Business Phone Answering Services: A Smart Move For Sales Organizations

By Author: Mary J. Emmer
Total Articles: 2
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If you’re doing business online or in any direct-response or order-taking capacity, you may find, like so many other similar companies, that a professional business phone answering service will not only handle inbound calls more efficiently but can also increase sales.

A business phone answering service takes calls from a client’s customers twenty-four hours a day, all year long – including holidays. Staff at these call centers provide information, help with product selection, engage in upselling, qualify callers and close sales.

A company may be trying to handle all order-fulfillment tasks in-house, but when business grows, that no longer makes sense. A company may have an e-commerce website on which it strongly urges customers to order online. But many customers don’t like to pay online; many others may have questions the company’s website didn’t answer and want to speak to a real person. Business phone answering services address these and many other problems.

Call center staff who take orders will familiarize themselves with their client’s website and their products or services. By ...
... doing this, there’s clear communication with people who call to order – in fact, those callers rarely even realize they’re speaking with someone off-site.

An experienced business phone answering service can handle inbound sales calls from catalogues, television ads and infomercials, radio and print ads, direct-response advertising, Internet ads and more. Typically such a service can deal with calls coming from multiple marketing channels a company may use and close sales quickly and efficiently.

Numerous benefits exist for sales companies when they use business phone answering services. They include:

Incoming calls are answered on the first ring with your customized greeting
Forwarding service to an 800 number
E-mail or fax confirmation for every order received
Clear phone lines – not all scratchy and hissy
Phone dialing and menu systems that customers easily understand
Bilingual staff for Spanish-speaking callers
Billing by the second, not by the minute

How does it all work? Simple. A customer calls a toll-free number. The call center’s inbound system recognizes the number and routes the call to a staff member trained in talking about and selling your products or services. Everything this business phone answering service staff member says will be from scripts and notes approved by the client. Staff will also add shipping costs to each order and determine the correct amount of tax.

Once the sale is made, notification of it is sent to whatever distribution/fulfillment center the company specifies. Most centers send orders on a daily basis, and some can send them even more frequently, depending on the nature of its client’s needs and systems.

Because the staff of call centers are trained in the sales process, companies that use them feel more secure, knowing that fewer sales will be lost. Trying to run a sales business is difficult to manage completely in-house, especially when there aren’t sufficiently trained phone people. Call centers truly serve as an extension of a business and have the company’s profits in mind at all times.

Mary J. Emmer is a freelance writer for Anserve, a New Jersey-based provider of business phone answering services across a wide range of sales industries. Interested in finding out more about answering service for small business? Visit our website www.anserve.com today for more information.