If you run a small business and you’re thinking of getting an answering service, it is a worthwhile investment. However, you shouldn’t just settle for any answering service if you want to get the best value for money. Therefore, in this article, we’ll share five factors you need to consider when shopping for an answering service.
Let’s get right into it…
1. 24/7 Availability
The purpose of hiring a help desk company in the first place is to ensure that current and potential customers can easily reach your business. Therefore, a factor you need to consider when hiring is the service’s availability. You need to contact the company to learn more about their working hours. They must be reachable even at weekends, nights, and holidays.
Bear in mind that a good number of these call center companies offer round-the-clock services. However, you need to pay additional fees to enjoy such offers. For instance, they might charge you more for attending to customer calls on holidays or once it is past 9 pm.
On the other hand, some provide live support until a particular time of the day, let’s say 8 pm. Once it’s 8 pm, an automatic system takes over. You need to find an answering service that will offer you round-the-clock live support without any additional cost.
2. Excellent Operators
When you hire a help desk firm, the staff of the firm will be the ones receiving the calls of your customers. These operators must be professional or else they might cause more harm than good. They must be able to represent your company and take care of your clients as if they worked for it. Furthermore, they must be able to provide the necessary information and assistance that the clients might require.
The type of business you run will determine the kind of operators you need. For instance, the call representative of a funeral home must not be too excited when speaking. Such behavior might insult the clients who are in mourning.
3. Personalized Caller Experience
While hiring a call center company is a great way to scale your business, you might still have to attend to certain calls yourself. You can visit https://medium.com/ to discover proven strategies to scale your business. One of the problems with such an arrangement is that the caller’s experience might feel different. This is usually the case if your company attends to customer calls on a personal level, whereas the help desk firm uses generic templates.
You need to find out if the answering service is using generic templates, or if they are attending to callers as individuals. When a personal touch is implemented in how clients are addressed over the phone, it shows how much value the business places on them as individuals. This, in turn, will lead to better customer loyalty. Therefore, work out the modalities of how customers will be spoken to with the call center firm before they begin to represent your business.
4. Affordable Prices
The cost of hiring a virtual receptionist service varies and depends on the company’s policy. Some of these firms would offer you a free trial for their services. Others charge you what they feel they are worth based on what they provide.
Despite these price differences, most of these firms will charge you based on the amount of calls they receive on your behalf rather than a fixed rate. If you tend to receive a lot of calls from your clients, you’ll have to pay more. Before you hire a company that charges in this manner, you need to do some calculations to ensure you don’t exceed your budget.
Some of these firms provide allocations in use along with varying pricing tiers. This makes the cost more affordable. However, for the cost to be justified, you must have a consistent monthly call capacity. You can choose the ideal pricing plan if you know the call volume, how the service would be used, and your budget.
5. Assess the Features before Making Payment
Before you make payment for any service, confirm whether they offer a free trial. You can read this article to find out why offering a free trial is beneficial for any business. With the trial period, you can familiarize yourself with the features and also assess whether they meet the needs of your company.
During the trial period, there are certain things you can do to evaluate the service. First of all, call the operators to get a feeling of how they respond to customers. Act like any of your clients would when they call your business. You should also test all the program’s features to enable you to decide.
Conclusion
Hiring a great answering service can help you grow your business by allowing you to focus on other important tasks. However, choosing one is not always simple. Thankfully the article above provides five factors you need to consider when shopping for an answering service.
