.
It would be unfair if i failed to mention that some people have perfectly good reasons for not answering the phone, so who knows. I don't think it's something that is so broken it should be abandoned.
There's no policy regarding #2, but there probably should be. Not saying it shouldn't be used at all, but there should be a better reason than "I'm not sure where this person is... lets try everywhere. BOOOP! [NAME] CALL ON 1! BOOOOOOOP BEEEEEEEEP! [whistling sound akin to jet engine full of Kazoos"].
I think if everyone improves their phone skills (SO MANY BUTTONS!!!) our current system will be fine and dandy until the eventuality we hire someone to do the work full-time, like how we hired Will to chase the dogs away from the garbage in the developer room.
Re: McPhail Point #1
During my survey, 42% of iMarcians answered 100% of the calls. However, it was the 42% that rarely receive calls for themselves. In every case, the phone answerer transferred the call to someone else.
Re: #2
Like Patrick and Fred, I don't like intercom pages. When the phone rings, I choose to answer it or not. When a page goes off, everyone breaks their train of thought and must pay attention. Even if the page is "Craig, phone call on line 1", it's an interruption for everyone in the room.
I also agree with Fred, about tracking people down. The biggest breaks in productivity usually go like this:
- *RING*
- Fred answers phone
- "Hold on, let me get Rob"
- Fred puts the phone on hold and pages Rob
- Rob doesn't answer
- Fred, not wanting to break 14 people's concentration with a company-wide page, gets up and tracks down Rob
- On his way back to his desk, Fred chats with Craig for a minute **
- Fred sits back at his desk and spends 5 minutes getting back to the concentrated state productivity he was in before the interruption.
This entire process can easily disrupt 10 minutes of someone's day.
As someone on the inside, I like the solution suggested by Nils in the blog - transfer directly, no paging, no asking if the person is at their desk, no tracking down.
This has never been a 10 minute process for me (granted they do call me the Kung Phone Master). All this talk about breaking peoples concentration and being a huge issue is a bit laughable. We're making websites here folks not doing open heart surgery.
Everyone around here is always talking about "good usability", "make it really easy to use". You know what's easy... answering the phone - that's easy. It doesn't take 10 minutes, it doesn't hurt
in fact human contact everyone now and again feels pretty darn good.
If the phone rings just answer it, I'm sure someday we'll get a receptionist that will solve this and the coffee issue.
An inherent problem, as I see it, is that those most likely to be available to answer are least likely to need to answer. Developers and designers spend a lot of time at their desks, working. Project managers spend a lot of time on the phone or in meetings with clients, during which they're unavailable to answer or take calls. And the bizdev team spends a lot of time on the road, in meetings with clients, or otherwise away from desks, thus also unavailable to answer or take calls.
So, the aforementioned 42% that answer are most available yet least needed on the phone — and, in my judgement, the most damaged by interruption. The percentage of the time that I'm working on Best Proposal Ever, I'm willing to bet, is far lower than the percentage of time that our developers are developing and designers are designing. More likely, I'm talking to a client, brainstorming, scribbling a site architecture, or wordsmithing — all highly interruptible activities.
(Routing is a minor challenge — often I'm paged for sales cold-calls that ought to go to Nils or Karin.)
I have no startlingly brilliant ideas for fixing this problem, short of a designated victim for answering all incoming calls. I do wish the phone load were lower on our development and design teams. They're completely loaded as it is!
(Oh, heck, my voicemail light is on again. I hate voicemail. I'd hate it less if I could forward it from our arcane internal VM system to my cell phone voicemail.)
You remember those happy days Dan. When men were men and phones were a way of reaching out and touching someone.
I'll be the Receptionist, I already sit near the exit and don't do anything.
@Nick:
I have to disagree with your assessment of the effects of interruption. You're a seasoned and effective multitasker, but not everyone at iMarc has your job. The time lost to context switching is substantial — if a developer on your team answers the phone four times in a day, he's probably lost at least half an hour of productive time to recovering from the interruption.
Recommended further reading:
A 5–10 minute break in productivity is not laughable at all for programmers. Note that it usually doesn't take us 5–10 minutes to answer the phone or transfer it off, however we must leave our current thought process and dump a good amount of resident information when we pick up the phone and help find someone. Time is spent getting back in the “groove”. I know for a fact that I am much more productive when in the groove. An outward sign that I am in the groove is that I type much faster because my thought process is moving so quickly. There is more good stuff about interruptions at http://www.thinkvitamin.com/features/webapps/how-to-shut-up-and-get-to-work
We make may websites, however we aren't just putting borders on divs all day long. More than 75% of my work deals strictly with PHP where I am juggling all kind of variables, files, and more. Debugging is even more brain intensive. Often times I’ll be creating and removing debugging code to fix bugs in the code. Being interrupted in the middle of debugging is really bad because I have to track down all of my in-process changes that may or may not completely break what I was working on.
