Leave A Message After The Tone

Most business phone systems were set up once, by somebody, and have been quietly wrong ever since. Nobody files a report about it. What it leaves behind is messages, and these are the five we hear most.

Hello. You have reached a business. Nobody is available to take your call. Please leave a message after the tone.

Messages on the tape

Five messages, and every one of them is a phone system telling you something about itself. What each one actually is, is printed underneath it.

1. Message 1 A customer Tuesday, 9:12 AM

   I pressed four for accounts and it rang for a good while and then it hung up on me. I will try again later I suppose.

   What that one is: A menu option pointing at an extension nobody sits at any more. Every one of these is a caller who has decided to try somewhere else, and none of them will tell you they did.

2. Message 2 Your own office manager Tuesday, 11:40 AM

   It is me. I am at home today and I cannot work out how to make my extension ring here. Can somebody have a look at it.

   What that one is: A system built on the assumption that everybody would always be in the building. Following a person to wherever they are working is the single most common thing we get asked for.

3. Message 3 A supplier Wednesday, 8:02 AM

   Your mailbox is full and I cannot leave a message. This is the third time I have tried this week.

   What that one is: Nobody owns the mailbox, so nobody empties it. Whatever was in there that mattered has already been lost, and there is no way to find out what it was.

4. Message 4 A caller at half past five Thursday, 5:31 PM

   Hello? Is anybody there? Hello.

   What that one is: The out-of-hours message says the office is closed. It does not say what to do instead, so somebody with an urgent problem had nowhere at all to go with it.

5. Message 5 Somebody in your own sales team Friday, 3:15 PM

   I just gave the customer my mobile number, it is easier than trying to explain how to transfer them.

   What that one is: When a system is hard to use, people route around it. The call happens, the business gets no record of it, and the number the customer now has belongs to a person rather than to you.

What a phone system should simply do

• Ring the person wherever they are working that day, without anybody reconfiguring anything first.
• Say something useful outside office hours instead of playing a tone at somebody.
• Let a person put a call on the right desk in one move, so they stop handing out their own mobile number.
• Keep a record of who called, so a missed call is something you can see rather than something you find out about later.

How this goes

1. We listen to what is actually happening

Which options nobody picks, which extensions ring out, and what your staff have quietly started doing instead of using the system.

2. You get it written down

How calls flow now, and how they would flow if the system matched the way the business is actually laid out. Both on one page.

3. It gets changed at your pace

Usually the numbers stay and the system underneath them changes, which is the part people expect to be painful and generally is not.