If your business currently only works standard office hours you could be missing a real opportunity. The vast majority of small and medium sized businesses only work between the hours of 8am and 6pm from Monday to Friday. This can be a major drawback if your main client base is normal consumers, many of whom are at work during this period of the day. So it can be an excellent idea to offer longer opening hours.

There are many benefits. The first is obvious: it’s an opportunity to gain additional sales. But equally it gives you the chance to offer better customer service – no-one likes to have to leave a voicemail or be told that they need to ring back tomorrow. It’s also true that being open for longer can give you an advantage against competitors who aren’t available.

But this is an option that many companies don’t consider because they don’t want to expense of hiring extra staff to work the hours. However, there is a cost-effective way to extend your opening hours without having to hiring an extra shift of workers for the evenings and weekends: use call answering services.

Call answering services work with your business to provide customer services to your clients during the hours that suit your business. They will take your out-of-hours and overflow calls to ensure that you never miss another sales lead or let down a customer. They will offer a personalised service that understands your business so they can deal with the vast majority of simple queries and questions.

You can choose exactly how and when your call answering services work – it could be that you only want them to cover you in the evenings, or that you need help covering all the calls over busy periods. Either way this is an extremely efficient way to extend your opening hours that can boost your profits and improve customer satisfaction.