Granted, there are always interruptions while working, but being able to plan them (like scheduled meetings) tends to work really well for most programmers and keep them more productive.
So answering 4-5 30 second calls actually takes away at least half an hour of productive time.
Wow - I really don't do anything around here then... firing myself now.
My guess is the person is that splash page, because then you have to talk and wait for answer, while that person is finding the answer, to send you to answer to ask another question. With the auto-attendent, you kind of have your navigation right there. You know if you press zero, you will get to a person. If you know the extension, you tap in the keys and you are navigated to them, and if you don't know where to go, you go the sitemap.
To me an auto-attendant actually saves you and your client time.
Don't get me wrong, having a receptionist would be great. All day long I get calls and people coming into my office. It's certainly a distraction but I don't think it's at a level where it needs to be presented as doom and gloom.
If the goal is to achieve maximum productivity, let's cut out all communication around here like emails and blogs. There's a new blog that show up on this site everyday. Now that's something I know takes 30+ minutes away of working.
We can't go around saying I hate the phone it makes me unproductive, but then go blast out a page long blog or fire off a few personal emails.
Not that I write much code anymore, but like Will said, once you start coding, you're juggling variables, logic, and processes in your mind. It takes a 15-20 minutes to really get in a groove. Most people prefer to follow through to a logical ending point and safely unset all those variables from their mind instead of core dumping.
Ask any developer who has come in on the weekend if he's equally productive on the weekend vs. during the week. I assume when people come in on the weekend they still check and write emails, visit MySpace, and do other stuff.
@Dan - I sometimes feel the same way about auto-attendant...sometimes it is a more direct route, but I'm guessing MOST of our clients like talking to a person...maybe not, though.
Are there really more instances of risking a "core dump of a groove" than not? Doesn't seem likely.
I get the feeling that 'all-the-time productivity loss' is just a front for 'I hate talking on the phone'. There are so many things that can contribute to productivity loss, and answering the phone is probably close to the bottom of the list.
The conversation above hasn't been put into any reasonable perspective at all.
Last time I made a page not validate, Dave killed me.
(I got better.)
@Nick:
Read Will and Dave's comments. Respectfully, please disable the sarcasm-key and consider how not all work is the same, nor are all of us the same. That's why I described my work as more interruptible than development or design work. My basic observation is that the onus of phone answering is too frequently falling upon those who are the most adversely affected by it.
Does taking phone calls adversely affect your productivity? Maybe so, maybe not. Ask any developer here how it affects their work, and the answer appears to be "adversely", not "it's inconsequential".
Of course there are times when I won't answer because I'm really concentrating on the problem solving aspect of what we do here. But lets be very liberal with the figures and say i'm in the ultra developer zen zone© 80% of the time throughout the day. That still leaves a significant amount of time in which I can easily pick up the phone and continue with my work, with, strangely enough, my consciousness not being completely or permanentely damaged. Somebody call Rob Ripley!
Yes, we need to do a better job at evenly splitting the phone duties. But after that is resolved, and someone says they don't have the 2-4 opportunities necessary to do their part to sustain the incoming phone calls throughout the day, they're lying.
I have read Wills, Dave's and everyone else's comments. That's how I'm able to formulate an opinion and post my comments.
Bottom line: I don't buy it when someone tells me a 30 seconds call takes 10 minutes away from productivity.
Is this really the case every time?? I doubt it. Sure there's times when you're busy and the phones rings, or someone comes into your office and you get distracted. That's the day in a life of working in an office environment.
According to Dave, there's writing code, then there's doing other things besides writing code (blogging, emailing, surfing the web). Maybe during this time the phone and pages become more tolerable. That said, the formula becomes easy:
Busy = Don't answer phone
Not Busy = answer phone
Oh, by the way Nils, you just cost your company 1 billion dollars because they were so destracted. Heck, you cost me money because I was in on it.
One last question, how do you answer the phone. Is it "hello and thank you for calling iMarc", If so, does everyone say the same thing? The reason I ask is, it adds to how you continue iMarc's Branding (as Dave says a couple of posts ago, "Branding is more than just a logo—we should explore our own branding in much greater depth."). If everyone says the same thing, then you become unified.
Random thought, Can anyone sing the IBM songs?
Unless instructed otherwise, I’ll continue to use my method of answering the phone when I judge appropriate.
