No ambitious entrepreneur sets out to create a business that’s just mediocre. However, creating a successful business doesn’t happen overnight. Not only does growing your small business takes time and effort, but it also requires a great team.
To gain support from experienced professionals without having to hire in-house staff, many small business owners outsource to telephone answering services. Below we will answer and discuss the following questions about answering services for small businesses.
- Why you need a phone answering service?
- What can a telephone answering service do?
- Who uses a telephone answering service?
- What are the advantages of telephone answering services?
Why do you need a phone answering service?
If you’re wondering why you might need a telephone answering service for your small business, ask yourself the following questions:
- Is my business receiving more calls than we can keep up with?
- Are my customers being sent to voicemail?
- Is my productivity suffering due to a constantly ringing phone?
- Has my business received complaints about customer service?
- Does my business receive a lot of calls during non-business hours?
- Is my business having a hard time serving our Spanish-speaking customers?
What can a telephone answering service do?
If you answered “yes” to any of the questions above, your small business could likely benefit from an answering service. In addition to answering your phones, here are some of the things a live telephone answering service can do:
- Ensure that more calls get answered, and less get sent to voicemail
- Free up more of your time to accomplish more tasks every day
- Improve your company’s customer service, which leads to happier customers and a better reputation
- Provide after-hours answering services
- Provide bilingual virtual receptionists who are fluent in both English in Spanish
- Help callers schedule and update appointments
- Answer general questions that callers might have
Who uses a telephone answering service?
From sole proprietors to large corporations, businesses of every size and type partner with telephone answering services to grow while keeping overhead as low as possible. Some of the industries and businesses that we support here at Answering Service Care include (but are not limited to):
- Medical, healthcare, dental, and veterinarian practices
- Lawyers, attorneys, and legal firms
- Real estate brokerages and property managers
- Consultant services
- Finance and accounting businesses
- Insurance agencies and claims adjusters
- Community colleges, public universities, and professional schools
- Funeral homes
- Service contractors
What are the advantages of telephone answering services?
No matter the size of your business, partnering with a telephone answering service can provide a variety of benefits. Here are some of the advantages of telephone answering services:
- 24/7/365 coverage. Not only do callers have a live person to assist them during non-business hours, but they will also receive better, faster support in the event of an emergency. This is because live agents can identify and escalate urgent and emergency issues so callers might not have to wait until morning.
- Lower overhead. Partnering with a telephone answering service allows you to save money by not having to pay for employee salaries and benefits, hardware, software, office space, and much more. You will also never have to worry about missing out on business opportunities due to an employee calling in sick or quitting suddenly.
- Flexibility that you don’t get with in-house employees. Answering services offer the flexibility to increase or decrease your usage according to your changing business needs, without any of the overheads associated with taking on more workers.
- No need to recruit, hire or train. The virtual receptionists who work for telephone answering services receive specialized training on your industry and business, as well as customer service and the phone systems that they work with.
