Revolutionising call handling for small businesses

Answering Services for Small Business

As a small business owner, you've got a lot on your plate. Between running your day-to-day operations, managing staff, and chasing new leads, the last thing you need to worry about is missing important customer calls.

That's where CallChimps swings into action.

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Elevate Your Small Business with Our Answering Service

CallChimps is an AI-powered answering service designed to help small and medium businesses like yours never miss a beat. Our professional call answering services delivers your preferred greeting with a friendly, knowledgeable voice, no matter when they call.

Our call answering starts with a friendly greeting, mentioning your company name and asking how we can help. Our agents can then answer questions about your business - pulled from FAQs, your website and any other documents you want to share with us.

Typically, callers will want to leave a message for someone to call back, so we have a streamlined process for capturing contact details and other specifics to help with the follow up call. If you'd like us to ask specific questions, capture particular information or follow a lead capture process, this can all be spelled out and we'll follow it to the letter.

Try our Pro plan for Free!

60 min call time included - £0.37 per min thereafter

Starts at

£29Free for 1 month

Then, starts at £29/month

Outsourced Switchboard and Virtual Receptionists for Small Business

It’s one thing handling inbound calls, but CallChimps really shines when you need to go a few steps further – providing answers to multiple questions on each call, and booking appointments in.

CallChimps integrates with all major calendars and CRM systems to enable us to book in an appointment if you’re free (don’t worry, you can specify working hours, days, holiday, etc.) and even allow a specific amount of time between appointments, so you have time to prepare, travel and generally not pack things in too tight.

Our online storage of your calls, transcripts, summaries and task lists allows easy searching to find out who said what and when, so you never lose track of the conversation. If you have a CRM system, we can assign each of these to the contact record for easy lookup and reference.

Answering services for small business can often seem like dumbed-down versions of their large business counterparts, but this is where CallChimps differs. We answer your calls in a professional manner, via our UK based team - okay, virtual team, but still professional English voices.

Our answering services then decide whether the call needs to be transferred (if the correct person is showing as available), questions answered, an appointment booked, or for questions to be asked to capture a message, summarise the call and send a task list to the right person in your business.

Key Benefits of Our Answering Services:

CallChimps provides small businesses with telephone answering services that provide:

24/7 Availability: Our call handling agents are on hand to answer your business calls, even outside of regular office hours.
Appointment Scheduling: We can book appointments and manage your calendar to help you stay on top of your schedule.
Seamless Call Transfers: We'll quickly transfer calls to the right person or department, ensuring a smooth customer experience.
Detailed Message Taking: Our team of AI-powered agents will capture all the relevant information from customer calls, so you never miss important details.

Small business call answering service benefits

Professional Telephone Answering Service at an Affordable Price

Unlike hiring a full-time receptionist, our small business answering service is a cost-effective solution that delivers exceptional customer service. With our most competitive tariffs, you can enjoy all the benefits of a telephone answering service without breaking the bank.

A traditional telephone answering service uses people to pick up the phone, each of whom must be paid minimum wage or (ideally) higher. Add to this the fact that they will not spend 100% of their time answering calls, allow for training time, holidays, loo breaks and everything else and it's not hard to see why a traditional phone answering service cost can easily be hundreds of pounds every month.

Furthermore, most answering services charge for any call answering time. But you don't pay for unwanted calls - especially known spam callers. It's a lot to expect for a virtual receptionist to quickly shut down sales calls and other unwanted callers quickly, so you end up paying a percentage of your call time for these normally.

Don't Pay for Unwanted Calls

At CallChimps, we provide a small business answering service with an option to automatically ignore all numbers recognised as spam callers (you can turn this off, as sometimes businesses you want may be wrongly labelled). Our call agents are also trained to ask targeted questions to quickly identify the nature of the call and divert salespeople and other unwanted callers elsewhere (voicemail, or even curtail the call).

Zero Set-Up Fees and as Low as £0.29 Per Min for Excess Calls

CallChimps has no set up fees and starts with zero cost per month on our Business tier. If you have less than 30 minutes of calls each month, this may be your most cost effective tariff. If you find we are answering calls above this threshold, they will be charged at £0.97 per minute.

However, we'll let you know about our other tiers of service, such as Pro (£29 per month) where additional calls are charged at £0.37 per minute, or Premim (£99 per month) where additional calls, above a generous 240 minutes of inclusive call time, are charged at just £0.27 per minute.

You can find out more about how CallChimps compares to pricing from popular services like Moneypenny, AllDayPA and CallConnect here.

Low cost call answering for small businesses

Why Small Business Owners Choose CallChimps:

The call answering service from CallChimps ensures all of your calls are answered professionally, with the ability to transfer calls to the relevant person. A small business answering service which can genuinely improve customer interactions.

