February 18, 2017
6 Reasons to Consider a Professional Answering Service
When you run your own business, you know how important it is to put your best foot forward. When clients or customers call your company, you need to know that they are going to get a professional voice on your end of the line. Many businesses around the globe have found that they get a lot of benefits from using a professional answering service. Here are some ways your business will be helped by using a live telephone answering service.
- It is a cost effective way to make sure your phones are covered. Some businesses think that it is cheaper to hire someone in house to take care of the phones but the opposite is true. When you look to hire someone to handle your phones, you have to take the time to find a staff member to do this. Hiring can be a very time consuming and expensive thing to do. If you hire the wrong person, you can end up spending a lot on hiring and training one person only to have to do it all over again. Moreover, if you hire one person, if your business has busy times of the day, that person can only answer one call at a time. When you hire a live operator answering service, your calls will be covered, for less, when you need them to be.
- You can say goodbye to voice mail. People are not all that likely to leave a voice mail message when they do not get the person they want or need to talk to. When people get voice mail, they tend to just hang up and call someone else for the products or services that they needed. When you hire a professional answering service, your customers and clients will never get voice mail. When they call your offices or business, they will get a live person. That will increase your sales and customer satisfaction. If you want to have a 24/7 answering service, you can have that. This is often an important feature for medical offices. If a patient has a problem at midnight, they will get a live person to help with their problem.
- You will provide better service to your customers and clients. This is important. At least 59% of all American consumers will try a new brand if they think they are going to have a better experience in terms of customer service. At least 78% of all American consumers said that they have abandoned their plans to make a purchase because the customer service they received was not good enough. Keeping customers happy makes a bis difference for your bottom line. Companies that are able to increase their customer retention by 5% see an increase in profits of about 125%. Hiring a professional answering service will help you increase the customer service you offer and improve your customer retention.
- They can set appointments or take reservations. If someone wants to make an appointment with you or book a reservation for anything from a haircut to a time to eat at your restaurant, they can do that when you have a professional answering service. There are systems where their appointment or reservation making can be inputted directly into your system so you can see what they are doing on your behalf.
- A professional answering service can provide tech support. A full 61% of American consumers would rather get their customer service and technical support over the telephone. The service you hire will train the people who answer your phone on your products and that can make a difference. People are always much happier to talk to a company representative when they have questions or concerns about a product.
- They can take orders for you. If you take orders on the phone or online, you know how important it is to get those orders right. Your live phone answering service can take the orders and get them right. You can develop scripts for the answering service to use. This is another benefit to hiring a service.
Having the right people answer your phones can make a huge difference in your bottom line. Hiring a professional answering service is one way to do that.