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May 7th 2026
In today’s fast-paced world, customers expect businesses to be quick, responsive, and easy to reach. Whether you’re a growing SME or an established service provider, the way you handle calls can directly affect your reputation, customer satisfaction, and revenue. Missing calls doesn’t just mean missed messages — it can mean missed opportunities.
A call answering service is no longer seen as a ‘nice to have.’ Instead, it’s becoming a practical business tool that helps companies stay competitive. In this blog, we explore five key ways it can boost your business.
One of the biggest benefits is simple: you stop losing business due to missed calls. Many customers won’t leave a voicemail — they’ll call the next company on the list. This is especially true for industries like legal services, property, trades, and accountancy, where people often need quick answers.
With a professional answering service in place, every call is picked up, even during busy periods. That means new enquiries are captured, questions are handled quickly, and leads don’t slip away. In a competitive market, being reachable can make the difference between winning and losing a customer.
Your phone line is often the first direct contact a customer has with your business. A rushed answer, unanswered call, or voicemail can make you seem disorganised or too busy. On the other hand, a friendly and professional response builds trust and helps customers feel valued.
A call answering service gives your business a consistent first impression. At MYCO Connect, our telephone answering service can answer in your company name, follow tailored scripts, and handle enquiries without interrupting your team. This creates a smoother customer journey and builds confidence.
Calls are necessary, but they can also be disruptive. Constant interruptions break focus and slow productivity, especially when staff are juggling multiple tasks. If your team is repeatedly stopping to answer the phone, it can lead to delays, mistakes, and stress.
With an answering service, your team can stay focused on priority work while callers are still looked after. Calls can be filtered, messages taken accurately, and urgent queries transferred through.
As your business grows, call volumes often increase — but hiring extra admin support isn’t always possible or affordable. Recruiting, training, and managing staff takes time and adds ongoing costs. A call answering service provides flexible support without the commitment of a full-time hire.
Trust plays a big role in customer decision-making, especially when people are comparing similar businesses online. If customers can’t reach you easily, they may question how reliable you are. Clear and consistent communication helps build a strong reputation.
A call answering service helps your business appear responsive, organised, and professional — which can improve customer satisfaction and even encourage positive reviews. When people feel supported, they’re more likely to return, recommend you, and view your business positively.
A call answering service is not just about taking messages — it’s about improving customer experience, capturing more leads, saving time, and building a stronger business. In a competitive market, being responsive is one of the simplest ways to stand out.
If you’re regularly missing calls, feeling stretched, or looking to create a more professional customer journey, MYCO Connect’s dedicated telephone answering service can help. With monthly packages starting from just £35, it’s an easy and cost-effective way to upgrade how you handle calls. Explore our packages today and take your customer experience to the next level.
Apr 21st 2026
As a founder, you watch your costs closely.
At 15%, Employer National Insurance is one of the biggest costs that comes with growing your team. What many business owners do not realise is that there is a simple and fully compliant way to reduce it.
It is called Salary Sacrifice.
Here is how it works.
Instead of an employee paying pension contributions from their salary after tax, they agree to reduce their salary by that contribution amount. The employer then pays it directly into the pension.
Because the contribution is taken before National Insurance is calculated:
The employee pays less National Insurance.
The employer pays less National Insurance.
The pension contribution stays the same. But both sides save.
For growing businesses, those savings can add up quickly. As your team expands, so does the impact. A 10-worker business with average salaries of £45,000/year would save around £3,375 a year on National Insurance, whilst saving employees around £200 on their NET pay, for example.
Salary Sacrifice can help you:
There is one important point. It must be set up correctly. Proper documentation and payroll integration are essential.
When done properly, Salary Sacrifice becomes one of the smartest and simplest financial improvements a small business can make.
If you are a MYCO client and want to understand how this could work for your company, Husky can review your current setup and explain the savings clearly.
Sometimes the easiest wins are the ones hiding in plain sight.
Do you have any questions, you can book a call with Husky’s team: https://calendly.com/husky-workplace-pensions/myco
Apr 9th 2026
Article by PolicyBee
Cybercrime is a big problem for the UK. In 2025, it cost the UK economy an estimated £14.7 billion.
One of the most high-profile and impactful areas of cybercrime is data breaches. You know those stories where a company is hacked and their data is either held ransom, leaked to the world, or sold? That’s a data breach.
At worst, the average cost of a data breach for businesses can be devastating. At best, they’re an expensive nuisance that forces you to stay on your toes.
Large and medium businesses are targeted the most. Their data is the most valuable for cybercriminals, but also difficult to get.
Why? Well, they have more budget to spend on cybersecurity and experts. So, they can set up tough defences around their data.
These criminals will go after smaller businesses too. The rewards are smaller but the data’s easier for them to get their hands on.
The government’s latest Cyber Security Breaches Survey reveals that 43% of all UK businesses experienced some form of cybersecurity breach in the last 12 months. For large businesses, this rises to 74%.
That’s over a third of all UK businesses and nearly three-quarters of bigger organisations. Not forgetting many smaller businesses have no way of detecting cyber-attacks. So there are potentially thousands of attacks going unrecorded.
