We have seen unprecedented advancements in the technological area in the last few decades, which has completely transformed the way businesses used to be conducted. The availability of the latest technology has empowered businesses to connect on a global scale. Particularly, it equipped the small and medium businesses to step up their game and become more competitive as they are able to sound more professional and offer greater services to their clients via telecommunication as well as establish effective internal communication channels, and that too without spending a fortune.
When it comes to providing great customer services, phone answering services play a pivotal role in ensuring that customer complaints, feedbacks, or any other queries, per se, are catered efficiently and on a timely basis. Previously, most small businesses, and often medium businesses, could not provide exceptional quality customer services to their clients, primarily due to the fact that they did not have sufficient funds to set up a dedicated department to deal with their clients’ queries. However, the availability of service providers offering telephone answering services has enabled SMEs to outsource this function without straining their budget.
Considering this, it’s fair to say that one of the chief reasons that SMEs choose to outsource their telephone answering service is financial as it offers an economical solution to them. Not only does it eliminates the requirement of investing a significant amount of money in infrastructure, but also reduces the monthly overheads by cutting down on staff costs and maintenance. However, there is more to it, along with the potential of saving money, as there are plenty of ways a company can benefit from this arrangement.
Here are some of the key ways of how outsourcing your telecoms can boost your business:
Staying in control
Having in-house resources dedicated to deal with a high volume of calls comes with several challenges aside from the financial aspect. Firstly, they require proper training and constant monitoring to ensure quality customer service is being provided to the clients. Secondly, they need the latest equipment and infrastructure to function seamlessly and smoothly, which is highly critical in today’s dynamic business environment.
Implementing a telephone answering service can help businesses to address both of these issues. Using their knowledge and expertise accumulated from serving a large customer base, a reputable service provider will ensure the highest quality service to the clients. As providing customer service is their core operations, they also use the latest technology and keep their systems up-to-date to remain competitive.
Longer, more flexible customer service times
It is extremely difficult for SMEs to provide 24/7 support to the clients via the in-house team unless they maintain three different shifts, which is unlikely to provide value for money. Therefore, they might only operate for specific hours per day. This may leave a great deal of customer communication unattended which may lead to the client’s dissatisfaction.
On the other hand, outsourcing a telephone answering service to an experienced service provider can enable companies to offer more comprehensive customer service to their clients. This can help businesses to capture every lead and never miss any sales opportunity. This will potentially help companies to increase their revenue by maximising their sales.
Improve brand reception
Professional telecommunication can play a substantial role in developing a bond of trust between a company and its customers. Conversations conducted on phone create a sense of urgency, allowing the business to appear more proactive. This is particularly useful to maintain effective B2B communication, ensuring that your business is always there at the right moment to grab the right opportunity. This levels the playing field for SMEs and enables them to actually compete with larger corporations.
Increase customer loyalty
Verbal communication on phone calls tend to make a much greater impact than written communication such as E-mails, Fax, or chat messengers, They are more personalised and allow customers to deliver their point in a comfortable and easy way. Not only that, phone calls are more prompt and greatly reduces, if not eliminates, the possibility of messages getting lost during the communication as often happens with e-mails.
The tone of a written message may be wrongly interpreted by the customer by an incorrect articulation of the words. However, a phone call allows to easily convey the emotions and tone during the conversation, decreasing the chances of such instances. These factors, when combined, make the customer feel valued and can potentially lead to better customer loyalty.
Things to consider when choosing a service provider
Clearly, it can be highly beneficial for companies, especially SMEs, to use a phone answering service to optimise and streamline their communication channels. However, it is critical that they choose the right service provider as they tend to greatly differ in terms of quality, supplemented by the fact that they offer different functionalities and pricing to their clients.
At the very least, a service provider should offer agents who are friendly and polite, are able to effectively collect information from the caller without coming across as intrusive, and respond to customer queries, questions, or feedbacks as instructed by the company. Moreover, the receptionist service that they offer will be rendered by a professional telephonist who can greet customers, transfer calls to the relevant person or department, and improvise in exceptional cases.
A competent service provider is more than just a phone answering service provider, they can provide numerous other services such as dairy management to confirm appointments and organise schedules, assist with order and form processing, payment processing, to name but a few.
