It is a fact that around 75 percent of customers who call into a business hang up the phone immediately if they reach an automated answering voice service. Many callers refuse to leave messages for the business if they get an answering machine, and most do not ever bother to call back. These issues amount to an enormous sum of missed opportunities which have the potential to be taking your business to the next level if there were just a human being there to answer the phone calls.
Automated systems have become unreliable and are very annoying for most people. Instead of helping a business create a larger customer base they build a negative image in the mind of a caller. About 60 percent of callers have admitted that they get frustrated hearing an automated telephone response and may opt to discontinue business with an organisation completely based solely on this fact. Due to this reason, many businesses irrespective of their size are opting for telephone answering services.
Build and Save Your Customer Base
A business can build and save its customer base merely by opting for a telephone answering service instead of an automated one. Being able to speak with a customer service representative assures a customer that his grievances will be handled at the earliest time and with utmost responsibility. Great customer service leads to word-of-mouth publicity for a business, which can ultimately save a good amount of money in advertising costs.
Today, being able to provide a telephone answering service to your customers is not as tedious as it may seem. A telephone answering service provider offers services for many different types of business simultaneously. Highly skilled virtual receptionists professionally handle all of the phone calls, saving you and your employees a lot of time which can be utilised for other aspects of the business.
What to Look for in a Good Telephone Answering Service
- Around-the-clock telephone answering service: a 24 hours a day, 7 days a week answering service is perfect for businesses whose customers live in different time zones or have schedules that conflict with your business hours.
- Call attendants: must be readily available and the customer should never be made to wait on hold for anything for more than 2 minutes.
- Continuous updating and training: a knowledgeable call attendant will be able to resolve any query of the customer. After the call has been completed, the customer should feel that his issue has been addressed promptly.
- Experience: the experience of an attendant who has handled a range of different customers comes to the rescue for both your business and your customers.
- Price: the main objective of hiring a telephone attending company is to reduce the operational cost that a business would incur by using traditional receptionists and other staff for customer relations management.
Quality Customer Service
Telephone answering services are a great way to boost an organisation’s name through prompt, high-quality customer service. People don’t like being kept on hold for long periods of time. Automated systems run in loops and the menus can be very tedious and confusing to manoeuvre through that by the time a customer gets to speak to a person (if he ever does), he is so exhausted and frustrated that he may even take the drastic step of discontinuing the use of your products or services.
It used to be that telephone answering service providers restricted their services to attending calls and taking messages only after business hours, but with developments in technology and outsourcing jobs around the world, calls can now be taken any time of day from anywhere in the world by virtual receptionists who have the ability to connect the call with the concerned personnel in your business. If the concerned person is not available at your end, virtual receptionists are trained to understand the exact needs of the caller or to take messages. Virtual receptionists can also be instructed to relay messages to particular clients and to collect information such as appointment confirmations, schedules for meetings, etc.
Great Service at Low Costs
The telephone call could be the first point of contact between you and your client. Answering telephone calls is a core business activity for the service provider which means that they specialise in everything that is even remotely related to telephonic communication, such as message taking, emergency response, overflow call handling, and outbound services. The virtual receptionists and call attendants are trained and supervised continuously about the intricacies of your particular business and how to handle your clients and customers.
If a person is recruited as a conventional receptionist in your office, they may be busy with many other tasks, such as front office management and trivial administration-related jobs, or even worse, they may be completely idle aside from attending phone calls. More often than not, he or she may not have had any special training for effectively handling customer calls. As an end result, the image of your business may suffer along with its budget. The extra costs for managing this person along with employment taxes and other incentives will add to your operational expenses. Also, if he or she goes on leave or takes unnecessarily long breaks, you run a risk of missing important business calls.
By hiring virtual receptionists through telephone answering services, your business will appear larger and more professional. A team of employees from the service provider handles your account and within the team they specialise in various aspects of your business, thus providing your business with an effective outsourcing process. To a person outside of your organisation, these service providers are employees of your business who are highly skilled and motivated.
Many answering services will offer tailor-made packages according to the special and unique needs of your business. The employees of the telephone answering service will be especially trained to match the requirements of your business, resulting in a more efficient handling of your account.
Message-Direct are based in Ferndown, Dorset and they offer around-the-clock telephone answering services for businesses of all types and sizes. They provide custom-made packages to suit the unique needs of your business. Whether your business is new or well-established, they ensure that your customer’s phone calls are answered promptly, even if he should call in the middle of the night. They have a flexible billing plan and you can rest assured that the service is worth every bit of what you pay.