The continuing evolution and ease of access to AI in 2025 is also having an impact on the world of cybercrime. The NCSC has highlighted the importance of properly protecting your business, as cybercriminals begin to utilise AI to improve the speed and impact of cyber-attacks.
But just what is the average cost of a data breach for UK businesses? And what sort of impact can data breaches have on businesses?
It’s difficult to put a firm number on the cost of a data breach in the UK. It depends on the size of your company, how much data you store, what your business does, and much more.
There are a few ways we can measure it, though.
First, we can look at the average cost of a data breach around the world. According to technology giant IBM, which looked at data from 16 different countries and regions, it was $4.4 million in 2025.
It’s worth mentioning that this stat doesn’t include very small or very large breaches. For huge companies that have vast amounts of data, a breach will cost them a lot more.
Likewise for small businesses, the cost will be a lot lower as they store much less data.
So, let’s look at it another way.
In 2025, the average cost of cybercrime on a UK business was around £990. Looks a lot lower than $4.4 million, doesn’t it? Well, this stat includes forms of cybercrime which will be much cheaper to sort out. Especially those that don’t involve stolen data.
This stat also takes into account very small businesses, which IBM didn’t do in their study. Thousands of small businesses are affected by cybercrime every year. But naturally, their clean-up costs are a lot lower.
When you consider that small businesses make up 99.18% of our business population in the UK, it makes sense that including them would drive down the average cost.
Regardless, this amount of money can cause real problems for small and micro-businesses. But there are other, less measurable issues that they might have to face…
We won’t mince words. A successful data breach of a small business can cause chaos.
Why? Well, it comes down to investment in cybersecurity. A small business doesn’t have as much budget to spend on defending themselves from cybercriminals.
They also don’t have as much access to experts who can monitor and log attacks.
A report by Hiscox in 2018 estimated that UK small businesses were targeted with 65,000 cyber-attacks per day. And that over 4,500 of those attacks were successful.
This means that a small business was successfully breached every 19 seconds.
Other global and UK-based data we’ve highlighted in this blog shows us that post-pandemic, it’s highly likely that this number of attacks will have risen. Especially with the increasing use of AI in cybercrime.
What does being breached actually mean for a small business? Hiscox found it costs them about £25,700 in clean-up costs, on average. This includes restoring systems, paying ransoms, replacing hardware, and investing in better security after they’ve been breached.
The second big hurdle they have to face is less measurable. Business interruption, damage to their reputation, difficulty getting customers in the future. These problems are far more likely to lead to a small business closing after a data breach.
In 2024, Hiscox found that 43% of businesses lost customers after a cyber-attack. And 38% reported experiencing bad publicity.
With challenges like these in mind, it’s easy to see how a small business could struggle to keep its doors open. Especially if they were faced with a particularly damaging data breach.
There are many different kinds of data breaches. Some of which are complex and nuanced, while others are about as subtle as throwing a brick through a window.
The main ones you need to watch out for involve exploiting human error. In 2023, Stanford University research found that around 88% of all data breaches are caused by human error.
That’s why training your staff is so important. So they can avoid the tricks and tactics that cybercriminals love to use.
These include phishing emails, where a fake email is used to gain access to a system. Or ransomware, where someone inadvertently installs malware on your network, allowing a cybercriminal to hold your data hostage in exchange for a ransom payment.
Outside of human error, there are physical breaches. A criminal might steal an employee’s laptop or phone, or break into your office and rip a hard drive out of a computer.
These are just a few examples of data breaches. In reality, there are dozens of techniques that cybercriminals use.
The most important thing is that you have some kind of cybersecurity in place. It’s all about prevention.
You’ve probably heard a lot of talk about UK GDPR over the last few years.
It stands for UK General Data Protection Regulation. It’s a set of rules that makes sure personal data is used responsibly by businesses.
You’ll often hear about it when companies are fined for failing to follow the rules. Usually in connection to a data breach.
When a company is breached, it might be found that it didn’t protect its data properly. This is a big no-no when it comes to UK GDPR.
So much so that they can be investigated by the regulator (the Information Commissioner’s Office) and fined up to £17.5 million, or 4% of their annual global turnover. Whichever is greater.
Smaller businesses probably wouldn’t see a fine anywhere near this level. But they can still be fined thousands of pounds.
Don’t want to be on the receiving end of a data breach? We don’t blame you. Because the average cost of a data breach for small businesses in the UK can be crippling.
The best way to stop them is by prevention. Investing whatever budget you can afford into cybersecurity will make a huge difference. The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) is a great resource for actionable advice.
Following their advice can help you mitigate the chances of being hit by a cyber-attack. And make it way harder for cybercriminals to sneak in and cause havoc, if they choose you as a target.
Chances are, though, that you will be breached at some point. Being prepared for it can help you get ahead of the problems you’ll face.
Cyber insurance is a great way to do this. It’ll pay your recovery costs. Help you manage any PR difficulties you might face. And bring the average cost of a data breach right down.
Some policies even offer online cybersecurity training for your staff. So you can avoid common pitfalls that can lead to data breaches.
You can also add on extra cover for social engineering and financial cybercrime – two of the most common forms of cybercrime. Or patch on some help if your business isn’t able to trade due to a cyber-attack.
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