Some of the factors you juggle as a business owner include keeping customers happy, making sure your operating costs don't overrun your profits, and increasing the reach and reputation of your business. The right phone service can help you with all of these goals.
Here's how a phone service can help lower your costs and help increase your business reputation.
Lower Costs Through Efficiency
Using a phone service can actually help you save money and lower costs. For example, you won't have to hire additional employees to answer the phones if you have a phone service. Here are some of the other ways that a phone service could improve efficiency to reduce costs.
Filter Spam Calls
A phone service can take calls and assess them to ensure you're only spending important time on calls and messages that are relevant to your business. For example, you can ask your phone service to filter out telemarketer calls. A good phone service often automatically filters out many spam and robot calls and may even let you add custom numbers to block.
Save Employee Time
If you can't afford to hire extra employees to take calls, the employees you have may need to take time out of their busy schedules to answer phones. Using a phone service will give your employees this valuable time back so they can more effectively and efficiently complete the tasks you hired them for.
This factor can be especially important if you consider that a phone call could take 23 minutes for them to re-focus their attention afterward. So if you expect your employees to answer phones, you could lose a lot more productive time than just the time they spend on the call itself.
Avoid Missed Connections
A phone service can provide answering services 24/7, so you won't miss any calls from customers who don't call during business hours or who call when everyone is busy. This can help ensure that your business doesn't suffer from missed connections with potential customers.
Boost Business Reputation
A phone service can help boost your business reputation as well. As you can imagine, a better reputation could help your business grow faster, get more customers, and stay profitable more easily. Here are some examples of how a phone service can help in this area.
Improve First Impressions
If a prospective customer is frustrated and disappointed by not being able to get through to you, they could decide your business isn't worth bothering with and move on to another. Or, even if they keep working with you, they may still have a low opinion of your business because of a poor first impression. This could lead to lower reviews and fewer recommendations.
Professional phone answering representatives can improve new customers' first experiences (and first impressions) when they contact your business. Some phone service companies even offer online chat support for customers interacting with your website.
Provide Trained Representatives
If you choose the right phone service, they'll have professionally trained representatives answering the phones. These representatives can offer excellent service because they specialize in helping customers on the phone.
Customers who receive competent, friendly, and sympathetic customer service on the phone are more likely to think well of your business. If they talk to your untrained employees or are put on hold for a long time, chances are they won’t come back.
If your employees are well-trained in their job, whether that's plumbing, healthcare, HVAC, or anything else, that may not leave them much time to develop customer service skills. Instead of worrying about retraining your employees to make sure they represent you well over the phone, you can outsource this task to a phone answering service.
The benefits of hiring a phone service can range from saving you and your employees' time to providing trained call representatives for customer service that will help your business keep customers happy. Get in touch with a reputable phone service like AnSer to discuss phone service pricing and other details.