How To Grow Your Business With a Business Answering Service

If you are thinking of expanding your business, you need a business answering service. An answering service made specifically for businesses like yours helps to improve business services, meet customer demands, build new customers, and free up staff to do other tasks.

How a Business Phone Answering Service Can Increase Overall Sales?

Although every business owner is aware of the statistics on the difficulty of acquiring new customers vs keeping an existing one, few are engaging solutions that can keep customers and increase sales. While a 24×7 answering service can play a vital role in answering customer questions and order fulfillment, it can also play a role in increasing sales and retaining customers.

Incentivized Upselling

The majority of customers that call your business support line for order fulfillment or questions regarding a product provide a unique opportunity to add related or support items to their order. This is a delicate process that requires a well-informed live phone agent that is equipped with all of the information on a product and how consumers use the product. By creating scripting that looks for certain product questions or orders, a live answering service agent can inform the consumer about potentially needed items based on their questions.

By incentivizing this process through reduced cost or bundle offers, the business can ensure that the offer is taken as a help to the consumer rather than an attempt to just sell them more products. This opportunity can be just as viable after normal business hours as the consumer may be more flexible and responsive to the benefits that are offered by a live support person that is helpful, friendly, and informed.

24/7 Online Lead Management

The 24/7 world is the one in which service providers, as well as retail businesses, must operate. When a potential customer has a question that may come at any time of day or night, a live agent is the only way to ensure that they will not go to the next business on their list.

By being able to respond to those inquiries immediately with a knowledgeable live person, retail and service businesses, in particular, are essentially engaging an effective lead management system. The live answering service representative is in a great position to discuss your services, schedule an appointment and ensure that you receive the details. Even when a caller is merely making an inquiry or asking questions, adding them to the business’s CRM database allows for the development of a growing list of potential clients that can be contacted at a later date with offers that are more likely to result in sales conversions.

Professional Answering Service for Business Can Help with Special Deals

The daily deal sites that are popping up all over the net can be a great boost to any business. Offering a big discount to customers is usually a great way to boost sales in the short term while attracting new customers for the long term. But how does a company handle a 30% to 70% increase in phone calls for new business? An answering service for business is becoming a better solution for many of these companies. The answering service can provide a lot of solutions that turn the daily deal into a revenue-making machine.

The daily deals appeal to most companies in the current economic crisis. When more customers call, visit a website, or visit the actual store it can only drive up sales. But the increase in calls and emails can quickly overpower a business that only has one or two assistants answering a phone all day. Outsourcing the call work to an answering service for business can free up the assistants to handle other duties.

Business Answering Services Can Help with Customer Acquisitions

Another way that the answering service for business can benefit the merchant is by collecting email addresses and proper phone numbers. The lifeblood of every company relies on its ability to stay in touch with customers. Whether it is offering a new product, informing them of a change in business hours, or communicating a clearance sale, all companies have an inherent need to connect closely with their paying customers. People that buy from a company once are much more likely to buy from them again. By collecting the necessary contact information businesses can focus on making customers happy while the answering service for business focuses on the administrative duties.

Establishing a Follow-Up System

Besides handling the new calls and emails, there is the problem with follow-up. Most of the deals advertised on these websites are truly a losing offer for the business owner. The best way to optimize this surge in business is for the business owner to either focus on up-selling the new customers or institute a follow-up system to stay in touch with the new customers. Once again, a business with just one receptionist will likely not have the resources to handle this much work. But an answering service for business can devote people specifically to incoming calls and devote a separate team to making outbound calls and emails for follow-up appointments.

Customer Data Tracking

Using an answering service for businesses can also provide specific tracking data for the business owner. The call center will have the ability to track all of the incoming information, whether it is by phone calls, hits on a website, or direct email. With this type of information, the merchant can learn which deal is the most appealing to its customer base, what form of communication is used the most, and whether or not certain limits have any effect on the deal. Tracking this kind of marketing data can empower the merchant with solid information the next time they prepare a new campaign to drive up sales or find new leads.

Business Answering Services Enhance Customer Satisfaction

In this age of text messaging and social networking, people have lost a little bit of their humanity. This may be a bit of an exaggeration. However, we often take the personal touch for granted.

An old customer service tenet is that the customer is always right. Our customers are our most valuable resource. These relationships need to be maintained and nourished.

Consumers despise nothing more than a ponderous automated answering system. They are the bane of any positive phone experience.

