I have just read on another thread about offering a telephone answering service for clients.

Can anyone tell me how this works please? not sure exactly how one would go about this.

Thanks in advance

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VA-Karen
www.elite-va.com

The client would have their calls forwarded to your number and you would answer the phone as if the clients were calling YOUR clients phone. I hope that made sense. lol.

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Serita Diana, the List 2 Close Assistant
REVA Academy

Thanks Serita. I wasn't sure if it was a resource on the net. I think possibly this is a service I will not be offering currently.

Thanks for the info.

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VA-Karen
www.elite-va.com

I would like to offer telephone answering services. I used to work for a telephone answering service company and the calls were back to back so I think it would be hard sometimes to do this completely on your own.

There are services you can sign up for where a client can forward their number to yours or to a voice mail box that you can access, distinct rings for different incoming numbers, etc. I'm sure if you do a search on here you'll find some threads that talk about which services people have used for this. There are not a lot of VAs that offer this as a service but those that do and who do a good job can be in demand. However, I suspect it's not generally offered as a service by VAs as it is very time consuming and I think most clients will expect to not pay a very high hourly fee for this service.

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Kimberly
Facebook Marketing Magic!

This is a service I'd like to offer to my clients.

I do have a question on how to charge for telephone answering service. My client is wanting to forward calls on a random, as needed basis. This could be only a few hours a week or month - but not a regular basis. thanks for any input.

Carol

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Classic Exec
Your Virtual Administrative Consultantwww.classicexec.com

Carol - Do you have a retainer for this client or is it project priced?

I would be inclined to say that any time your client has his number forwarded to you is billed at your regular hourly rate (assuming you have a retainer and/or some type of support contract and you're not project pricing). I say this because a phone ringing every 5 or 10 minutes would shoot my concentration all to heck and I wouldn't be able to get anything else done during that time frame.

If you think you would be able to get other work done during that time, you could just charge time for each phone call according to your normal billing methods.

If you're project pricing, this is very difficult to do, because you don't know the frequency of calls. If you know the approximate duration of calls (if they're very similar in scope for customer-service type questions, or if you're mainly going to be acting as an answering service and taking messages and determining if they need to be relayed to the client immediately or if they can be dealt with later), you could figure out a "per-call" rate of $X, include x number of calls per day/week/month in your base price, then say something like "calls over x per day/week/month" billed at $x per call" or something like that.

Good luck with this one - I don't offer answering service because I don't like to be chained to my desk and also because figuring out how to do it would give me a headache.

I do have a client that I do this for and I charge my standard rate for this.... not sure if this helps or not. If not, feel free to ask more specific questions!

That sounds real interesting. I can imagine the phones ringing off the hook. lol