Category: Answering Service
Use an Answering Service to Better Serve Your Customers
We’ve talked about how using an answering service can save your customers time. A related topic is that an answering service can also improve the level of service you provide to your customers.
This helps keep customers happy, and happy customers become a long-term customers. Therefore, an answering service is a key customer retention tool.
Key ways a telephone answering service can help you serve your customers better
Available 24/7
In our fast-paced, always on society, customers expect the organizations they do business with to be available whenever they want to contact them. While staffing your business twenty-four-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week is cost-prohibitive for most all organizations, hiring an answering service to pick up the slack on evenings and weekends presents an affordable alternative, costing a small fraction of what just one full-time employee would cost. Whenever your customers opt to contact you, you provide the best possible service by being available. Your answering service helps make this happen
Provide Answers Fast
Some people will always go online to seek answers. But what happens when the information isn’t available online? What happens if the online answer is hard to find or incomplete? Aside from your staff, a 24/7 answering service is the most effective FAQ (frequently asked questions) resource available. Not only can they provide standard answers to common questions, but, as real people talking to your customers, they can expand on standard responses, clarify misunderstandings, and add value that a static website cannot.
Extend Office Hours
Having a 9 to 5 mentality puts businesses out of reach of many consumers, who aren’t able to call during regular business hours. Plus too many people intend to call during the day but don’t remember until it is too late. Without an answering service to handle these afterhours calls, you might inadvertently be sending your customers to your competitor who offers extended hours.
Address Urgent Calls
Though it varies from one industry to the next, every business has emergency communication. For some businesses customer emergencies happen every day and for others urgent calls are infrequent. Regardless, it is critical to have a twenty-four-hour-a-day response to your customers during their critical moments. Anything less gives them a strong reason to take their business elsewhere.
Defuse Emotion
Imagine your customer is upset. He picks up the phone and calls your number. As it rings his anger mounts. A real person answers. Her calm, professional voice helps restore his inner peace, even it if takes a few moments for him to settle. How much worse would it be if he had to leave a voicemail message or, even worse, if no one answered at all? This would just give him more time to stew, for his emotions to build. No, having your answering service available to answer these difficult calls is the best solution. They can take action, offer assurances, and defuse the situation.
Having an answering service available around-the-clock to serve your customers is often the best customer service strategy you can have.