Our customers often cite the following benefits:

Improved customer satisfaction and customer experience
Increased efficiency by handling incoming calls and business calls
Reduced missed calls and lost business opportunities
Professional image and excellent customer service
Customized solutions and messaging preference to meet your unique business needs

Five star telephone answering service for small businesses

How Our Call Answering Service Works:

Our UK-based team of (virtual) call agents answer your calls promptly, using your preferred greeting.
We gather all the relevant details from the caller, including their contact information and the purpose of their call. If they appear to be a sales, or other unwanted, call we can shut them down swiftly, so you don't pay extra for the call time.
We can answer questions about your business, in many cases removing the need for a call back.
If the caller matches your VIP callers list, we will transfer the call to the appropriate person or department.
We take a detailed message, asking questions to ensure all salient information is captured, to be delivered to you immediately by email, text or WhatsApp as a call summary, task list and link to call recording and transcript.

Say goodbye to missed calls, unanswered customer queries, and disgruntled clients. With CallChimps, you can focus on running your business while we handle your incoming communications.

How call answering works for small businesses

Experience the Difference with CallChimps

Ready to take your small business customer service to the next level? Try CallChimps for free today to experience our call answering services first hand, and see how they can help you provide exceptional customer service, streamline your operations, and grow your company.

Small businesses need to do more with less, and the call handling service from CallChimps frees you up to do exactly this, driving customer satisfaction and the freedom to focus on growth higher than ever before.

Don't let another important call slip through the cracks. Let CallChimps be your dedicated team of virtual receptionist services, ensuring your customers are always greeted with professionalism and care.

Did you know?

Business Growth Hack: Call Analytics and Reporting

Every small business should welcome a growth hack to get ahead of the competition. Imagine having analytics and insight into your callers, available to filter, search and run reports on at the touch of a button?

You could see:

What the busiest times of day, week, month or year are for calls answered
Where are you answering calls from most often?
Demographics about your callers – maybe you need to capitalise on growing interest from a certain age group, location or other grouping?
What topics come up in your calls the most often. Small businesses need to keep an eye on changing customer demands - identify these proactively and develop solutions to meet these needs
What the sentiment of calls are – what percentage are complaints, and who your happiest callers are
We can even automatically request your happiest callers leave you an online review (we’ll send out emails to make the steps easy for them)
Who takes the most time on your calls
Spikes in customer complaints, where they’re coming from, when, and what they are regarding
Tons of other useful info to focus your business, capitalise on interest and fix any problems fast

Reporting functions allow regular reports to be generated on your most useful metrics from your telephone answering services. You can even generate audit trails for specific incidents, accounts or contacts, to see exactly what was said and when.

Outsourced call handling analytics and reporting-1

Try our Pro plan for free!

Find out why customers prefer our Pro plan, with a risk-free 30-day free trial.
Cancel or downgrade to our Business (free) plan at any time.

24/7/365 Call Handling
60 min of call time included
Personalised greeting
Answers questions about your business
Call transcripts and summaries sent to your email and/or mobile
Unlimited parallel calls: 100% answered within 3 rings

See all plans here

CallChimps Pro

60 min call time included - £0.37 per min thereafter

Starts at

£29Free for 1 month

Then, starts at £29/month

FAQ

Don’t Sit There Scratching Your Head...

We get asked a lot of questions, so here are answers to some of the most common ones.

How much does a telephone answering service cost UK?

A typical telephone answering service in the UK will cost a few hundred pounds per month if your call handling needs are between one and 10 hours. For most small businesses, this is less than the cost of missed business opportunities that would arise if these calls were missed.

In most cases, employing a call handling answering service is cheaper than extending your in-house team to handle peaks in call volumes, or out of hours calls.

Take a look at our small business call answering service price comparison blog post here - we compare the cost and features from some of the UK's most popular call answering services: CallChimps, Moneypenny, alldayPA and AnswerConnect.

What is a Virtual Receptionist

Imagine having a friendly, knowledgeable representative available to answer your phone calls, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. That's exactly what our telephone answering services provide. CallChimps is a virtual receptionist service, or, more specifically, a virtual receptionists (plural) service - powered by AI.

Whether your small businesses needs to handle peak call volumes, transfer important sales calls, or simply ensure your customers are greeted with a professional manner, CallChimps phone answering services has you covered.

You can specify your company name and messaging preferences, as well as supply us with a wide range of information about your business, so our agents are able to answer questions on your behalf, ask the sorts of questions which make follow up more efficient and even book appointments via your calendar!

How do I set up a business answering service?

Setting up a business answering service is relatively straightforward. Telephone answering services from CallChimps take just a few minutes to set up online. You can configure the service to answer as if from your own office, test (pretend to be a customer call) and put the telephone answering live in less time than it takes to read this page.

