ServeNow

When your phone rings, you should look at it as an opportunity to promote your process serving business and interact with clients. Your phone is your main source of communication with your clients, and many times how a client will make their first impression of you. Don’t lose business because of poor phone skills.

When you are answering the phone, there are many things to take into consideration:

1. Quite simply, answer your phone. This may sound like common sense, but one of the most frequent complaints we hear from people using the ServeNow.com directory is that process servers aren’t answering their phones during business hours. If you are out serving papers most of the day, have your calls forwarded to your cell phone so you can answer them or consider hiring a secretary to answer calls while you are out of the office. Try to answer the phone by the 3rd ring. Everyone is busy these days and answering the telephone promptly shows the person on the other end that you respect their time.

2. Answer Professionally. Instead of answering your phone, “Hello”, say something along the lines of, “ABC Process Service, this is Katie. How may I help you?” Answering the phone this way only takes three seconds longer but allows the caller to learn three important things: who you are, where you work, and that you want to help them. As discussed in an earlier ServeReport article, this is another way of competing on value instead of price.

3. Pay attention while you’re on the phone, and resist the urge to multitask. Keep a notepad by the phone to jot down notes. Actively listen. While it may be tempting to finish the task you were in the middle of when the phone rang, don’t. The person on the other end of the phone can tell if you sound distracted. If you are driving to serve papers, pull over and take the call. It is safer for everyone on the road and allows you to give the caller your full attention.

4. Be pleasant. An easy trick to sound pleasant over the phone is to smile while you are talking. You can “hear” the smile over the phone. Don’t believe it? Leave yourself two messages – one when you are smiling and one when you are not – then listen to the results. The call when you were smiling will sound generally more pleasant.

5. Speak slowly and clearly. While you may be familiar with certain terms involving service of process, if you are working with an individual who has never had papers served he or she may have questions about the process. By speaking slowly and clearly, you give the person one the other end a chance to ask questions and be reassured that you are the best service provider.

6. Extend phone etiquette to making calls. We understand that you cannot answer every single call, no matter how hard you try. If you do miss a call, return the missed call promptly. If the caller left a message, be sure to listen to the message so you know who called and why they called. ServeNow.com Brand Manager Mike MacDonald highlights the importance of this, saying, “Don’t call back the numbers missed on your call log and say, ‘somebody just called me from this number’. This may be a law firm with 30 paralegals, all of them making calls out of that office throughout the day. When someone else answers who did not place the call to you – this just begins an awkward conversation of ‘who are you and why did you call me?’ between you both.”

7. Be courteous. If you tell someone you will return their call at a certain time, be sure to call them back when you say you will. No one likes to be kept waiting by the phone, and if a client can’t rely on you to return a phone call, they may have second thoughts when choosing who to trust to serve important documents.

The biggest trick to good phone etiquette is to treat phone conversations as if they were happening face to face. By being polite and friendly over the phone, people will be more likely to remember the pleasant experience they had working with your company. By answering your phone professionally and courteously, you can grow your business and retain repeat clients.