• First, they are entirely menu-driven with up to ten main options and possibly dozens more sub-menus. The names for each menu can be confusing and inconsistent with that of other companies.
• Second, companies constantly change the configuration of these menus. This results in increased frustration for the customer and serves to put him or her at odds with your company before the first real word is exchanged.
• Third, these menu systems are impersonal and time-consuming for the customer. Average hold times can run in excess of 15 to 20 minutes in some markets.

People who manage phone operations have a term for when customers become frustrated with these to the point of ending the call. They call it the abandon rate. But really it is the company that has abandoned its customers by placing a formidable obstacle in their way.

That is where a live answer service comes in. An answering service for business could be your key to a happier customer and a more civil and expedient transaction between you and your clients. Where automated phone menus are devoid of humanity, an answering service for your business lets your stakeholders know you care.

Answering Services Help to Build Your Business Reputation

When you establish a relationship with a live answering service, you will know that the operators taking your messages have your best interest at heart. This answering service for your business will become a linchpin in your after-hours operations or any time when you cannot personally answer the phone.

A live answer service is also a symbol of prosperity and prestige. This is a service associated with wealthy and successful individuals, though it has always been more affordable than many people think. When you establish an answering service for your business, you will reap the rewards of this elite designation as an individual or organization above your competitors and peers.

Many people believe that a live answer service is something not available anymore. It is easy to understand why folks might think such an answering service for business is not needed. The advent of voice mail systems within smartphones and with companies is so commonplace that few people think they are available. But imagine the customer experience of making that phone call and hearing a real human voice from a live answer service.

Direct Customer Attention Towards Your Business With Live Answering Agents

An answering service for your business just makes sense because people want to make contact and receive attention from a real person with the ability to think, take concise and clear notes and then deliver messages to the subscriber of the answering service for business in a timely manner or on-demand. A live answer service can be an important element in a successful business strategy.

In short, an answering service for your business is a great idea because it combines the accuracy of professional operators with the personal attention and prestige of real live professionals instead of a difficult and frustrating voice mail system.

Build Customer Loyalty During the Holidays With a Business Phone Answering Service

For small and medium businesses with a strong e-commerce presence, capturing their share of the holiday customer pie from the giant online retailers is about the long haul of the holiday season rather than a few days. While online sales and queries will be high during the holiday season, the need for a strong business phone answering service goes well into the New Year to ensure ongoing customer loyalty.

The vast majority of small and medium-sized businesses that provide products or services increasingly rely on their online Website portal as the introductory, intermediate and closing encounter for their customers during the holidays and throughout the year. While this digital presence for a customer interface provides a way to capture the bigger sales boost during the holidays, it can easily be undone without the added customer service that knowledgeable human contact can provide.

Fulfill Customer Expectations In The Busiest Times

It is the back-end system for processing orders and handling returns where small businesses can succeed or fail in terms of customer expectation fulfillment. As the busiest time of the year, phone answering services become crucial in these two areas where live agents can field customer order calls through a dedicated 800 number. In addition, having them available for online chat to answer questions and deal with the order process questions and the inevitable change or return is the one-two punch that helps these businesses fulfill customer needs during the holidays.

In addition to online chat and live order fulfillment being crucial during the holidays, they are more essential in the weeks following the holidays to efficiently deal with returns or purchase complications. This is where the potential for damaging customer loyalty that can translate into sales throughout the New Year are high.

Businesses can and do capture the customer during the holidays with specials and the human touch of a live agent of their business phone answering service and online chat. The real challenge is that delays become even more frowned upon when those customers must wait on hold after the holidays to deal with a return. Maintaining effective customer service across multiple channels requires a strong customer-centric culture.

Build Brand Loyalty

An exceptional e-commerce presence and multi-pronged online marketing will only get a small business halfway to their goal in an era when brand loyalty has been supplanted by finding the best deal of the moment. It is the human interaction that will define whether the business makes it to their bottom line goal as a well-informed human voice via the multi-platform incoming customer service of a business phone answering service makes the difference in terms of reigniting brand loyalty.

By ensuring that customers are promptly, courteously and effectively taken care of via phone answering services as well as online chat, businesses pave the way for the baseline sales that will help carry them through the year to the next holiday season. By guaranteeing that every interaction has a positive and prompt request fulfillment, businesses can build on that base year after year and expand the use of their phone answering services to affordably handle the growth.