If you haven’t already started to plan ahead for the next year, taking a careful look at how your business manages phone calls is one step to improving your bottom line by the end of your next quarter. Outsourcing your routine phone tasks to an answering service can create positive change in three key areas during 2010 and beyond:
- Customer Relationship Management. When you improve your customer service, you naturally generate positive business buzz, starting a chain effect that ends with your company making more money by word of mouth. Whether your company already has a comprehensive department devoted to CRM or just has a few individuals handling customer service, an answering service is a viable solution for your business. An answering service’s live agents will field your calls during the day, allowing your busy representatives to focus on one customer or at a time. You can also have an answering service act as your customer helpline overnight: live operators can record customer complaints, answer basic questions about your policies or procedures, and will mark messages as urgent. This means that when your workers show up in the morning, they’ll already have a plan of action for the day.
- Sales. If your customers can’t easily order your products and your sales professionals are overwhelmed by phone calls, then your company is working harder than it has to. An answering service easily allows you to organize your sales division by providing off-site live operators to answer routine sales calls. Live agents can easily give basic information about your products (such as color selection, pricing, or in stock status), sign up customers for your mailing list, and track customer shipments. When your customers are working from your catalog, networks of live agents make it easy for your customers to order: An answering service provides live operators that are instantly available to walk customers through their orders 24 hours a day. When you have the assistance of an answering service, you can also have live agents provide basic web assistance and troubleshooting information. This allows your sales professionals to limit the amount of simple technical questions they receive, so they can concentrate on more advanced aspects of your business.
- Business Operations. It’s a fact that office phone systems aren’t always reliable or easy to use. You can have an answering service act as your back up phone system or can use an answering service to streamline the way you receive your calls and messages. Since an answering service’s phone system is not directly connected to your office, if your phone lines should go down, professional live agents can act as your auxiliaries and connect clients to your employee’s smart phones or home phones. During regular office hours, an answering service can take immediate, detailed, accurate messages and send them quickly to employee smart phones, cell phones, fax machine, or pager. The added bonus of an answering service is many provide incoming faxing services: instead of dealing with the pain of picking up faxes or fixing an inevitable fax malfunction, incoming faxes go straight to your e-mail in PDF format. Choosing an answering service guarantees that you always receive your faxes, and also allows you to easily share information throughout your company and to your clients.
Don’t wait until next year is over to take stock of your business! You can bring a fresh start to your business simply by taking inventory of which of your routine phone processes can be updated. Are there any phone tasks that could easily be turned over to an answering service?