Paul Henderson asked on the Q&A last night about how often you change your voice mail? I know folks who change it when they are "out of the office" so to speak and two weeks later it still says "I'll return on (insert date here) and that was a week ago. So instead of changing my voicemail often I worked at tweeking it until I got it where I wanted. I think it's been a okay for more than a year now. I never got compliments on it before. But since I made the changes I get more messages left, compliments and even better messages left.
The following 8 points are all things I find to be important in my outgoing message:
- Identify myself (so the party calling will know who they reached)
- Identify my company
- A brief explanation of why you can't take a call right now
- A snippet about our specialty (for me that's Lake Sinclair)
- Asking them to leave their name and number
- Asking them to leave the reason for their call
- Asking them to leave a good time to call them back
- Leaving them an alternate number to get information if they can't wait
My advice to you is to write it down, practice it a few times before attempting to record it, be alone and be in a place where with good sound absorption when you record it. This information applies to both your office number and your cell phone if you have an answering system in place on your office number.
You don't want it to be TOO long because people get irritated having to wait too long, but you need to get the vital information out there. It's even good to add that you can't take their call because you are on the phone or with another client. That lets them understand you will give them that same courtesy when they are working with you or on the phone with you.
I put a lot of time into getting my outgoing voice mail greeting "just right", short, but detailed. Good luck with doing the same for your greeting.
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