Why hire an answering service?
There are many reasons you should consider hiring an answering service to answer inbound calls from your customers. These reasons include:
Quick setup
If your business needs to add a customer service department for billing inquiries and for ordering, it can take several months to set one up. There are several steps involved in adding a department to handle all your inbound telephone inquiries. The first step is determining whether you have the room to add another department in the office or if you would need to lease additional space.
The department would need enough space for desks, computers, telephone equipment, and the personnel to take the phone calls. If you have a small business, this could mean relocating your offices. Unfortunately, the process could take several months and, in the meantime, your current personnel could be overwhelmed with telephone calls from customers checking on orders, asking about their accounts and needing help with other problems.
Hiring a telephone answering service would allow you to get your customer service department up and running in a matter of days instead of months. All they would need to do is train their personnel on your products and company procedures in order to handle inbound calls from your customers. The ability to add a customer service department for your business quickly can help your company to grow quickly as well.
More cost-effective
Adding a department to handle all of your inbound calls would not only take several months, but it would cost several thousand pounds as well. By the time you relocate or lease another space for the department, purchase furniture, equipment, advertise for new employees, and train them, you could easily spend several hundred thousand pounds. However, you can afford all of the costs of adding a new department at your business by hiring a telephone answering service.
Hiring a telephone answering service like Netcall Solutions is a fraction of the cost of adding a new department to your business to answer telephone calls. You can contract their services for a set period of time for a low monthly fee, which allows you to use your operating capital for other things, such as expanding your business as it grows.
Trained telephone professionals
In order to have an effective customer service department, you need to have employees who know how to answer the phones and know your business well enough to handle your customers' questions about their orders or accounts. They also need to be able to handle the various temperaments they will be met with from customers when they handle phone calls. When you hire a telephone answering service, they will already have a well-trained staff ready to take your company's telephone inquiries.
The staff working for the answering service you hire only needs to be trained on your products or services in order to help your customers. Since they already have a staff and customer service processes in place, getting them up to speed to handle your customers' questions will only take a matter of days instead of weeks or months as it would if your company were to add a customer service department to your business.
Flexibility
Hiring a telephone answering service provides the flexibility you need for your business. During lulls in business, you do not have to pay for personnel you don't need to sit and wait for telephone calls because the service will simply put those extra employees to work on other accounts. When the telephones are busy with calls from your customers, they can add staff to handle the influx of inbound calls.
If your company offers services customers may need in an emergency, such as a towing service or a plumbing service, the staff at the telephone answering service can be available 24 hours a day to take those calls. In addition, they can also handle telephone calls when there is a staff shortage in your offices due to illness or employees going on vacation. This flexibility allows the service to handle all of your customers' inquiries without any disruption to your business.
Maintain focus on business
By hiring a telephone answering service to handle your company's inbound customer calls, you can maintain your focus on your business. As a small business owner, you already wear many hats in your company and you don't need the added burden of managing a department you may not have the experience to handle. Instead of pulling attention away from your current responsibilities, you will be able to focus on your business, finding new customers and expanding as your business grows.
In addition, you won't have to use your operating capital on starting a new department and you can use it to help expand your business instead. You can add services to offer your current customers or you can add product lines to gain more clients. The answering service you hire will handle all aspects of your company's customer service, from management to staffing to training its personnel to be able to handle all of your customers' questions efficiently.
When you hire a telephone answering service to handle your company's inbound calls from your customers, it frees you up to focus on other aspects of your company and is more cost-effective. You don't have to dump a lot of money into a department you may not be able to afford, but you can be responsive to your customers' questions and concerns. It also allows you to get a customer service department up and running quickly to better service your customers.
