The Client

Jones & Co is an independent opticians offering a unique eyewear experience, providing individual, exclusive eyewear to customers.

As a company that prides itself on individual service, Jones & Co knew it had a problem with its call answering, with calls being missed when staff were busy helping customers in store.

This wasn’t just hurting their customer service reputation, it was costing them money in missed appointments.

The Challenge

The biggest issue Jones & Co had when it came to telephone answering was staff resources, as they wanted staff to focus on providing a great service to customers attending appointments or looking for eyewear. But this meant calls were being missed without a dedicated resource to deal with inbound enquiries over the phone.

They came to Face For Business as part of a competitive pitch for a dedicated telephone answering service.

A partnership based on shared values

We stood out to Jones & Co as the preferred choice for their telephone answering service because we shared the same business values – namely friendly and a less corporate feel. This was important to Jones and Co, as their business thrives on excellent customer service and they didn’t want people thinking they were ringing a call centre hundreds of miles away.

Once we came on board we assigned Jones & Co a dedicated team of virtual receptionists who would be available to answer incoming calls, take accurate messages or deal with customer enquiries directly to ensure they company continued to offer excellent service on the phone, even when staff were busy.

We could also help with appointment booking when customers wanted to arrange a time to come in.

Our receptionists spent time getting to know Jones & Co and we worked closely with them to understand what types of calls and customers we’d be dealing with, and also how they wanted us to handle calls so customers got a consistent experience whether talking to one of our receptionists or Jones & Co’s own staff.

We also set up a customer portal where Jones & Co staff could easily view and listen to messages and get caller information when they were ready to return a call, as well as setting up a consistent call transfer policy so we were always transferring calls to the right person based on the enquiry and employee availability.

The results

Jones & Co had good feedback from their clients and our message taking service works perfectly for them, allowing them to reply to clients and even ‘buy’ time with certain clients who may need a little more preparation for before having a return call.

The benefits of using a telephone answering service for opticians are:

• Calls are answered when the opticians are in consultations with their customers
• Cost savings – there is no need to employ an additional receptionist
• No more worry about capturing new customers – new enquiry details are taken during calls
• Providing a professional and friendly image by having all calls answered by a polite and friendly PA

What the client said

“I researched a number of companies but Face for Business stood out and seemed to have a friendly, less corporate feel to it. A bit like hiring a stand in receptionist for the day. This was important to Jones and Co, as our business thrives on excellent customer service. We had good feedback from our clients (some were a little confused that it wasn’t me answering the phone!) but overall it has worked well.”