No matter what type of business you have, the ability to answer calls live 24/7 is a growing necessity. Answering services are often mistaken as an expense but the truth is that more business owners should look at them as an investment in the company and its future. Phone trees are confusing and more than 80% of callers would rather hang up than leave a voicemail message.
Your business and your reputation are based on providing excellent customer service and that starts with answering your customers’ calls. The following are just a few of the many benefits of having 24/7 live phone coverage from an answering service.
Customer Retention
Using an answering service helps you to meet peoples increasing expectation of calls being answered no matter what time they call. The new standard of customer service is that calls are answered by a real person who can help them any time day or night. Failing to meet this standard means disappointing your customers and callers.
If your existing clients call your business with an urgent request or even an emergency your ability to be available to them is often critical in order to keep them as a loyal customer. Ignoring their call or being unable to answer will not only greatly disappoint them, but it will also encourage them to start calling your competitors. At that point, you will have lost a customer and helped your competition grow their business and gain market share at your own expense. Utilizing an answering service will help you avoid this and enable you to better retain existing customers.
Greater Availability
Most businesses are open during the typical business hours of 8 to 5, somewhere between forty to forty-five hours a week. Unfortunately, these are not the hours when it’s convenient for most people to call. For most people what is most convenient is to call after hours and on the weekends when they are not working and of course, that creates the problem because those are the hours that you are closed and not answering the office phones. This is a huge disconnect that can hurt your business.
By only answering your phone during regular business hours, you force customers to be on your schedule and not providing what’s best for them. However, with an answering service you expand your standard business hours phone coverage to provide 24/7 availability. That means that no matter what time of day people call you, they speak with a live person who can help them and they won’t be disappointed.
Increased Sales
As stated in the intro of this article, most people will not leave a message when they encounter an answering machine or voicemail recording. And if a business doesn’t answer its phone at all and instead uses a phone tree, people often times simply won’t bother to call back, they’ll just call someone else.
Using an answering service can make the difference between a sale and a lost opportunity. Depending on your business, your answering service can filter the type of call, give out prices, or even take lead information for your sales team so that they can follow up with a new prospect. Whatever features work best for you, using an answering service to handle your calls 24/7 is an assurance policy that you won’t miss out on new leads which results in an increase in your sales.
Grow Your Bottom Line
While every one of these benefits is geared toward helping your customers and making it easier for them to contact you, they also provide the business owner with a financial element which serves to increase profitability and financial gain. In fact, when used properly, the financial gain from utilizing an answering service for 24/7 coverage can be significant.
An answering service is a smart and easy investment that helps better serve your customers while at the same time can increase your company’s bottom line.
