Did you know that there are almost 28 million small businesses in the U.S.? If you?re one of these small businesses, you know what the daily struggle is like. You want to help out your customers — without significantly raising your overhead. Although you?d love to give your consumers a premium experience, you?re always on a budget and looking for ways to pay your bills, your employees, and yourself while you?re at it.

Here are a few things you can keep in mind going forward.

Get Your Website Up

Do you find that your company?s phone line is often tied up during the day? Try to get your website up to date and cutting edge. This means that all the information about your business (operating times, commonly asked questions, prices) should be easily accessible so that people aren?t wasting your time calling up about things that don?t require a personal explanation. While you?re at it, if you?re the type of business to be on websites like Yelp or Google listings, make sure your information is updated there as well — many people will only look to Google for things like a restaurant?s open hours, rather than going to the website.

Outsource Your Answering Services

If you have a 9-5 company, you may not have the budget for a 24 hour answering service. In some industries, though, all-hour services are needed — or at least highly recommended for good business practices. Did you know, for example, that 66% of customers agree they would be willing to spend more money with a company after they?ve had a positive customer service experience? What you can do to make ends meet, and make your customers happy is invest in outsourced answering services.

These services can be instructed on everything they need to know about what your company offers, and the answers to common questions. Because it?s outsourced, these companies are providing a service to multiple businesses. If you only have four calls on average a night, the call secretary will be able to answer calls for other businesses in the interim — in other words, you won?t need to pay for the full night. This way you can have a professional telephone answering service around the clock without needing to pay someone to be in your office at 2am every night.