How Many Phone Lines?

[RobT]

How many phone lines does everyone out there have for their business?

 

[Daddio]

One importat thing to remember is: never have more lines than places to answer them.

 

[paul7979]

I have 5 lines on rollover plus credit card lines. Will soon be processing CC via DSL and will go with 6 rollover lines with 4 POS stations.

 

[NY_Pizza]

I have 2 lines. Have been thinking of moving it up to 3 - 4 lines though. Question - has anyone done anything similar, and what impact on your sales?

 

[wa_dave]

NY Pizza

I had three phone lines , witht he third also used for EFTPOS transactions.

Problem we had was that on busy nights the three phones ran hot and sometimes we waited ages for the third phone to go quiet so we could put through an EFTPOS transaction. At times customers got peeved at the time they had to wait to pay.

We now have line three soley for EFTPOS.

The other problem with the three phones is that we had calls on hold as we have 2 front of shop customer service girls on and could only take one call at a time each, plus do walk ins. Also we got so many orders at once that the makeline could keep up.

Now we have only 2 lines it is more manageable. Sometimes customer say “gee you must be busy tonight, it took ages to get through.” This helps when we have a real long wait time due to amount of orders. They think we are slammed and they expect a long wait so when we tell them the wait time they are not surprised.

I personally think that if you go to more lines you need people to answer them (refer to Daddio’s reply) and facilities to make the orders, such as Daddio with his tripple deck.

We currently only have a single deck MMPs360 so we are limited so having less phones are OK for us. When we get our second oven we will speed up pizza output then we can get another line and another order taker.

Dave

 

[15thStreetPizzaandPu]

paul7979:

I have 5 lines on rollover plus credit card lines. Will soon be processing CC via DSL and will go with 6 rollover lines with 4 POS stations.

paul, how big is your place…what % dine in versus delivery? we do quite well ans have only two lines the second has call waiting. again do quite well but 75% dine in customers with high alcohol sales

 

[paul7979]

I have no dine in, just 85% delivery and 15% carryout. Even with six lines there will be multiple times a week when customers will recieve a busy signal. Unlike some others, I would rather have someone listening to my messages on hold than to have them get a busy signal.

 

[GT1]

true, i would rather have them hear a message on hold, but how many of those hearing a busy signal would it take, to have one less line paid for. be realistic, if you need 20 lines, have 20 lines but if you only need 19 and once in a great while someone might have to call back…pay for 19