Not Busy = answer phone
End it!
LOLZ.
if ($employee->getStatus() != 'busy')) {
$phone->answer($branded_greeting);
}
exit;
Actually, Marino's last comment about a "branded" greeting kind of brings it all back to Nils' original statement.
iMarc (the company) is supposed to be: efficient, intelligent, usable and focused on honest customer support. Bringing all that back to the phone answering seems as simple as:
- answer the phone quickly but helpfully
- transfer to the intended recipient
(don't try page the entire company, don't walk around the office looking for the recipient, etc...)
- if the intended recipient answers, great. if not, voice mail kicks in. that's pretty normal.
And Nick - please continue to use the intercom for the Monday morning status meeting start and the Friday call for MAAAAAARGARITAAAAAAS!!!
@ Karin
I was thinking the exact same thing last night. All we have really discussed so far is internally how employees answer the phone.
@ Everyone
To do a little usability testing, I tried calling iMarc this morning to see what I would experience as a client. Here are my results:
Now, when more people are in the office, the call is usually answered after about 2 rings or so. At which point the caller is greeted by saying “Good (Morning|Afternoon), thank you for calling iMarc.” The caller usually asks for a specific person, at which point most iMarcians ask who is calling.
Now we talked about changing the policy to directly forwarding a call to someone’s extension without checking to see if the person is in. I think this could be make more friendly if the caller did not have to call again if they wish to ring everyone.
Let’s think about a situation where an iMarc client calls because there is a problem with their hosting. They have always dealt with Nick since he is the project manager in charge of their project. If I recieve the call and just forward it to Nick and he isn’t there, the client will probably want to speak with someone else. It seems their choice now is to call back and explain the situation to the iMarcian who picks up the phone, thus getting someone who can help them.
From a usability standpoint, it would be nice if there was some way to ring everyone even after you have been transfered. Perhaps set up the “receptionist” to be all lines? This way the client would not have to guess from our rollcall who to speak with, and wouldn’t have to place a second call.
Branching from that original idea, I think the following could be a very useful scenario:
This way whenever a client needs to contact someone at iMarc about an issue, they can call our main number. If they only want to speak with a specific person, they don’t have to go through the process of explaining who they are and who they are looking for. If they try to contact a specific person, but that iMarcian is not available, they would ring all lines instead of just trying Nick (who may be out or on the other line).
What do you guys think?
I think 6 rings is a bit much, how about 4?
Tangent: We provide our clients with our IM names. The only way they could have more direct access is if we were sharing the cubicle.
In short, calling iMarc is NEVER a waste of my time. I can't say that about any other group I do business with.
We just hired a new office manager and a new receptionist here; having someone who is dedicated to answering the phone, and using Everyone Else (or the 42% who are compulsive about picking up the phone) as a backup is a good thing, IMHO.
We'll still answer the phones. We'll all try and take our turns more equitably.
Won't we? :-)
We'll all turn our ringers down to the minimum. Here I am at your elbow to show you how.
We'll all keep up-to-date extension rosters in the sliding tray under our phones.
When we get a call, if we can't see from where we sit (or if we don't already know for a fact) that a person is away from their desk or out of the office for some reason we'll transfer a call to their extension.
- It will not be expected that we will screen calls any longer.
- It will not be expected that we will announce calls. Just transfer the call to their extension and hang up.
- It will not be expected that we will track a person down or page them.
Some fine points:
To reiterate, I never want to be the sort of organization that routinely lets calls go to voice mail when we're siting at our desks. Do not do that except when you are truly in the throes.
One of the things I was most surprised about was the near-universal dislike for the all-phones page. And while this may simply be a holdover from the Air Horn Terrors, as a habitual user of the all-phones page I hereby pledge to tone it down. You do too :-).
We need to be consistent with our messages, so get in the habit of leaving detailed away messages on your voice mail when you're out of the office, including how to transfer to another extension that is covering, your mobile phone number, leaving a message, etc.
We all need to brush up on transferring calls to voice mail, *or* someone's extension. If you know someone is out, it it certainly preferable to tell the caller, and then send calls directly to their voice mail, so that the person's neighbors don't have to listen to a ringing phone. Note that the use of the DND key when out of the office would take care of the ringing phone issue. Feel free to plonk a neighbor's noisy phone this way if they're out.
Nick pecked out a set of frequently used features and Dave posted them on the wiki. Many of the phones also have instructions on the tray that slides out from beneath the phone. Please avail yourself of both as needed.
OK, this is the policy until further notice, or a concerted attempt to change my mind, whichever comes first.
Thanks again,
Nils