Being on call all day and all night can be exhausting for a business owner, whether you’re a medical professional or a tow truck operator.
That’s why having an answering service to help handle your after hours calls and overflow calling can be so important to preventing burn-out. Even with a live answering service on the job, though, many people worry that customers having a true emergency aren’t going to get the attention they need.
But there’s no reason to fear for your customers, an answering service company will handle your emergency calls with great care and respect, no matter what your industry. Telephone professionals understand that an emergency requires real attention and focus in every situation.
How Answering Services Help Emergency Callers
You answering service will absolutely take callers claiming an emergency seriously, but your team of call agents won’t necessarily pass every call directly to you or your emergency contact person.
The answering service operators understand your privacy is vital, too, and recognize that many caller emergencies can he handled with basic customer service skills. The human touch can help frustrated and frightened callers realize that when their emergency is actually a situation that can wait for morning.
For every call that comes into the answering service company as an emergency, trained operators walk through a simple process to help determine the seriousness of the caller’s situation.
These are the steps we take to resolve emergency calls:
- Greet the caller. Callers are greeted immediately using your business name so they’re confident they’ve reached the right operators. If you’ve provided the team with specific instructions, they’ll be included in the greeting to help the caller feel they’re being heard.
- Inquire about their call. The inquiry phase is the most important to developing a rapport with the caller. How can we help you? Is always better than asking about their emergency, since not all callers will be in panic mode and those that are shouldn’t be upset further. Using materials provided by you, trained answering service operators can query the customer until they understand the situation at hand and are clear about whether or not there is a true emergency occurring.
- Relaying the message. Depending on how your answering service package is configured, customers that are determined to be in true emergency situations can either be relayed to you as a message needing immediate call back or patched through to the designated phone number. At this point, the answering service disconnects and leaves you to work your magic. Callers that aren’t in real emergencies are collected into a call log for the next morning. The log includes detailed information like their name, number and a reason for their call that makes it easy to triage callers later.
Emergency calls are serious and should always be treated that way, that’s why it’s important that you ask your future answering service about how they handle your emergency calls to ensure that your customers are getting treated as kindly as possible. After all, whether they need a late night plumbing repair or are worried about a recent surgery, they’ve come to trust you in their times of need.
