The majority of businesses involve some sort of customer support where your agents provide assistant to your customers. Although some rookies might say customer support isn’t that important — pros will tell you it’s crucial for a thriving business.
Having a solid system to answer your customers’ queries takes your business a tad closer to your customers’ hearts. It’s a nice way to build a trustful relationship with your customers.
While email- and chat-based support is viable as well, the majority of customers prefer talking to businesses on the phone, primarily due to the sheer convenience phone support brings along.
However, building and managing a customer support department with experienced agents is a costly and time-consuming process. It’s better to rely on a professional phone answering service for the matter.
A phone answering service does exactly what it sounds like: it answers your customers’ phone calls for you. While the definition is quite simple, a phone answering service is much more than that.
If you choose your phone answering service wisely, your business can reap many benefits including better customer satisfaction, the opportunity to attract & retain more customers, improve your brand image, and much more.
If you go with a professional and reputed phone answering service, here are a few benefits you’d get.
Professionalism and Credibility
Your business is good at doing what it does, i.e., providing its customers with high-quality products or services. However, if your business isn’t already a multi-million dollar company, there’s a high chance you don’t have a professional customer support department.
As obvious as it may sound, arranging a professional support department with 24/7 phone call availability is a costly feat. You’d have to invest a lot of time and money in putting together such a department. You’d have to search and hire professionals who specialize in such areas.
On the other hand, if you decide to go with a phone answering service, your phone calls will be handled by certified professionals who specialize in handling customer phone calls. You can rest assured they’d provide your customers with reliable and valuable support.
Having a professional support department with phone availability gives you credibility in your field. Your business gets recognized as a firm that genuinely cares for its customers.
Reduced Staffing Costs
When you rely on another company to handle all your customers’ phone calls for you, you don’t need to hire and manage a wide array of staff members.
First and foremost, you save recruitment costs: you don’t have to spend money posting your job openings on different job portals; you don’t need to go through resumes and conduct interviews.
Furthermore, you won’t need to train your newly-hired employees as the professionals from the phone answering service already know what they’re doing. You also save up on potential workspace costs as you don’t have to arrange offices for your staff.
If your company operates remotely, you won’t have to arrange different online communication and collaboration resources for your phone department.
Simply put, you save up a lot on staffing costs when you rely on a professional phone answering company.
Increased Productivity for Employees
When you partner with a phone answering company, they work for you even when you’re asleep. Even when your company is closed and isn’t able to conduct any business activity, your partner virtual receptionists are there to pick up your customers’ calls.
It means when your business re-opens and your employees get back to work, they won’t have to face a tremendous amount of customer requests before they can get to do important stuff. Your employees can be more productive with their time and other resources.
Effectively Work With Remote Teams
If you have a small business consisting of a remote team, you know how hard it is to provide customer support, especially phone support. There’s a high chance your team includes people from various parts of the globe with different time zones. It’s hard to hire and manage phone receptionists who can work effectively through your business hours to provide customer support.
However, as professional virtual receptionists from phone answering firms are mostly available 24/7, you don’t have to go through such hassles. You can rest assured your business will be providing its customers with effective customer support no matter the time zone.
Better Customer Service Results
As mentioned earlier, phone answering services have trained professionals who specialize in providing customer support on phone. No matter how hard you try, setting up an in-house phone answering department of such caliber is a difficult task for small- and medium-sized companies.
When you rely on a reputed phone answering service, you essentially make sure your customer service results are going to improve. You can reap the benefits of higher customer satisfaction.
Additional Sales Leads
Depending on what you require from a phone answering service, you can set them up to generate additional sales leads for you. They can be an effective way to attract customers and funnel them into purchasing your products or services.
In the longer term, partnering with a phone answering service can earn you more revenues.
Improved Office Organization and Accountability
Having a customer support department with several agents to handle multiple phone calls at once requires a lot of office space. Not only do you have to arrange a peaceful environment for your agents to work in, but you also need to have acoustic equipment to make sure the call quality doesn’t suffer. Partnering with a phone answering service saves you from that hassle and lets you organize your office space better.
Moreover, as you’re outsourcing your phone answering department, you can keep your partner company accountable for any misconduct or bad practices.
A phone answering service is a company that answers your customers’ phone calls for you. These firms have trained professionals who specialize in providing on-phone customer support.
Partnering with such a company saves your business from a lot of hassles, while also providing you with several short- and long-term benefits. Ultimately, you can reap the benefits of boosted sales and revenues.