Nationwide Answering Service Can Make Small Businesses Look More Professional

By Author: Jared Kitchell
Total Articles: 4
Comment this article

A couple of problems many small businesses face are handling after-hours phone calls and dealing with simultaneous incoming calls. It can be difficult to handle incoming calls when the person answering phones is also your sales department or your shipping manager, which can be the case in a small office. And most small businesses cannot afford to have phones staffed at nights and on weekends.

At so many small businesses, the drill goes something like this: About 70 percent of incoming calls are answered before going to voice mail. Those answered calls occupy the time of someone who has better things to do. Then, the messages left from the calls not answered are not returned in a timely fashion because the person who returns them has better things to do.

I have seen those exact scenarios all too often in small offices. The best solution is a nationwide answering service that is able to give any business a consistent professional voice that will answer every call.

The problem with allowing after-hours calls or incoming calls on the other line to go to company ...
... voice mail is that about a third of all callers will abandon their call before leaving a message. The idea behind business, if you were wondering, is to interact productively with current and prospective customers at every opportunity. It is always a good idea to turn to an operator answering service, where a live voice will take the caller's message.

After-hours calls are often though about when considering an answering service company. What many small business owners do not consider is the call loss due to simultaneous incoming calls. In the case of call overflow, most small businesses send any callers to a company voice box. An operator answering service can improve this broken process as well, and instead of being forced to retrieve a caller's voice message, most answering services will type out the entire message after using a script that ensures all relevant information was gathered from the caller. This improves the productivity of the person answering phones, which can have a major impact on a small office where only a few people are working.

Ensuring callers get a live voice on the other end makes any business, large or small, look and sound more professional. Many answering services will also integrate their services with your website. For instance, you may wish to have a live chat function on the website that would be handled by your answering service.

Answering services give you real-time updates on calls as well. You will know, through computer-installed software, as soon as your business has a message waiting for it so your staff can respond with the greatest speed.

A lot of business owners probably think call centers are only for large corporations, but no size of company can afford to miss customer interaction. With the many customizable answering service plans available now, the vast, vast majority of small businesses will benefit from an operator answering service to handle the calls they cannot answer. It is an investment in customer relations and decision that can help your small business grow.

Resource:
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.