Voicemail Prescreen

Sometimes voicemail gets a bad rap. Most of the time it's deserved. No one likes being stuck in voicemail jail wandering in an endless loop of prompts.

The good news is, that is not what voicemail prescreen is all about. Voicemail prescreen presents your callers with clear and concise options and information. All while saving you money.

Callers can receive helpful information without speaking to an operator. Good examples are office hours, specials, and updates. You can also provide the option to leave voicemail messages which can be emailed to you automatically because who needs to check voicemail nowadays. 

We can even custom design voicemail prescreen to your exact needs. Want extension number, no problem! Need callers to enter their zip code to route to a specific option, we have you covered. The sky is the limit.

By informing your callers of their options, they get the help or direction they need. The important part of this equation is that they can speak to a human being at any time.

Voicemail prescreen with live operators ready to help 24/7 gives you the best of both worlds. The cost savings of screening out routine calls and a delighted customer because they can speak to a person when they need it most.

Having a call screen in place can make a lot of sense for businesses. While it's not a good fit for every business type, voicemail prescreen has many great real-world applications. Here are a few popular examples. 

Service Companies

For service companies where not every call is an emergency, having voicemail call screening can be a great idea. Routine service requests can be left in voicemail or redirected to open a ticket online. We’ve seen some companies provide their after-hours service rates upfront so the caller can determine just how urgent their needs are. Urgent service requests can then be immediately routed to an answering service operator.

Employee Call Off Hotline

This is a great addition to your employee call off hotline. During extreme weather events or unexpected shutdowns, voicemail prescreen is an easy way to quickly get information out to your workforce.

Your employees already know the employee call-off line number, so having an informative greeting added to this phone line can be extremely beneficial. The greeting can be updated in real-time over the phone. This allows timely updates for your workers and saves your human resource staff time.

Healthcare

Informing your patients of office hours, allowing Rx Refills to be left in a secure voice mailbox, appointment requests, and cancellations. Urgent medical requests are immediately routed to one of our medical answering service agents for handling.

An example greeting for a medical practice:

"You have reached ABC Medical Practice; the office is now closed. Normal office hours are M-F 8a-5p if you are calling regarding an appointment, RX refill, or test results please call back during normal office hours.

If this is a life-threatening emergency, please hang up and dial 911 or proceed to the nearest emergency room.

If you have an urgent medical need that cannot wait until normal office hours, please press 1 to be connected to our medical call center that will [contact the on-call physician/connect you with a nurse].”

Property Management

When using a property management answering service, voicemail prescreen is a home-run. We can customize the call screening greeting to allow the caller to reach specific people on your team. This way you're not weeding through messages in the morning sending them along to your team for follow up.

What we have seen work best is to give your callers the option to connect with your leasing agent, leave a routine maintenance request, and leave a general message for the office. Then emergency maintenance requests are immediately sent to our agents for troubleshooting and escalation.

The great thing about voicemail prescreen is that can be customized to your specific needs. While we recommend keeping the options straightforward and simple for the caller, you can build it around your needs.

The number of options you can present to the caller is virtually endless. You can enhance it by connecting it to our auto-attendant service which can transfer calls to other people besides our telephone agents.

A good example is connecting a sales inquiry right to your salesperson's mobile phone.

Here are some additional things that our auto-attendant service can do:

• Verify caller is a customer before transferring by having them enter their account number.
• Transfer to individual direct dial numbers.
• Connect callers to individual voice mailboxes for each staff member.
• Connect to a conference call bridge.
• Enter zip code to route to the correct location.