Hunting for the very best answering service for your company can be a complicated and time-consuming process, but you don’t have to go in blind.
Instead of wondering what features might be good when it comes to answering services, you can be armed with a list of “must-haves” before you even pick up the phone to make your first contact.
Great Answering Services Protect Your Callers
One of the most vital things you want to know about your future answering service is that it will always put your callers first.
These features will help clue you in to who is the most important person in any answering service’s picture:
- Disaster recovery It would be helpful for an answering service company to provide your business with assistance for disaster recovery should there be a natural disaster, fire or other event that cripples your facility. The best answering services plan for the worst, and are prepared for it.When your answering service has redundancy built into its systems, you can be certain that this is a company that will always be there for your callers, even when you can’t.
- 24/7 availability. Even if your business is only open 9-to-5, you’ll still have callers who will call after hours for various reasons. Since you’re only paying for the calls your answering service takes, it just makes sense that you ensure all your callers get the same care by partnering with a 24/7 answering service.After all, many callers will hang up if they get a voicemail system, or worse, they’ll leave a message that makes no sense or leaves you with too many questions to be able to properly prepare for the call back. A 24 hour answering service team ensures consistency and accurate message taking all day and all night long.
- A customer service option. Some answering services are strictly that, they’ll answer the phone and take a message or patch a call through and nothing more. Others, however, offer additional options for you and your callers, like inbound customer service help.An answering service with customer service options means that you can pay a little extra to have an entire team that can answer common questions and walk callers through diagnosing their problems, for example, for a fraction of what it would cost to train and maintain the same staff in-house.
You should carefully consider the answering services that make your short list, but it doesn’t have to be a difficult process to narrow a bigger list down to the greatest answering services around. As long as they’re absolutely, totally committed to the happiness of your callers and the security of their data, your chances of a good experience are high.