Calls answered by the service will need to flow through a different number to the one you use for outgoing calls. So, you can set up and share this new number for telephone answering, or you can keep your original number and put in place an incoming call divert when you are unable to answer calls, or for phone answering outside of office hours.

Do people still use answering services?

In today's fast-paced business world, you might assume that traditional telephone answering services are a thing of the past. But the truth is, they remain a vital tool for small and medium-sized enterprises. An in-house receptionist can be costly, while an interactive voice response (IVR) system often leaves customers feeling frustrated and impersonal. That's where CallChimps comes in.

Our AI-powered answering service provides a low-cost, highly efficient solution that allows you to focus on running your business. With CallChimps, your existing customers can be put straight through to the right department or person, ensuring a seamless experience. And for new inquiries, our team of virtual receptionists are trained to handle telephone calls with professionalism and care.

Whether you're an office manager or running your own small business, CallChimps can help you streamline communications, enhance customer satisfaction, and free up your time to do what you do best. Experience the difference a modern, cost-effective answering service can make.

How do small businesses manage phone calls?

Running a small business is no easy feat, and often the day-to-day operations can feel overwhelming. One of the biggest challenges many small businesses face is managing incoming and outbound calls effectively. Without a dedicated in-house receptionist, it's all too easy for important calls to slip through the cracks, especially during busy periods.

That's where call answering services like CallChimps can make a world of difference. Our affordable, highly efficient solution ensures that no call goes unanswered, even when you're busy with other aspects of your small business. Our virtual receptionists are trained to handle inquiries professionally, taking detailed messages or transferring customers to the relevant person or department.

By outsourcing your phone handling to CallChimps, you can say goodbye to missing important calls and losing potential business opportunities. Our call answering services free up your time so you can focus on what really matters - growing your small business and providing exceptional service to your customers.

Don't let missed calls hold your company back. Invest in a cost-effective, reliable call answering solution that will help your small business thrive.

What is the best voice answering service?

For exceptional service that outshines impersonal IVR systems, choose CallChimps - a professional phone answering service tailored for businesses. Our friendly, knowledgeable agents handle calls with care, scheduling appointments, taking messages, and transferring customers to the right person. This frees you up for business meetings, strategic planning and doing your actual job while delivering the exceptional service your customers deserve. Unlike basic IVR, CallChimps provides a premium call answering experience to help your business thrive.

How do I start a small business answering service?

Starting a small business requires juggling countless responsibilities, from managing finances to responding to customer inquiries. Trying to handle all your own incoming calls can quickly become overwhelming, leading to missed opportunities and frustrated clients. That's where a dedicated telephone answering service like CallChimps can make all the difference.

By outsourcing your call answering to our team of virtual receptionists, you can ensure every call is answered promptly and professionally, even during your busiest periods. Our affordable, flexible plans are designed to seamlessly integrate with small businesses, providing a cost-effective solution that frees you up to focus on growing your company.

Whether you need basic call handling or a more comprehensive telephone answering service, CallChimps has you covered. Our customizable solutions are tailored to the unique needs of small enterprises, helping you deliver exceptional customer service and streamline your operations from day one. Start your small business off on the right foot with the support of a reliable, professional call answering partner.

What does a live answering service do?

Beyond basic phone answering, CallChimps' live answering service provides personalized support. Our virtual receptionists transfer calls, schedule appointments, and deliver a professional experience - without call recording. This frees you to focus on core business, while customers speak to friendly, knowledgeable representatives through our call answering services.

How much does CallChimps cost?

CallChimps Offers Flexible Call Handling for Every Business

CallChimps' free plan provides 30 minutes of complementary call handling per month. For higher volume needs, our £29/month plan includes 60 minutes with £0.37/minute thereafter.

For more comprehensive solutions, the £99/month Premium service offers 240 included minutes, CRM integration, and prioritised routing for VIP callers. Tailored to your organisation's unique requirements, CallChimps has a call handling plan to fit every business.

Can I use my own business number and website with CallChimps?

The service from CallChimps includes a free business landline or mobile number. You don't have to use this directly; you can route your existing number to our call handling service when you are busy with a job and unable to answer calls from clients or customers.

CallChimps can reference content from your website when in communication with your customers, as well as using other resources to respond to questions - building trust and improving efficiency in call handling.

Does CallChimps replace my telephone team?

The short answer is a telephone answering service does not mean you need to replace your internal team. CallChimps works as a seamless extension of your existing call centre solution or other telephone answering service.

Reserve your real people for higher value calls and customer services. The call handling service from CallChimps can manage calls when your agents are stretched, or out of office hours, providing a reliable system to handle enquiries and ensure messages reach the appropriate person within the business in a timely manner.