5 Signs Your Business Needs an Answering Service

Good customer service is crucial to the success of a business. Often the interactions customers have when calling your company for the first time create either a lasting good or a lasting bad first impression. Many small businesses start out by addressing all customer calls and concerns themselves, but overtime this may become too much to handle. For those still handling their own customer calls, here’s five signs you may need to switch to an answering service.

1. Work isn’t Getting Done

Many small businesses have employees with overlapping roles. This may mean that the person in charge of filling orders or running the website is also taking customer calls throughout the day. However, if it gets to the point where that person is only taking calls all day and unable to do the main purpose of their job, it may be time to get some help. Customers can tell when the person on the other side of the line is rushed or stressed. It will be much better for the bottom line if your employee’s can handle their jobs and leave answering calls to a service.

2. Too Many Calls to Handle

This is a problem that arises out of a good thing. Your business has taken off, people are placing orders and contacting you for various reasons. When the amount of customers you have maxis out your own capacity to receive all of the calls in your day, an answering service can help by taking multiple calls at once and keeping the customer service positive while you continue to turn out an awesome product. An answering service can also help you divide calls based on small inquiries and whether you need to personally address the issue. That way you are able to devote more of your time to important clients and leave the regular calls to the call service.

3. Customer Service is Lacking

If for some reason your company’s customer service is lacking due to employees not having enough experience or training or not having enough time to address complaints, an answering service can help you to greatly improve this area. An answering service will have highly trained employees who know how to represent your company and give the best customer service possible.

4. Customer Service is too Expensive

Hiring full time employees with training, salary and benefits can be expensive. If hiring your own customer service reps is starting to take a toll on your bottom line, hiring an answering service can help. A service only requires a fee for its services and uses a pool of money from multiple paying companies to pay its employees. This means you can save company time and resources.

5. You Rely on a Machine to Direct Calls

No customer likes to be answered by a machine. It makes your company feel cold and distant and many customers become frustrated when they aren’t sure how to instruct the machine to get them to the person that they need to talk to. An answering service can allow you to have a real person on the other end of the line, who gives a human feel to your company and relieves the client of having to talk to a machine.