Give your customers personal attention and they stick with you and stay loyal to your products and services. Round the clock customer service is a great way to give them that attention. Since most businesses do not have the time, personnel and resources to provide round the clock customer service, an answering service helps you achieve that goal.

An answering service has a number of functions including greeting callers, transferring them to appropriate extensions, taking down messages, placing orders for callers, playing custom on-hold messages or music while processing customer requests and entering caller information directly into lead tracking systems. Most answering services provide toll-free national and local numbers. You can either forward your existing numbers to the service or ask for easy to remember vanity numbers that reinforce your business name. If you do not need round the clock answering service, you may hire one to answer calls only at specific times.

Answering Service Gives a Competitive Edge to your Business

1. Enhance Customer Satisfaction and Faith in your Business

An answering service lends a human voice to your business reassuring your customers of your commitment to them. A call answering service assures your customers about the genuineness of your business. Professional customer service representatives make your customers feel at ease, solve all their queries and enhance customer satisfaction.

2. Reduce Wait Time to Speak to Someone

We all hate those endless chains of call transfers to multiple extensions when we call customer service. An answering service prevents the frustration of transfers and holds by getting the caller to quickly reach a live person.

3. Improve your Client Base

Answering service spurs customers into action, encouraging them to act when they are most likely to place an order or voice complaints. While the former allows you to expand your client base, the latter saves prevents loss of customers and negative publicity.

4. 24x7 Customer Support

Whom would you rather deal with? A company that offers customer support during a limited part of the day or a business that is ready to help you with your urgent queries round the clock. Answering services allow you to attend to customers even when your staff has left the office.

5. Multi-language Customer Support

It is difficult for a small business to offer multi-language customer support unless the customer base is large enough to warrant hiring a full time resource. An answering service relives you of this chicken and egg dilemma. You can hire an answering service to support even very small number of customers that need support in languages other than English.

6. Reduce Costs and Improve Productivity

Answering services are less expensive than hiring full-time staff, receptionist and phone attendants. They provide you with reports on the length and disposition of calls. This information allows you to better adjust your service to customer needs.

7. Improves the Perception of your Company Size

Customers like to deal with big companies. The type of services offered is often indicative of the size of the firm. When small and startup businesses hire answering services, they enhance the perception of size and customers get more inclined to buy from them.

8. Test the Effectiveness of Marketing and Media Campaigns

You can test the reach and impact of your marketing and media campaigns by hiring an answering service and routing calls to it. By placing a different contact number in different media like newspapers, magazines, television, radio and Web, you can assess the effectiveness of that particular media. The medium that generated the most calls and higher conversions is obviously a more effective medium for future marketing spend.

9. Efficient Handling of Different Types of Requests

Answering services can provide information, take messages, enter orders and leads, forward calls to cell phones or landlines and transfer them to extensions as per customers' specification and requirement. By providing customer a solution to all their requests at one place, the service improves efficiency and customer satisfaction.

10. Use of Scripts to Control quality and Costs

To get the most out of your answering service you can provide scripts to the answering service. The scripts are brief, clear and concise and state the things to be said when responding to calls or transferring them or while entering leads and orders. Besides enhancing customer satisfaction, the use of scripts helps maintaining the quality of calls and in controlling cost as many answering services charge by the length of the call.

Hiring an answering service is a quick and easy way to gain that edge over your competition and put forth a professional image of your small business. The best part is that it is a very affordable for even a small business with low incoming call volume. Remember to get multiple quotes before you make a hiring decision.