Using a telephone answering service produces many positive outcomes. Here are some answering service benefits for you to consider that will improve your business and better help your customers.
Gain More Sales
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People call a business whenever they feel the need, be it during the day, in the evening, or on the weekend—even holidays. And they expect their phone call to be answered. Anything less than a personal touch when they pick up the phone to call you will produce disappointment. And that disappointment will prompt them to call someone else, someone with an answering service. That company will get their business and you won’t.
However, when you have an answering service managing your calls 24/7, one of the key answering service benefits you will realize is more sales.
Provide Customer Service Excellence
After a few decades of decline, the provision of quality customer service is again on the rise. Online self-service didn’t work out so well. Though a few people want to figure things out for themselves, the majority want to pick up the phone, talk to a person, and find a solution fast.
An answering machine can’t do that. A computer can’t do that. And voicemail can’t do that. But an answering service—with its professional, personable, knowledgeable staff—can. Quality service excellence is the second item on our list of answering service benefits.
Encourage People to Call You—and Not Someone Else
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If you don’t have an answering service, what happens to your phone calls after business hours? Don’t for a minute think that a machine or recording will be enough to provide the high-touch service people expect. Instead, they’ll hang up. Then they’ll call somebody else.
And if you think they’ll call back in the morning when your office is open, you’re wrong. By then they’ve forgotten about you because they solved their problem with another company. And you just lost their business.
However, when a real person answers your phone calls 24/7, you will delight your callers. Over time, this will encourage them to call you whenever they have a need. Third on our list of answering service benefits is encouraging people to call your business and not someone else.
Earn More Positive Online Reviews
In today’s online society, what’s the first thing people do when they’re frustrated with a company? They vent online. They leave negative, scathing, one-star reviews. Too often they expect the worst, and that’s exactly what they get.
However, with the power of a personal touch that only an answering service can provide, callers will have the opposite reaction. This time when they share their experience online, they’ll have glowing things to say. They’ll give you a five-star review. And don’t you want a lot more of those? Earning more five-star reviews is another one of our answering service benefits.
Enhance the Customer Experience
One of the newer buzzwords when it comes to customer service is customer experience, CX for short. CX takes a step beyond individual, isolated contacts between a company and a customer. CX embraces a holistic view of the lifecycle of a customer. Each interaction builds upon the prior one to form an overall customer experience arc. Each positive exchange paves the way for the next one and smartly helps drive customer retention.
However, one bad phone call—such as encountering an answering machine, voicemail jail or, even worse, an unanswered phone—strikes a critical blow to the CX journey. With so much at stake, it’s too much of a risk to force after-hours callers to use automated solutions. Hire a professional answering service instead. This will help enhance the customer experience, serving as our capstone for our list of answering service benefits.
Apply This To Your Business
These five answering service benefits emerge as essential requirements in today’s highly competitive business environment, where customer loyalty is nonexistent. However, the low monthly cost of a professional answering service provides a smart, effective response to gain sales, improve customer service, encourage customer interaction, earn five-star reviews, and enhance customer experience.
That’s a huge payoff for a small investment in hiring a professional telephone answering service.
Contact us to learn how Apollo Answering Service can help you better manage your telephone calls any time of the day or night.