Don’t “Take a Message”

My attitude about responsive telephone communications is represented by the fact that we don’t use Voice Mail at our office. This was a conscious decision made in 1994, before the impact of email, IM, and the web. Being in the technical support area, we advertise our responsiveness and value it as a primary differentiator. Even though the mentioned wonders are now the mode of support for over half of our cases, there is still a need to continue to improve our phone communications.

The point of having no VM is to minimize the number of contacts on each case (to one). We want to eliminate phone tag and “we’ll get back to you.” An extension to this philosophy is handling calls for others: try to get it handled NOW instead of saying “I’ll have them call you back.”

Here’s an example: I ordered some cables online today but one of the parts was a special factory order line item. They may have to call us to confirm. If I’m not here, I hope the staff will pass the call to David. He’s somewhat aware of what I wanted. So is Bob. Perhaps one of them could make a decision or answer a question. Maybe Rob or Pam could decide what’s best. It’s worth a try.

Objective: don’t just say “I’ll take a message” before digging into what they really want and seeing if someone else can help them.

My ideal is to empower everyone to try to make decisions for others when it’s a “safe” call and time is of the essence. An impossible ideal, to be certain; mistakes will be made. But it’s worth a shot to try.