subject: Live Answering Service: An Important Element Of Customer Service Support [print this page] No matter how pleasant and friendly your answering machine sounds like, customers will still feel the cold and impersonal nature of a machine. Who wants to get generic responses and messages anyway? It makes more sense that you use live answering service for your business than merely directing your customers to a machine. With real people accepting calls and messages from your customers, you will get far better results. Callers become more endeared and respond positively when telemarketers answer the phone in a professional, pleasant, and caring manner.
Live answering service therefore provides a far better customer relations. As we all know, living and thinking persons are more helpful than machines. They allow better communications between businesses and its customers, both during and after office hours. On the other hand, many firms cannot operate efficiently just because they don't have live people to take the calls during weekends. While that might be okay for firms of some sort, most businesses just cannot expect any customers to understand such unavailability all the time.
Luckily, a live answering service could become a good form of customer service support to any kind of business, be it small or big. How is that so? Even if you're out of the office, or even away on vacation, a live answering service will provide a 24-hour point of contact for your customers. That means your business will be available even if you are not. This service has given businessmen the chance to enjoy their personal lives worrying about losing sales. Customers on the other hand are provided with quick solutions to their needs. They no longer need to wait for endless hours just to talk to a person to inquire, ask a question or make a purchase.
Now, it is true that using live answering service is more costly compared to using a machine to take calls. The reason why this service becomes very costly is that you need to pay telephone operators for the number of hours they are being hired. If you want to provide customer support all day and all night long, you need to pay more. Nevertheless, by outsourcing live answering service to an inbound call center, you will only pay for the services they use, which is considerably lesser than hiring full time workers and erecting your own dialing systems.
If you are planning to outsource live answering service to an inbound call center, you need to make sure that the company you hire has a team of live operators who have met the highest standards of a call center. Remember that the way your telephone representatives answer the telephone will make or break your business. Therefore, you must consider their skills more than the price you will be paying them. If you can get the necessary skills and qualities of a good customer service support through live answering service, then expect more customers coming your way and higher retention ratings.
