Are you losing customers to competitors? If yes, perhaps you’re not making it easy for your customers to contact you. In business, a strong first impression is invaluable. Thus, if you sometimes miss your customers’ calls because you’re too busy, your business and reputation may suffer.
Make it easy for your customers to contact you by utilizing a reliable telephone answering service. Here are 6 benefits that a telephone answering service brings to the table.
1. Lead Collection
If you want to improve business sales, you must collect every possible lead. That said, when you’re doing everything yourself, sometimes it’s easy to miss a few calls.
However, missing calls can hurt your business big time. Customers don’t like it when their calls are not promptly answered. In fact, research shows most won’t call the second time. Did you know that almost 85% of customers whose calls you don’t pick up aren’t going to call you back?
The good news is that you don’t have to do everything on your own. A reliable telephone answering service can take your calls and instantly input the exact information you need into your customer relationship management (CRM) software or send it to your inbox.
And the best part: depending on your needs, you can hire such a service on a full-time or part-time basis.
2. Order Processing
Did you know that 75% of people believe calling is the fastest way to get a response when ordering something?
If you find it difficult to take orders over the phone after business hours or on weekends, you should strongly consider using a telephone answering service. With a reliable telephone answering service provider by your side, you’ll be able to capture every single order.
3. Customer Service
Whether you’re an international player or a mom-and-pop store, missing phone calls reflects poorly on your business. When you fail to answer calls, customers feel that you don’t have things under control and, thus, won’t be able to help them.
Think that’s an exaggeration? Think again. Here are some stats that underline the importance of prompt service.
- Over 70% of unhappy customers will stop doing business with you
- Roughly 60% of them will go to your competitors
So how can you keep customers happy, satisfied, and loyal?
If you think using an answering machine can help, you’re wrong. An answering machine doesn’t do much to boost your image. This is because what customers really want is a personalized experience.
Try a telephone answering service instead. You’ll be able to register customer complaints the first time and resolve them quickly. All this will help you improve customer service and keep customers in your fold.
4. Integrate with Your Brand
Some small businesses avoid hiring a telephone answering service because they fear the agents will sound more like call center representatives and less like their employees.
Is that what you fear as well?
If yes, you’ll be surprised to know that today’s answering services—at least the reputable ones—provide excellent brand integration. Instead of reading from a script, their agents undergo training to learn about your products and services through and through. If you select a reputable service, you can rest assured knowing that your customers won’t be able to tell whether they’re speaking to contract staff or in-house workers.
5. Appointment Scheduling
Managing your calendar or scheduling appointments can be challenging when you’re super-busy and have little time to pick up the phone.
Enter a telephone answering service.
A reliable service can schedule appointments for your clients, customers, and business partners as per your calendaring system. Now that you’ve got a bunch of experts managing your schedule, you can focus all your attention on what you do best: running your business.
6. Call Reporting
Are you finding it difficult to collect and collate data regarding the number of business calls you get each month? Do you want to map the progress of your latest direct mail campaign, but don’t have access to a reporting tool?
A reliable and advanced telephone answering service can help you.
Many top answering services offer call reporting. At the end of each month, you’ll get a call report that’ll have the necessary details regarding your calls. This includes the total number of calls, total call duration, details of every single call, and average call duration, among other information.
Conclusion
A reliable answering service can help you save money and time. It can also help you collect more leads, which in turn can help you boost sales. Furthermore, it helps you improve customer service and streamline order processing and scheduling appointments.
In short, a reputable telephone service offers you all the benefits of in-house staff at a fraction of the cost.
