One of the best, and sadly underutilized, features of the top answering services is the option to have your team customer calls.
All you have to do is provide a list of frequently asked questions, along with the right answers, and suddenly you don’t have to tell 40 people a day that your office closes at 5 pm. It’s really an incredible timesaver!
But, your answering service’s answers are only as good as the FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) you create for it.
Considerations for a Customer-Centric FAQ
When creating a FAQ for your answering service to use to help your callers, it’s not only important that you consider basic questions that you want to answer, but the needs of your callers.
Here are some things to consider:
- Why do most of your callers call? Do they have general questions? Maybe they want to set an appointment? Or do they have product questions they think will make more sense when a human is doing the explaining? It might help you to write down every call you get for the next week or two, noting the question and frequency. That way, you’ll have a great picture of what your customers really need to know.
- What would you want to know if you were your caller? Just because a caller hasn’t asked the question yet doesn’t mean it’s not the elephant in the room. Sit down with your product catalog or service marketing materials and try to pretend you’re a caller. What do you want to know about pricing, product features or the type of service you’re going to receive? That same answering service team can also take orders, just something to think about.
- What kind of FAQs do your competitors have? You can often just pop over to your competition’s website to find a hearty list of FAQs to review. Obviously, you don’t want to steal their FAQ as-is, but you can certainly use it as inspiration for your own. The FAQ you pass to your answering service can also become your online FAQ, killing two birds with one stone.
Putting the FAQ in Writing
Writing out the questions is just step one in putting your FAQ together. You’re also going to need to answer those questions in the way you want your team to handle them. Although it can be tempting to dance around questions that you aren’t exactly proud of the answers to, be bold and answer in a professional, straight-forward and generous manner. It can help if you also consider the responses that might be generated from those answers, so you can have a response ready.
You can get pretty far down the rabbit hole when writing a FAQ, but the more detailed your document, the better your answering service team will be able to help your customers. Since they’re not in the building with you, it’s important to spell out every detail, big or small.
Using an answering service to address your callers’ top questions isn’t only an efficient way to use your time, it’s a huge cost savings. Instead of taking your valuable time to deal with yet another question about returning an item or when your shop closes, you can be doing what you do to close more sales.
