Slippery roads, wet conditions and distracted drivers make every day as a motorist a challenging one.
When those inevitable accidents happen, you want to be the tow company everyone calls — but if there’s no one home to answer the phone, a vehicle owner in trouble won’t bother to leave a message. They’ll just keep calling until they find a tow truck company that answers. You may be trying to save a few bucks by not having a full-time dispatcher on duty, but the cost to you in business can be significant.
Improving Business with an Answering Service
According to a Constant Contact survey during Business Week 2015, 66 percent of the small business owners interviewed were primarily concerned with finding new customers and 40 percent with retaining existing customers. Customers, on the other hand, told NewVoiceMedia that 44 percent of them were actively seeking business elsewhere due to inadequate customer service –creating huge opportunities for businesses that prioritize customer care.
Your towing company is no different: your customers want to be able to reach you quickly and not have to wait for a response. They need to know that you’re going to take care of their problem instead of having to talk to a machine and hope for the best. Sure, you and your tow truck operators try to catch every call that comes through, but when you’re in a spot with bad reception or you don’t hear the phone ring because you’re winching a car onto the flatbed, it can cost you plenty.
Answering services can be the solution to filling those customer service holes. Unlike a full-time dispatcher who is paid a full-time salary, and who has to have an office to work in and often receives a benefit package, an answering service is hired on a pay-as-you-go basis. You only pay for the calls that they handle, not for the times when they’re waiting for calls or even waiting for a call back from a customer.
Taking Advantage of a Live Answering Service for Towing
Towing companies are a unique type of business, since they’re largely reliant on their operators being familiar with the local geography. Fortunately, the Internet age has made it possible for anyone to pinpoint the location of a stranded motorist with extreme accuracy from anywhere on the planet. As long as you provide your answering service a list of zip codes you handle or a map outlining the zones for each driver, a remote answering service company can dispatch your calls as well as any in-house team — and for a lot less.
You can contract an answering service to pick up the calls that you miss, to handle nighttime calls or to take over full time as your virtual dispatcher. No matter how you use them, answering services can greatly improve your customer satisfaction, earning you superb scores with towing clubs and positive online reviews. And positive customer experiences go further than that, though — when a customer tells friends about how great their towing experience was, you’re likely to earn even more business, since hiring a tow truck is much like hiring a mechanic: reputation matters most.
