A telephone answering service gives you a cost-effective way to provide outstanding service to your customers. By using an answering service, you will ensure that no call ever gets missed again.
A reliable, well-trained, and experienced virtual receptionist can be ready to provide phone answering and represent your business within minutes. Best of all is that you can save money and time from having to hire and train new staff.
Doing so can also free up existing staff and allow them to be more productive, rather than be distracted by answering phone calls constantly.
A live answering service gives you peace of mind that all the phone calls your business receives will be handled by a professional and experienced virtual receptionist. You can also provide your own approved greetings and script, to fully customize the experience to your customers.
What is a telephone answering service?
A telephone answering service is an outsourced business service that answers inbound calls on your company’s behalf and acts as a virtual receptionist. We are located in the US and can provide a local customer service experience for your clients anywhere in America.
Whenever someone calls your business phone number, a virtual receptionist will answer phone calls within 10 seconds, instead of it going to voicemail.
The virtual answering service can screen calls, take messages, provide customer service, as well as scheduling appointments, all in real-time.
To make sure you never miss an important call again, there is a 24-hour answering service available around the clock. Not only does it save your business time and money, but it also ensures that someone is always available to answer client calls.
Customers place significant value on customer service, and it can be the difference between keeping a customer, or them going to a competitor instead.
How is a telephone answering service different from a call center?
People often mistake a telephone answering service for a call center, which is known for cold-calling or outbound marketing. However, this couldn’t be further from the case.
A call answering service instead provides your business with support for inbound calls from callers who are contacting your business directly.
While a business phone answering service may be in a call center environment, a professional virtual receptionist has a very different set of skills. Instead of having sales skills, they instead are experienced in providing excellent customer service and resolving any query that the caller has.
Benefits of a phone answering service
Having professional outsourced phone answering has many benefits to help set you apart from your competition. These include:
Every call being answered
A live answering service lets your company instantly respond to every call during peak periods. Whether you are running a marketing campaign, have an unexpectedly high volume of calls, seasonal products or services, or team members on holidays or ill, there’s no need to stress. You can ensure that every single call will be answered and resolved.
Virtual receptionist services can fill in during peak times, with only a moment’s notice, to provide seamless support for your business.
Calls answered according to your script
The telephone answering service uses your script to ensure that all instructions and advice is consistent, which strengthens your brand and company values. It’s also possible to add a custom on-hold message for your callers to listen to.
Cost effectiveness
You only pay for phone answering for calls you receive, instead of paying a fixed wage for a real receptionist who may otherwise be bored and unproductive during quiet times. Packages are available ranging from a call-by-call basis for small businesses, as well as monthly packages.
Customer service outside of business hours
A telephone answering service lets you be available to answer any calls you may receive outside of business hours. It ensures that every call gets answered and professionally dealt with, at a time which is most convenient for your customers, including public holidays and weekends.
Real-time resolution
A live receptionist can provide real-time problem resolution and prevent calls being escalated to you. Based on the FAQs you provide, they can give your customers consistent answers for any queries related to your product or service.
Ability to scale as your business grows
As your business grows, there is no need to hire and train more staff. Instead, you can change to a different package that best suits your business objectives. As well as having an increased number of live receptionists available to handle the calls, you can take advantage of the full range of virtual receptionist services while increasing their responsibility and outsourcing more tasks over time thanks to flexible packages.
The importance of outsourcing to US-based virtual receptionists
Instead of outsourcing your calls to an overseas call center, ReceptionHQ’s phone answering service is based in the United States. The majority of calls for our clients are answered by professional receptionists in the US, with our international teams assisting with overflow during peak times and after hours. This means that typically a local live receptionist will be handling queries for your business and understand the unique culture and dialect of each city and state.
ReceptionHQ offers a free 7-day telephone answering service trial. Try it for yourself with no risk and no credit card required to see if phone answering is right for your business. You can get set up and have a friendly and helpful virtual receptionist answering your calls within minutes.
Best of all is your customers will receive the highest customer service possible while being able to contact your business 24/7. They will also have no idea that you are using a live receptionist service, instead of a receptionist physically in the office.
