With the fast expansion of digital communication over the last two decades and the wide preference for text messaging, online chat, and video conferencing over traditional phone calls among many young professionals, it’s easy to lose sight of how important it is to maintain legacy communication systems. Most established businesses get it because they have a lot of data about how robust and long-lasting customers who prefer phone communication have been as a population. While your business phone line might not be the most active channel of communication you buy, it’s still likely to be a very important one, and that means you need to invest in the right telecommunications resources, including reception and answering.
Luckily, the cost of concierge services like outsourced reception or after-hours live answering has gone down drastically over the years. Not only do new technologies make it more cost-effective for service providers, allowing them to reduce prices, those same technologies also make it easier than ever for you to navigate those services. When you add in the consolidation of call center businesses and their diversification into a range of telecommunication services for clients across industries in many sectors, it’s easy to see why prices have come down so far. If you still need convincing before you subscribe to an answering service, here are another five great reasons to get your company set up as quickly as possible.
1. Increase Customer Confidence and Repeat Sales
When customers call a company for help with questions or concerns about an order, a personal and professional answering helps instill confidence that they can resolve their issues. This increases customer satisfaction, but more importantly, it also increases confidence in your goods and services. When they have that confidence, they’re more likely to come back, even after a dissatisfying experience.
2. Screen Your Calls Without a Machine
When you work with live answering services like Voicenation, you set the terms for your answering and reception needs. That means you can choose whether customers are forwarded to you or your on-site employees according to criteria that make sense for your business. You can use these services to handle basic customer service questions that can be answered with widely available resources with the right service package, dictate when to take messages and when to pass people through to the right company contact, and which employee receives each class of incoming call. That allows you to stage your communications efficiently even when you’re open and taking calls in real time.
3. Get Detailed Messages With Relevant Context
Professional message-taking is one of the most attractive aspects of paying for an answering service. When customers talk to a real person instead of recording a voice message, there’s someone who is trained to distill their concerns into concise facts you can respond to quickly. The right service will also train their employees to ask clarifying questions and gather additional facts if they aren’t volunteered, so you have the essential background information you need to provide a fast and satisfactory response when you get into your office.
4. Compete With Larger Rivals
Presentation is a large part of successfully competing with established businesses when you are starting out. The more a small business can look like a strong company with deep financial resources and high quality work, the more attractive it is to prospective customers. It doesn’t matter if you’re retailing necessities to the public or providing backed B2B services for other professionals, the same principle holds. Subscribing to services that would take a deep investment to provide for yourself in-house is one way to appear large enough to take on your rivals and strong enough to deliver competitive work, and answering services are among the key features clients can see easily that indicate those things.
5. Increase Customer Satisfaction
Word of mouth marketing is becoming more important than ever in the age of social media, but to take advantage of it, you need satisfied customers who will recommend your work forward. When customers have the ability to reach out to a real person to resolve issues, they are generally more satisfied even if the resolution is the same one they’d get through an online system or automated phone menu. It just makes sense to invest in the tools that customers are happier to use, because it makes them happier when it’s time to write a review, and that does affect your bottom line.