While I would love to say yes every business should have an answering service (for obvious reasons) it’s not always that simple. Some businesses can really benefit from an answering service, while others not so much and how you use an answering service can greatly impact your results.
When I say how you use an answering service an impact your results, I mean depending on how you have your answering service setup it might not be doing the best job that it can be. For instance, if you’re a small business or a one-man business an answering service could be beneficial to you in a lot of ways. For instance, you’re out on a job and your phone rings, but you are too busy to answer the phone instead of it going to your voicemail just have one of our virtual receptionists handle the call for you this way your potential customer thinks someone from your office is handling the call. In a way, someone from your office is handling your call albeit virtually.
Virtual Receptionists work better the more information they have so they can answer more potential customer’s questions if you’re just wanting someone to get their information so you can call them back that works as well but it might impede customer experience. Most potential clients will simply hang up if they get a voicemail, and go down the google list hoping for someone to answer. Therefore having someone to talk to them can capture that potentially missed lead.
But the most important part comes into your delivery method, you can get your information sent in a variety of ways from a text, to secure SMS, fax, email or having someone call you directly for more urgent matters. You could even have all calls and messages held until you call in and speak to your virtual receptionist and have them give them to you. Whichever one you choose is your own choice but at the end of the day, it really does matter.
What Do I Recommend For Message Delivery?
I recommend text messages because they are obvious on your phone, you can call the person back right away when you’re available and you don’t forget not to mention the fact i can just screen dial their number by clicking on it in the text message its self. I find someone calling me and giving me the information by hand a pain because I need to then go and either write it down or open up an app on my phone and then take the information. Alternatively, if they are calling and going to connect me with the caller for something not absolutely important I still have to drop everything which interrupts my work.
With emails, I get hundreds of emails everyday spam or otherwise, so this doesn’t work well for me I lose track of what emails go where, so texting just works because if I am in the middle of doing something I can call that person back and am not interrupted and don’t have to drop everything.
Additionally, after hours and if something non-urgent calls the answering service can just hold your messages (which is where they save them) until the morning so you can handle them. For instance, if someone calls you saying how much would it cost to have a tree stump removed, 9 PM (trust me some people call asking for these kinds of services late at night), I wouldn’t want to have my phone going off and someone asking me that question. Instead, the service could just have them all sent to me starting at 8:30 AM the next morning so I am not bothered with unimportant messages.
So What If I Have An Office?
Great question a lot of medium-sized companies especially landscaping companies have a physical location whether it’s a place to park your trucks, and equipment or just a place to meet the work crew in the morning it’s important.
It really comes down to your workflow, if you’re going to have workers coming and going throughout all parts of the day and don’t want to hire someone to sit there as a receptionist an answering service / virtual receptionist would be perfect you can keep the phones forwarded all the time, and then have instructions on who you want the calls delivered too (not to mention it’s considerably less expensive). Let’s say you’re a medium-sized company with a few employees and you have a database of customer’s whom you do regularly scheduled care for.
Let’s say this customer’s name is Sue. So Sue calls in on Tuesday and she wants Bill, who regularly takes care of her lawn to come out. Sue can simply provide the name or names of whoever is on her “account” the virtual receptionist can input this data and get other data such as her address, phone number directly in front of them. The virtual receptionist can then depending on how your scheduling is handled either schedule them (if you have an online service you use to handle schedules), or simply say when Bill gets back from his current job he will call you back when he can come out. The virtual receptionist will also verify that the information is accurate, still and the call has been handled and the customer had a pleasant experience.
As you get new customer’s their data can be added to the database and so on and so forth allowing all customers to receive quality care and feel like they are being taken care of as opposed to having someone they don’t know asking for all their information. At the end of the day it comes down to how you run your business and how you want your business to be taken care of but an answering service / virtual receptionist can greatly simplify that process while lowering costs.
So what are you waiting for give us a call today so your business can take root and grow!
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