FAQs

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Broadly, two things:

1. We provide you with a city-centre address which has a range of benefits.
2. We provide your team with business and administrative experts without you actually employing any new staff.

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We chose the name Delocate for a few reasons:

1. Our Virtual Address service allows our clients to be located anywhere while still having a professional city-centre address. Some of our clients even travel the world, working from their laptop, while we handle all their office work.
2. We take work off your desk; you can Delegate almost anything to our team and be impressed at the result!
3. We intend to have multiple offices around the country and once we do you will be able to move your address to any of them allowing you to Relocate at will. Of course, you could also have an address at all of our sites and look like a multi-branch national company if you so wish, while actually touring Australia; that’s true Delocating!

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Broadly, two types:

1. Folks that operate a small business from home and in particular those that spend much of their day ‘on the job’ such as tradesmen.
2. Those whose business has grown and they can see that they either need to employ someone to handle certain aspects of their business or they would have to take time away from their core skills to do business-management or administrative tasks.

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Again, two primary reasons:

1. We give your business a professional veneer, and your family an added degree of privacy, with our city centre address. We can also handle all your mail including depositing cheques and filing receipts to your accounting software.
2. Using Delocate allows you to grow your businesses and the skillsets within it without worrying about interviewing and ultimately employing staff and dealing with all the complexities and expenses they bring. You can use our team on a part-time basis meaning you can engage us for help as soon as you have work to do rather than having to wait until you have many hours of work to be done.

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All of our services are available either on one-month subscriptions or as one-off projects. This means you’re not tied into anything and can try us out without commitment. (That said, we enjoy building long-term relationships with our clients; we’re sure you’ll stick around once you’ve used us once!)
We also offer twelve-month contracts at a reduced rate. Notice of cancellation must be provided in writing at least 15 days prior to your next billing date.

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No. Delocate do not apply any set-up fees to any of our business service offerings.

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Probably! If you’d like to use more than one of our services, please get in touch and we will discuss how we can help you.

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It depends on which of our Telephone Answering Services you choose to use.

Simple Service – £10+VAT/month for the service and then a per-call charge of £1+VAT/call.

Business Extension Service – £20+VAT/month for the service and then a per-minute charge of £1+VAT/minute.

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We believe anyone can justify outsourcing their calls to us because the service pays for itself in gained business because if you miss a prospective customer’s call the chances are they will try someone else and never call again. This is especially true for tradesmen.

Similarly, calls can be distracting; it might just be taking you away from your focus or more serious if you are driving or otherwise operating machinery.

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Absolutely! There are multiple ways we can route calls when your customers call a number and it’s possible to use an existing number you might already have published too. Just give us a call and we’ll discuss the best approach for you and your business.

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Not necessarily, no. It’s possible for us to port an existing number into our systems and then route calls to that number as appropriate. The costs for doing this are rarely prohibitive and do not necessarily tie you into using our services (though we doubt you’d ever want to leave us anyway)! 🙂

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Yes, we will work with you to decide what type of number is best for your business. It’s perfectly possible to have a London (or another city’s) area code if you so wish.

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Our current hours are as follows:
Monday to Friday: 09:00-17:00 (excluding bank holidays)

Please note that we are monitoring when calls come in and may extend these in the future.

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Callers will be greeted with a customised message with your company name and a request to call back in office hours – it is possible here to also give another number as a direct line to you if you wish.

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Yes, probably. This will depend on your telephone service provider and may incur charges from them. Please contact us to discuss your requirements as most things can be figured out one way or another.

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Within reason, as often as you like! If you would like to ask your team to change how they do anything, please, feel free to contact them directly and talk your ideas through with them.

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Because our system picks up the call and answers with your company name immediately and then connects us, most ‘silent calls’ get dropped without making it to us. Our system also recognises known spammy numbers so they are dropped too so you will never be charged anything for such calls. Finally, we’re pretty good at recognising junky sales calls and thus end such calls very promptly! We try to be reasonably polite, of course!

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This is up to you. Broadly speaking we can do one of two things:

Just send daily summaries when all calls were non-urgent and contact you immediately only about items of a time-sensitive nature.
Send a brief message about every call you receive.

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Your business will have its own number and our systems tell us ‘You have a call for ‘Business X’ when the calls come in so we can answer the call with your chosen greeting.

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When your customers call, they will immediately be greeted by a brief custom recording and then be answered within a few seconds by one of your three team members. Both the custom recording and the way your team greet your callers can be exactly as you wish.

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We will, we promise! We’re acutely aware that most telephone answering services are unable to offer a truly personalised service, but we do things differently. When you join us we will assign your company just three of our team. They will work hard to learn your business inside out so when they take calls, your customers will be sure they just spoke to one of your very own staff.

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Of course, it’s not actually virtual, it’s our physical address. The ‘virtual’ refers to the fact that you use it as your business address even though you aren’t actually based there. There are four main reasons why you would want to do this:

1. To give your business a professional veneer by appearing to have a city-centre office when in reality you might work from your kitchen table!
2. To keep your family’s address private.
3. To have us handle your mail for you. (We can scan and send or even handle it. For example, we can add bills to your accounting software, pay in cheques or save other documents in your chosen cloud-storage solution such as Drop-Box.
4. Give your business a ‘presence’ in a second location. For example, if you’re based in Cambridge but want to target the Norwich market you can use our address to be closer to your target clients. (Right now we only have our Norwich office but hope soon to have many more locations.)

Please see the Virtual Address page for more information.

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Coworking (or co-working) is working in an office with other people that are not members of one’s own business or team. Indeed, a large proportion of those that use coworking space are the only member of their organisation! Facilities such as meeting rooms, office equipment and furniture, and even internet access are shared to enable efficiencies of cost for their users.

Check out our Coworking Space page for more information.