As a business owner, you’re constantly looking for new ways to serve your customers better and grow your business. One of the ways to ensure this is by ensuring your customers have a great experience whenever they contact your business, as communicating with customers is critical to your growth and profitability as a business.
As your business begins to grow and expand, you might find that handling phone calls efficiently becomes more challenging. At that point, you might begin to consider using a live call answering service to manage call answering for your business. A live call answering service is a third-party service your business can employ to handle phone correspondence round-the-clock.
As a business owner or manager, you need to know the right time to adopt services like these for maximum effect. So, when is the right time to use a live phone answering service?
What’s a Phone Answering Service?
Also called a live virtual receptionist service, it helps businesses manage and respond to inbound calls. Live phone answering services are third-party call center professionals who are trained to receive calls for their clients and carry out several other tasks like appointment setting and automation.
These professionals are available round the clock to attend to customers who try to reach your business via phone. When a business uses a virtual phone answering service and a customer calls the business, the customer connects to an agent in the virtual call center who represents the business and responds to their basic queries promptly. If need be, the professional can route the call to the appropriate department or personnel in the business.
Here are some signs that your business needs one:
1. Increased Call Volume
Having a high volume of calls will lead to poor customer service and will significantly affect customer satisfaction. Several calls coming in at the same time will result in long wait times, missed calls, and stressed-out staff. Using a call answering service will free up time for your staff to carry out other essential duties effectively.
At some point, growing businesses might experience a high volume of calls, which can be challenging to handle effectively. If you notice that your receptionist or other designated staff spend a significant amount of time on the phone attending to customer calls, you might need to consider a live virtual receptionist service.
2. Limited Working Hours
If your business hours are limited but you need to be available to customers round the clock, you’ll need to consider using a call answering service. Some signs that indicate that your limited availability is affecting your business are when you begin to receive complaints about your business’s unavailability during off-hours, or you see a large amount of missed calls at the resumption of your work hours. Using a virtual phone answering service will ensure that your business can be reached at any time, and your customers can be attended to even when your business is closed.
3. Missed Calls and Lost Business Opportunities
When you start seeing long logs of missed calls from your business for any reason, you should strongly consider using a live phone answering service. In many ways, a long log of missed calls signifies missed business opportunities, and as a growing business, this can be severely detrimental to your reputation and profitability.
4. Business Expansion
Expanding your business has its unique challenges, some of which include increased call volume, calls from different time zones, and customers of different language preferences. Therefore, at the expansion stage, businesses must consider answering services to provide round-the-clock, multilingual services for new and existing customers.
5. Streamlining Data
A phone answering service can help you manage appointments and automate several related functions that your business may not have the resources to invest in. In many cases, especially if your business has multiple facilities, streamlining data might be a bit of a hassle for in-house staff who have other designated tasks. Outsourcing your business calls to a live virtual receptionist service will help you streamline your call data and do your business a world of good.
6. Competition
No doubt, competition can be a healthy driver to keep businesses on their toes and provide great customer service. If you see that your business is gaining significantly more negative reviews and dwindling customer loyalty, it might be a sign that your competition is doing a better job of being available to customers. Using a phone answering service can help your business stay relevant and ahead of the competition.
Also called a live virtual receptionist service, it helps businesses manage and respond to inbound calls. Live phone answering services are third-party call center professionals who are trained to receive calls for their clients and carry out several other tasks like appointment setting and automation.
These professionals are available round the clock to attend to customers who try to reach your business via phone. When a business uses a virtual phone answering service and a customer calls the business, the customer connects to an agent in the virtual call center who represents the business and responds to their basic queries promptly. If need be, the professional can route the call to the appropriate department or personnel in the business.
Here are some signs that your business needs one:
1. Increased Call Volume
Having a high volume of calls will lead to poor customer service and will significantly affect customer satisfaction. Several calls coming in at the same time will result in long wait times, missed calls, and stressed-out staff. Using a call answering service will free up time for your staff to carry out other essential duties effectively.
At some point, growing businesses might experience a high volume of calls, which can be challenging to handle effectively. If you notice that your receptionist or other designated staff spend a significant amount of time on the phone attending to customer calls, you might need to consider a live virtual receptionist service.
2. Limited Working Hours
If your business hours are limited but you need to be available to customers round the clock, you’ll need to consider using a call answering service. Some signs that indicate that your limited availability is affecting your business are when you begin to receive complaints about your business’s unavailability during off-hours, or you see a large amount of missed calls at the resumption of your work hours. Using a virtual phone answering service will ensure that your business can be reached at any time, and your customers can be attended to even when your business is closed.
3. Missed Calls and Lost Business Opportunities
When you start seeing long logs of missed calls from your business for any reason, you should strongly consider using a live phone answering service. In many ways, a long log of missed calls signifies missed business opportunities, and as a growing business, this can be severely detrimental to your reputation and profitability.
4. Business Expansion
Expanding your business has its unique challenges, some of which include increased call volume, calls from different time zones, and customers of different language preferences. Therefore, at the expansion stage, businesses must consider answering services to provide round-the-clock, multilingual services for new and existing customers.
5. Streamlining Data
A phone answering service can help you manage appointments and automate several related functions that your business may not have the resources to invest in. In many cases, especially if your business has multiple facilities, streamlining data might be a bit of a hassle for in-house staff who have other designated tasks. Outsourcing your business calls to a live virtual receptionist service will help you streamline your call data and do your business a world of good.
6. Competition
No doubt, competition can be a healthy driver to keep businesses on their toes and provide great customer service. If you see that your business is gaining significantly more negative reviews and dwindling customer loyalty, it might be a sign that your competition is doing a better job of being available to customers. Using a phone answering service can help your business stay relevant and ahead of the competition.
