Abandoning the company's main telephone line

It is quite common for a company to have a main telephone line. The phone number is used in case you don't know the section or the person you need to talk to. However, in our case until recently, there have been so many unwanted sales calls to the main line.

As a white-collar worker, answering phone calls in a polite and proper manner is a required skill. Thus, at e-Jan, new members are tasked with picking up calls from outside of the office for practice. However, I've observed and heard that most calls to the main line have been sales calls, and in some of the cases, our employees had a tough time turning down those persistent sales calls, most of them trying to get me on the line. Those kinds of calls could ruin new workers' motivation.

There are quite a few companies that demand workers to make such sales calls based on a quota, which is not enjoyable work. So, the dark aura from those companies could influence our employees. At e-Jan, we put high priority on each worker's motivation; the higher the motivation the better. It would be a big concern if there were negative external influences.

If there were any concerns, we would simply take corrective action.

For general inquiries, we have our homepage and each section has a separate line. Most business calls are made referring to phone numbers on business cards and email signatures. For incoming calls inquiring about our services, we have created a phone number dedicated to service queries; the same number was published in our brochures.

So now, if you call the main line, an automated messaging system would inform you about our service query number. Whenever there are sales calls to the service query line, the person who takes the call can easily deny the caller and doesn't need as much effort as it used to require to turn them down. That gave us peace of mind.

Oh and by the way, I was proudly telling a president of a company about my ingenious idea to abandon our main line, but he proudly got back at me saying that he had already abandoned all phone numbers from his business card which showed only his email address. Yes, thinking back, recently, most of my personal contacts come from SNS, SMS, or email, not via phone calls. It makes me feel that we need to rethink the need for telephones as we go along.