How An Answering Service Can Be Beneficial To Your Small Business As An Alternative To Office Staff

If your business hasn't grown enough to hire office staff, you should consider using an answering service. When you're busy, you don't have time to take calls all day, but routing calls to voicemail doesn't look too professional to your customers.

An answering service provides real people to answer your phone and take messages. Here's what this service might be able to do for you.

Answer Phones And More

Depending on what you need, the answering service might answer voice calls, reply to text messages, or even respond to emails. Some answering services also provide online chat. You may not need anything but someone to answer phone calls so people don't have to work their way through an automated call or go to voicemail.

When an answering service answers a call, a live person answers right away using your company name. This makes it seem as if they are working in your office, but the person may be working from home or from an office building. There are usually multiple people employed by the service, so if one person is already on a call, the next call is routed to someone else so callers aren't put on hold unless absolutely necessary.

Reply To Calls According To A Script

Since the staff may not know what your business is about, you'll have to supply the information they need. You might direct them to take a message so you can call people back at your convenience, but it's more helpful if the person answering the phone can answer simple questions so you don't have to return every call.

You can create scripts or answers to frequently asked questions callers ask and have the person answering the phone refer to the information provided to answer questions about hours of operation, business location, returning products, troubleshooting products, and other questions that have straightforward answers.

Schedule Appointments

Some answering services may also have their employees schedule appointments. Having someone set appointments could be especially beneficial so you can keep a full calendar without getting bogged down by taking time to schedule those appointments.

An employee of this service can do just about anything your own employee could do when they have access to equipment and software that lets them do many office tasks.

Whether you want simple phone answering and message taking or something more complex, talk to the answering service to learn what they offer and how much the services cost so you can choose what you need to help your business grow.

For more information, contact a local company, like AnSer.


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