It does pay to use a professional Telephone Answering Service… or does it really?

It does pay to use a professional Telephone Answering Service... or does it really?
Callers that refuse to leave a message or could not bother to call back can cost a business thousands of Pounds in lost revenues.

In the early days of telephone communications, Answering Services limited their services to answering the customer's telephones after business hours and taking messages.

With the developments in telecommunications technology, it is now possible to have an answering service can also put the transfer the call to you after they have answered it. A professional Call Handling Service will determine the caller's need, get clarifications, pass along the proper messages to the right person in your company or take messages.

A good provider can even set up meetings and schedule appointments. Many business people consider the operators at their telephone answering service as an extension of their business.

Ensuring that your customers speak to a live person can result in increased sales and improved customer satisfaction.

As a business owner your you have the option to employing in your business to answer all your incoming calls, but this will require adding specially trained employees to the payroll to handle the incoming calls. Contracting a good Call Centre has the benefit of reducing your employment costs substantially (thousands of pounds!) while also increasing the professionalism of telephone answering.

HOW CAN THIS BE POSSIBLE - LOWER COSTS MUST MEAN POORER SERVICE?

The fact is that answering telephone calls is CORE BUSINESS to a professional telephone answering service provider which means they specialize answering incoming calls - they recruit the right people, they pay them more, they get trained and supervised...to ANSWER YOUR CALLS!

Compare this...

To the person that is normally recruited as a receptionist to answer your calls. Often this person does not have any special training, he or she is paid poorly, not kept busy enough - so boredom sets in etc. Add to this the added management time to manage this person, the National Insurance Taxes, PAYE etc.

And what happens when that person is on leave or ill? You have to recruit and train a temp or you run the risk of missing those important calls.

Many companies now outsource their telephone calls management to professional telephone receptionists who are trained to understand their business or who specialize in components of it and its telephone system.

By hiring an Telephone Answering Service you can make your business appear to larger than it really is. Selected Answering Service employees can be trained to act as employees of your business. Other Telephone Answering Service employees can pose as part of your company's sales staff and take orders directly or by having the potential customer call a dedicated toll-free number. Customers will never realize that they are dealing with a Telephone Answering Service. They will be convinced that they are working directly with your staff members.

You can hire a Telephone Answering Service that will tailor their services to match your company's unique needs. This may involve some up-front costs for training Telephone Answering Service employees to understand your requirements, but will result is better and more efficient handling of your incoming sales and customer service calls.

The result, however, may be cost savings for you in efficiency and customer satisfaction.

I hope you find this article useful and hope to hear from you.

I hope you find this article useful and hope to hear from you.

One FINAL WORD of Advice: Be very careful when choosing a Telephone Answering Service provider. The axiom of "you get what you pay for" almost always holds true, so to when you choose a Call Handling Solution to deal with your incoming calls.

...remember, they will be the first contact that prospective clients have with your business!

Kind regards

Charl