Florida Answering Service Solutions: Keep Your Employees Productive

By Author: Jared Kitchell
Total Articles: 4
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Spending so much time speaking with business owners around Florida, I've come to understand just how often potential or current customer calls go unanswered. While these owners I speak to tell me that these callers are sent to a voice message box or instructed to call back during normal business hours, I know the truth is that those calls are missed opportunities. I know, because I was once in their shoes.

As a productivity consultant in the sunshine state, business owners will ask me the first thing they should be doing to get more out of their employees. My advice is always the same: Get in touch with a Florida answering service. There are many local operator answering service providers that can solve the problems of after-hours and weekend calls, as well as call overflow, when calls are placed on hold due to a high volume.

Before becoming a consultant, I ran two small companies and encountered the same problems. My employees who were not dedicated phone staffers spent so much time handling mundane phone interactions, due to overflow customer service calls or a sudden spike in phone sales. The increase ...
... in sales was great, but it made more work for my shipping and design people, who at the same time had to deal with the extra task of taking orders.

In addition, I knew the problems of unstaffed phones when my employees left for nights and weekends, but I rationalized that callers would leave a message that we would handle the next day or they would call back while we were there. I was not alone in that misconception. Plenty of other large and small businesses implemented the same practice and many still do. The thing that broke the camel's back for me was when I became so frustrated with productivity issues I instructed all of my non-phone employees to refrain from taking any customer service or order calls during periods of high call volume. It took about a week for me to understand that this impacted sales in a clearly negative way. Leaving callers on hold or sending them to voice mail unmistakably led to a low conversion rate for those callers. I could not afford to hire one or two more people to answer the phones, though, as spikes in call volume were difficult to predict, and margins were slim enough as they were.

My world changed when I signed on with a Florida answering service to handle call overflow and after-hours and weekend answering. Suddenly, the sales conversion rate was better than it had been before. The operator answering service employees have nothing to do but answer phones, so during those times when the phones were slammed with service calls or orders, a live voice picked up after a few rings, and no caller was ever put on hold. Even with my specialized employees picking up the slack for call overflow, callers were frequently put on hold for a minute or two. It was the way I had always dreamt of treating customers, but until that point I was unable to realize that ideal vision.

Even more impressive to me was the huge increase in after-hours and weekend messages we received. Messages increased by about 40 percent, meaning we previously had been losing hundreds of callers, likely to our competitors, because we sent potential customers or current customers with a service issue to a voice mail box when we were not in the office.

The Florida answering service I went with was a really affordable solution -- given the increase in business, higher percentage of customer satisfaction and improved productivity we experienced. There is no doubt that any small business which handles customer service calls or phone orders regularly can benefit from a professional answering service. Outsourcing off-hours calls and overflow makes more sense than hiring more dedicated phone personnel, and the call center assistance will keep specialized employees doing the job they are paid to do. It's all about productivity.

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Jared Kitchell is a nationwide answering service consultant and industry expert living in Michigan. He writes articles relevant to operator answering service providers and locally relevant to any Michigan answering service.