What is an answering service?
An answering service is a group of trained customer service professionals who answer telephone calls from clients and customers, take detailed messages and relay these messages directly to a client or appropriate employee. Customer service professionals are well-versed in speaking to customers from a wide variety of industries.
How do you access messages from a telephone answering service?
Telephone answering service clients can personally customize their means of message delivery in a way that best suits their business. These message receipt options are:
- Text messages
- Email Messages
- Fax Messages
- Call-in directly to Answering Service for your messages
- Request a call from the Answering Service for your messages
- Record messages and listen to them, available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
- Send your messages directly to multiple recipients with convenient options.
What businesses can use an answering service?
There is literally almost no business that cannot benefit from an answering service. Whether you own or operate a real estate company, a doctor’s office, dentist, lawyer, construction companies, retail stores, beauty salon or a plumbing company. There are benefits and uses for call service. Answering services can help you manage client call overflow, answer after hours calls, cover your calls on holidays and weekends and take the place of hiring a full-time secretary.
What are the hours of an answering service?
An answering service is all about being there when you can’t and is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Answering services are open during major holidays, such as Christmas, July 4th and New Year’s Day.
How can answering services save your company’s money?
Hiring an employee to manage the phone calls is very expensive. There are hourly wages, plus covering insurance costs. Many small offices do not have the space or the resources to hire someone to answer the phone all day. An answering service is an affordable solution to this problem.
How do I know if I need an answering service company?
If you are on the fence about using an answering service, you should ask yourself a few key questions:
- Do you find it difficult to answer all of your calls”
- Are you always checking your business voicemail due to missed calls?
- Is your voicemail frequently full?
- Does it take you more than an hour to return missed customer phone calls?
- Do you lose productivity due to always being tied up on the phone?
- Do you have trouble managing after-hour phone calls?
-Michael Mckenzie