Stress makes your heart pound, your breath quicken, and your forehead sweat. Stress has been demonized a lot recently, but psychologist Kelly McGonigal urges us to look at the new research that shows how important our attitude towards stress really is for us.

Have you ever stopped to think about how much a missed sales call could cost your business? Let’s take a minute and do the math . . . Multiply the amount of your average dollar sale by the number of hang-up calls you get on your voicemail. This ballpark number is a good benchmark for how much revenue you could be leaving on the table and giving up to a competitor.

At any place that takes calls, one must deal with angry callers. In this post, we’re going to explore some tips for doing that. Overall, you are trying to make them happy. Try to remain positive for a resolution. Give them options to empower them and ask if they have any other issues that might need help when their main problem is addressed.

Let’s say you have a farming client whose field worker is operating a large piece of equipment, and suddenly it breaks down and production halts. The foreman or field supervisor immediately calls you for emergency service, but you can't answer the call. They call your competitor, and you've just missed a profitable service call.

Harnessing self-doubt starts with a concept called “self-efficacy,” or our confidence in our ability to set ourselves up for success. We can improve this through something we already do: self-talk, says writer Rich Karlgaard.

We're in an era where many companies who had brick-and-mortar locations now have been forced to pivot their business to an online platform — better known as click and order commerce. This has made logistic outsourcing one of the most profitable ways for big businesses to remain competitive and scale their operations.

We all know that emergencies come in different forms depending on the type of business or industry. However, when these urgent situations occur, your phone must be answered quickly, with all information gathered accurately, so the correct on-call person or manager receives an immediate dispatch call or notification.

An answering service is an effective solution to ensure service continuity while you begin to scale your business. Our virtual receptionists are available 24/7 to support you with after-hours answering, appointment scheduling and even emergency response answering services — just to name a few.

Many business owners are challenged with the lack of staff and limited availability of their employees. One of the best ways to recover in these unprecedented times is by outsourcing certain roles to professional service providers such as a 24 live answering and receptionist service.

In order to stay competitive and satisfy customer expectations, even small and medium size businesses must provide a point of contact outside of normal business hours. An after-hours answering service can be the solution to streamline customer needs with your service delivery. Don’t risk missing another call and losing out on new business.

The I.M. OK Work Alone App is more than just a monitoring service. In fact, it goes one step beyond hiring a telephone answering service simply because the App provides real-time tracking and prevents distractions when employees are driving — which can potentially reduce your liability in the event of an accident.

In times where payroll costs are high and work hours are limited, an outsourced live virtual receptionist team makes for an effective way to reduce labor costs. According to Forbes, one of the key pillars for business infrastructure comes from implementing a virtual team that can provide telephone answering, take messages and dispatch to your on-call technicians.

Inevitably, there will be failures at times, but try to turn them into lessons to learn from. Think about what you’ll do the next time, even try to come up with concrete rules or guidelines from your experience. It is also important to remember to stay in the present moment. Not just the day or the hour, the exact moment.

It is an opportunity to have a vendor partner and outsource reception/control room functions to a professional award winning service. The telephone answering services of today are sophisticated, state of the art control rooms with highly skilled agents answering, handling and dispatching calls in a variety of ways.

Most of us live with a constant stream of internal statements, criticisms and commands running through our heads. But we do have a choice. We don’t have to let them define us or our days, says psychology researcher Steven Hayes.

The benefits to your organization of a telephone answering service practicing outcome based leadership is that the staff willingly accept your feedback and work with the team to improve the data collection during your calls and update the process to better meet your needs on an ongoing basis.

During these troubled times let us help provide the calm in the storm. Intercon Messaging, a telephone answering service, has been providing calm professionalism during the storms (many types) for over 23 years. Our long term strategy has been to calm your storm, whether during a business transition, a time when you were growing like crazy and could not manage workloads, or during a time where your receptionist is out of the office handling other priorities.