Having high quality customer service has been proven to be one of the best methods of generating profits and keeping a loyal customer base that can expand. However, many companies don’t want the expense of paying for additional employees and employees often don’t want to work longer hours. In this day and age of the Internet and instant access to everything, it’s becoming increasingly important for businesses that are customer service heavy like marketing or financial services, to be available 24/7 to customers or other businesses that may need to contact them. This means weekends, holidays, and \”after-hours\”–between 6 p.m. and 7 a.m. How does a company balance finances, employee needs, and excellent quality customer service? The answer may be simpler than you think. Investing in a live phone answering service or an automated telephone answering service might be an incredible resource to have. During a recently conducted survey, over half the respondents said they’d be willing to pay more money to receive better customer service. A live phone answering service will give the 60% of customers who prefer to conduct their customer service questions or needs over the phone the personal touch they need to keep coming back to your business.
What Exactly Does a Professional Answering Service Do?
Essentially, a professional answering service is a contracted company who works to give businesses high quality customer service. They handle complaints, questions, concerns, and more from customers who call in, regardless of the time of day. They may also forward on messages or send customers to a more direct line. There is a range of answering services available, from a virtual telephone answering service, to a live receptionist answering service, to an automated telephone answering service.
How Will An Answering Service Help My Business?
Think happy customers, good reviews, more business. A live phone answering service will let your customers be in touch with your business at any time that’s best for them. They’ll get the feeling that you’re really working for them and trying to accommodate their needs, which will make them happy. More customers are likely to share a bad experience with friends, family, or acquaintances than enthuse about a good one, so having bad customer service can be seriously detrimental to your business. You’ll have to work harder at rebuilding your reputation too–a study showed it took about twelve positive customer service experiences to make up for a single bad one.
Investing some money in customer service can also pay itself back tenfold. Did you know that over 80% of customers said they’d go back to a business and buy something after having had a good customer service experience there? There are also numbers that show companies who prize customer service and make it a priority have 60% better profits than businesses who are lax with their customer service.
Make the right decision for your business. Invest wisely now and you could see an amazing fiscal year ahead of you. You want to be known as the good customer service company. People will be more sympathetic if something should go wrong and more loyal. You’re sure to see more referrals to your business, which means more sales. Prioritize customer service: it can make or break you.