Telephone Answering
There are a number of different solutions that can be altered to fit your business requirements perfectly. There is no longer any need to trust unreliable answering machines to take messages: several answering service organizations now offer out-of-hours reception packages that provide twenty-four hour availability, so that there is someone available all day every day to answer your customer calls. This is particularly helpful if your business operates across several time zones or you have employees on call-out around the clock.
Charging for telephone answering services usually involves a monthly payment which may contain an allowance for calls answered; some services also specify a unit cost for additional volumes of calls answered.
Flexibility
The messages taken can be emailed, sent by SMS, faxed, or called in to a nominated number at particular times of the day – this way you are up to date without being hassled by frequent calls. You may instead choose to use the answering service as a virtual staff-member who can be called in to cover lunch-breaks, meetings, or for other staff-members who have called in sick or on holidays.
Call answering can also be used intermittently, with the service being invoked at predetermined times. For example if a staff member is away from the office for a certain time the service could be used; at other times when the staff member is in the office a simple call forwarding service could be used ensuring the staff member receives the call at his or her office number.
Pay As You Go
Some answering service organizations offer pay-as-you go accounts, so if you do decide to use the service for covering times when other staff-members are unavailable, you only pay for the calls that are received and dealt with by the service. This is a great way of keeping expenditure under control for smaller businesses while ensuring no sales or customers are lost.
Instead of an all-inclusive monthly cost, charging structures for pay as you go answer services usually involve a small monthly charge and higher costs for each call fielded.
Special Event Cover
Another way answering services can be used is for order-lines, brochure enquiries, media response handling or customer service. Your business may send out brochures or catalogues a few times a year, and may experience a spike in calls during these periods. It wouldn’t make sense to have the staff being paid year-round when you only need them for two or three weeks per year – and this is where the answering service comes in. Sales-trained staff can take the calls for you, and ensure you make the most out of your busy periods.
Call Centre Outsourcing
Call centre outsourcing is a growing part of the answering service industry. More suitable for large organisations, it involves sub-contracting out of contact centres to specialised companies, the theory being that an effective service can be provided cheaper by a company with experience in this sector.
Rather than going to the expense of setting up their own customer call centre, companies can instead contract a specialist company to provide this service for them. With the development of modern call centre software and techniques, there should be no discernable difference in service, the proviso being that the service provider’s employees are fully versed in all aspects of the contracting company’s business.