You’ve worked hard to ensure that your small business’s reputation is gold and all that work didn’t go unnoticed.
People are calling, so many that you often find yourself slammed with back to back customer service calls that make it difficult to continue to provide each caller the individual attention you really want to deliver. It may be time to line up some help, but in-house staff can be so expensive.
Can you outsource your customer service?
Of course you can! In fact, when you hire an answering service company to help with your customer service calls, you not only get back a huge chunk of time, but you suddenly have access to a team of dedicated phone operators who will do nothing but focus on customer service on your behalf. Your customers can get the very best in caring service and you can focus on the business of running your business.
A Few Ways Answering Services Help Callers
Today’s answering services are more than just telephone operators who can only take messages.
Instead, these services deliver high quality professionals for companies that need extra manpower but can’t really afford to hire someone full time. Customer service is one of the basic offerings of most answering services. All you have to do is provide the answering service company with materials they can use to teach your borrowed team about your business and they’ll be ready to take over your calls.
Outsourcing your customer service can really extend your customer touch, these are just a few ways to do that using an answering service:
- Add bilingual services. So many Americans speak Spanish as a first or primary language these days, so if you’re going to offer customer service you might as well do it in the languages you’ll use in your in-house business.When you’re in a Spanish speaking area, demanding that everyone who calls be capable of receiving their answers only in English can not only damage your reputation, it can create misunderstanding and throw up huge barriers between you and your target demographic.
- Expand your telephone hours. It’s expensive to hire and train a new employee, especially if you’re hiring teams to handle your call flow. When you have an answering service team, you never pay for training or idle time, they only charge you when the phone rings.This means it’s just as affordable to have 24-hour, seven-days-a-week customer service as it is to only offer help to callers during your business hours. Those extra hours can mean lots of extra sales in the long run.
- Become an emergency contact. Emergency call handling is a big part of customer service in a number of industries. When your customer service is limited, callers know not to expect too much, but if you have an answering service team who can always get to the phone and are empowered to push messages or calls to an appropriate helper any time of the day or night, your customers will come to see you as an emergency contact and a friend.
Although there are many jobs at your company that should be handled in-house, customer service isn’t one that has to be. Instead of spending a fortune to hire and train your own operators, consider outsourcing as a way to help keep more capital in your business and more liquid funds for further investments. You can absolutely outsource your customer service and with the right answering service partner, it can be the best decision you’ve ever made.
