The average US consumer spends about 61,000 per year. Increasing your business’ ability to capture as much of that revenue as possible comes down to how readily you engage the people that are shopping in your niche.
Therein lies the value of hiring on a call answering service.
A single missed call has the potential to carry thousands of dollars in lifetime losses. Armed with an answering service, you can guarantee that anybody who dials your number will be immediately courted. Consequently, you’ll better ensure new and repeat business.
But which sorts of answering services/features can you expect when you bring on an answering provider? Is what’s offered worth the cost?
In this post, we break down a handful of benefits you’ll almost certainly enjoy when you start working with a call professional. Keep reading to discover what they are!
1. Customer Support
Call answering service providers don’t just answer phones and place people on hold until you’re available. Many providers are prepared to offer end-to-end support solutions to clients.
Do you have business software that tracks customer complaints? If you do, your answering service can access that software and use its data to walk consumers through issues and towards resolutions.
With proper training, your call answering service might replace your internal support team!
2. Call Directing
There’s nothing more annoying to customers than being passed around endlessly by a business as you try to find somebody that can solve your problems. Rather than having unskilled, internal call fielders trial and error sending customers to various departments, centralize your call coordinating around an answering service.
Answering professionals can be trained to know exactly where calls need to be routed depending on a caller’s concerns. By using an answering service as call gatekeepers, callers will get to where they need to go faster which will skyrocket satisfaction.
3. Bilingual Conversations
Do you have a person on your team that can confidently communicate with people in Spanish? What about other languages that are growing in popularity in your community?
By diversifying the languages you’re able to service, you can grow your consumer base exponentially. The great news there is that many answering services offer bilingual call fielders.
Ask about the diversity of languages a prospective call answering service offers. Be sure to put companies that champion bi-lingual support at the top of your list!
4. Data Aggregation
Every time a customer calls, data points could be collected. These points would help you refine your marketing, products, and other business practices. Unfortunately, most phone call’s data points are not captured by your run of the mill internal employee that’s half fielding phone calls and half doing their primary job.
Call answering services can take in those lost data points! Things like which time of day callers are most active, the demographics of callers, typical pain points, and more.
Those analytics will fuel your ability to compete in an increasingly competitive marketplace.
5. Appointment Scheduling
A call answering service that’s worth its salt will be more than adept at managing foundational secretary tasks. For example, if a business client calls in wanting a meeting with a decision-maker, call fielders can scan calendars and create appointments.
That feature of answering services creates yet another means of saving for businesses that are investing in hiring dedicated secretaries full-time, paying them salaries and benefits.
6. Message Taking
Some messages are too important to be left to an answering machine. To ensure that every verbal communication customers leave with your business makes it to the person on your team that needs to hear it, tap into professional call fielder’s ability to notate and deliver messages.
Messages taken by call screeners can be transcribed to text, emailed, text messaged, or delivered in a variety of other ways that are most convenient to your team.
7. Speed Guarantees
What would it do for your business if you could market to clients that you guarantee your team will answer their calls in seconds? That would be a lofty promise but one that might illustrate your corporation’s focus on service.
We’ve seen trends in the call answering space where several companies are offering buyers like you “answer speed guarantees”. These guarantees typically promise that any customer that calls your business will be greeted by a support specialist within 3 rings.
You could certainly hang your hat on that guarantee and be all but assured that your competitors would never be able to beat it.
8. Support Localization
Yet another great feature you can expect to enjoy when contracting a call center answering service is support localization. If you’re an international business, you may want to make sure that Indian call screeners answer calls coming in from India, American from the USA, etc.
As call answering business’ network of agents continues to grow, more are capable of offering you that sort of custom, localized support that can leave a great impression on your clients.
Call Answering Service Features Empower Business Owners Like You
If you’re like most business owners we’ve talked to, the call answering service features we’ve shared should have you excited to explore hiring call professionals. As you explore your options, we implore you to test the service you’re considering bringing on by giving them a call.
If your call is answered quickly and questions are addressed professionally, that’s a great sign. If not, we would recommend trying another provider.
Curious to explore more call center answering service insights? If you are, check out additional content on our blog!