If your small business fails to answer the phones, your competitors will answer theirs.
Gaining a competitive advantage means being available for your customers 24/7. We know that’s not always easy. If you’re lacking the vital in-house resources, it can mean customer service isn’t always as switched on as you’d like it to be.
Something that is always switched on is an after-hours call answering service.
After-hours call handling can help your small business with:
- Improving response time
- Enhancing your professional image
- Increasing customer satisfaction
- Reducing missed opportunities
- Driving customer retention.
Keep reading to learn more about how to outsource call answering. It’s time to take control of your missed calls and become the always-on business.
The importance of accessibility.
Nothing frustrates customers more than when they can’t reach you by phone.
When customers decide to call, they want you to answer. This doesn’t just apply to small businesses; accessibility impacts companies of all sizes. Customers want that level of commitment from you.
Of course, convincing someone to stay in the office all night isn’t going to work. She isn’t going to answer the phones 24/7 (and nor should she). To become an accessible business around the clock, an after-hours call answering service is your solution.
An after-hours call answering service can help you fill the gaps in your customer support schedule. So when your team goes home, your calls divert to the service. Your customers still receive excellent customer service and the answers to their questions – day or night.
Building trust and professionalism.
An after-hours call handling service helps your business stand out from other business solutions on the market. It’s the kind of approach that conveys professionalism and builds customer trust.
It’s common for small businesses to feel like they can’t compete with larger corporations. If this is the case for you, it’s time to switch your mindset. What you have on your side is agility. You can make quick decisions that benefit both your business and your customers.
One of those decisions is introducing a 24/7 call-handling service. Compared to larger corporations, which often need multiple sign-offs, your small business can rapidly take on new services. This means you can make significant changes to enhance customer experience levels and boost productivity.
When your customers call in, their calls are answered quickly and professionally. Their ultimate feeling is one of relief and satisfaction. What do you think that does for your business’s professional image? That’s right – it shows that you’re agile and responsive.
In practice, an after-hours professional answering service will relay messages efficiently to the relevant people in your business. After all, if you’re constantly missing calls or sending them to voicemail, you give the impression that you’re overwhelmed. Or disorganized. Or both. Neither of which have a positive lasting impact.
Choosing to outsource call answering helps your business to appear perhaps more accustomed to dealing with high volume call scenarios, perhaps even giving your business the illusion of being larger than it is. It reinforces the perception that you are more than capable of handling all your incoming calls and queries.
Enhancing customer experience with 24/7 after-hours call answering
When you greet callers with a friendly and professional response, they feel reassured. They know that someone is on their case and is willing to help. This goes a long way to boost satisfaction, improve brand reputation, and ensure loyalty.
With so much choice today, customer experience has become a key differentiator. This is why round-the-clock customer support is essential for both meeting and exceeding customer expectations.
Of course, smaller businesses may struggle with the resources required to deliver 24/7 customer support. Common issues include operational costs and staffing shortages. You don’t want to pay for 24/7 telephone support when you’re unsure of call demand.
After hours call answering services help small businesses just like yours who experience call spikes and downtimes. During busy periods – for instance, when you’re holding a promotional event – you’ll probably have more calls than you can manage. This situation can be overwhelming for internal teams.
That’s where a highly skilled virtual receptionist comes in as a cost-effective solution. Helping your business project an image of calm and capability. Enhancing your customer experience in this way gives your business an edge. It helps you attract more customers and close more deals. This is due to customers appreciating the convenience of an instant response whenever they need it.
For instance, compare another small business offering the same or similar service to you. Their phones remain either unanswered or sent straight to voicemail. They might even have rude reception staff that don’t direct calls appropriately. Now consider your business. You have an after-hours call answering service in place. When calls come in, day or night, your professionalism shines through via your customer support service.
Which business do you think your prospects will choose?
24/7 call handling is even more important in regulated industries like financial services or legal. When you’re busy or out of the office, your calls are handled with efficiency and care. You can be confident that trained call agents consistently manage calls according to compliance regulations and your business’s standards.
Increasing efficiency and productivity.
If you’re looking to improve your business’s productivity, a small business answering service can help.
Improving your response time and accessibility undoubtedly improves your customer experience. As we’ve mentioned, limited staffing resources are often an issue to becoming a more accessible business. Your existing team is likely dealing with core business activities and is too busy to constantly field calls.
Common outcomes include delays in addressing customer needs – equalling frustrated and dissatisfied customers. And that’s before even discussing prospective customers. If they can’t reach your business out of hours, they’ll go directly to your competition. These wasted opportunities cost your company money and impact your growth potential.
After-hours call answering services overcome these challenges. A dedicated customer support channel is designed to handle calls outside of regular business hours. This approach frees up your team’s time to focus on essential tasks such as product development and marketing initiatives.
By outsourcing after-hours call answering, you instantly streamline your operations and improve team productivity. Take 100 Acres Estates, a Birmingham real estate agency. Their “clients come first” pledge involves staying in constant client communication throughout the buying or selling process.
Director Mohammed Shakir Ahmed knew they needed something to deal with high call volumes at peak times. He explains, “The frustration was when calls came through, all of them came at the same time. Unless you have a lot of advisors, people would hang up after waiting a couple of minutes. So we needed something to eradicate that problem so people could, at the bare minimum, get a “hello”.
Shakir expands on the issue, stating, “We were checking our calls and were seeing that not every call was being answered. Thinking about it, I knew just by the law of averages – one in every five calls could be a customer.”
The solution was for Shakir’s team to work closely with their AnswerConnect Client Account Manager. This pinpointed exactly what they needed for their business. They examined their script and discussed the process with their client account manager.
Shakir says, “The benefit of our after-hours call answering service is consistency; getting every call answered. Just being able to say we’ll never miss a call and every single one of our customers spoke to an actual human being. We don’t have the man-hours to answer all those calls in-house. AnswerConnect made that possible for us.”
