A double celebration for the Moneypenny telephone answering and outsourced switchboards service which this month celebrates 15 years in business in the UK and today opens for business in the United States, operating out of its new US base in Charleston, South Carolina. The US office is headed up by Vice-Presidents Pete Hardie and Toby Diggens.
The Moneypenny model is that law firms – and other organisations (in all it currently works for about 7000 businesses worldwide, including 800 law firms) are assigned a dedicated PA who gets to know your business and will answer your phones in exactly the same way as your internal staff would do. Some organisations use Moneypenny for overflow/out-of-hours calls, while others use it as a fully outsourced service. And, all organisations can determine how their calls are answered. For example we have heard of City law firms requiring calls to be answered in a strictly formal way, whereas some regional firms prefer a more informal, folksy approach – the choice is yours.
The US initiative was partly prompted by the London offices of American law firms, that Moneypenny was already acting for, saying it was a shame there wasn’t a similar service available in the United States – well now there is.
The First Rule of Moneypenny is you do not talk about Moneypenny. Well, not quite but Moneypenny has a strict rule that it never discloses the identities of its customers, even to prospects asking for reference sites. Commercial director Joanna Swash says one of the keys to the company’s success is that it just focuses on telephone services rather than diversifying into other fields. Unlike similar services, all Moneypenny staff work out of a central office rather than from home, which also explains why the company has won awards for being “The Best Company toWork For”. The company is currently building a new campus in the UK that will eventually employ over 1000 staff.
What we also learned from Moneypenny: Charleston is the home of the hand-woven Palmetto Rose.