Its no use getting a telephone answering service when you’re not getting full benefits out of it. You still need to pay attention to a few details. Let’s cover some of these.
1) Providing Customers with Relevant Information
The team you hired will only know the information you have supplied. They don’t have the ability to ‘get the gist’ of your business by simply signing up as your service providers. Among the jobs of a telephone answering service is to provide your potential customers with detailed information about your company’s products and services. If you hold back on information, the call answering service will not be able to capture the attention of your customers.
2) Keep the Telephone Answering Service in the Loop
The call answering service has, more or less, become a part of your organization. It can become difficult for them to handle clients’ calls if they don’t know about changes being rolled out in your company. On the other end of the spectrum are companies that publicly announce a change but fail to inform the answering service, expecting them to become privy to this information on-the-go. This isn’t realistic. If your business has planned to make significant changes in their offerings, you should thoroughly brief the answering service about it before the launch.
3) Evaluate Their Performance – Covertly
Call your telephone answering service covertly to test their ability to handle impatient callers. There are certain pitfalls you should avoid when testing them. This includes giving them generic names like Chad Connor or taking a few seconds to come up with a nickname to identify yourself. All of these mistakes give away the fact that they are being tested. If you give away your covert test with such mistakes, you will get an exaggerated version of their true service.
4) Prioritising Resources to Focus on the Business
Both small and big firms alike can find themselves in situations where there is a shortage of staff . When demand goes through the roof or too many calls begin pouring into the office, the core staff can become distracted by too much ‘firefighting’. This not only results in getting them stressed out, but adversely affects the quality of the service or product being delivered. This is where your business’ tired staff can benefit from the services of a virtual receptionist. This receptionist will take the load off their backs, enabling them to focus on what’s important – the growth of your business.
5) Learning About Other Businesses
A great way to evaluate the potential performance of this telephone answering service is getting a review from their previous clients. Get in touch with a client and try to get as much information about the benefits of the answering service as possible. Since they have already used their services, the business will be in a much better position to share beneficial insights.
6) Getting the Service Only When You Need It
The telephone answering service should be able to scale down when there are few people calling and scale-up appropriately when demand surges. Of course you have the option to switch the service off or on as you like or just set your phone system to forward the calls automatically when you just can’t answer or your team is busy with too many calls your phone system will overflow to the telephone answering service.
