Your clients and customers have varying degrees of patience when it comes to the phone calls they make. Sometimes, in fact, the patience that a client may have for being put on hold may have nothing to do with the services you are offering but instead reflect what is been going on during the rest of their day.
At a time when political phone calls are ramping up in the last few weeks before the 2016 Presidential election, for instance, it is understandable that many clients and customers will not tolerate being put on hold. And while some companies may think that are offering their calling customers a series of very viable menu choices is a step above and beyond being put on hold, this is not always how customers and clients receive these robotic choices.
in fact, customers who have had their family dinners interrupted three or four times a week by irritating political phone calls likely have a little patience for robotic choices or canned music while they wait to talk to a customer service representative. For these and many other customer satisfaction reasons, successful businesses offer their clients a live call answering service that provides personal attention from the very first phone call. A 24 hour answering service, in fact, can be the difference between a satisfied customer that will return again and again and a lost customer who becomes frustrated and hangs up in anger.
Could a Call Answering Service Help You Get and Keep More Customers?
In the past, large and small business owners may have thought of a call answering service as something that is used by medical offices and other similar settings. The fact of the matter is, however, the reason the doctor answering service platform works so well is not because of the specifics of the medical field. These telephone answering services work because of the personal attention. Personal attention that any business, whether it is large or small, can offer to its current and potential clients and customers.
Today’s consumer often wants to find the information and the products that they need as quickly as possible. When these same customers, on the other hand, decide that they want to talk to someone they are intolerant of being put on hold or asked to jump through a series of computer generated prompts. After being unable to find what they need online, they have called because they want to talk to a real person.
With this information in mind, it should come as no surprise that 80% of potential customers will hang up on a business if they hear a voicemail prompt. In fact, 79% of consumers indicate that they prefer to interact with companies by phone compared to other options. Ordering known items online works for many consumers, but a significant sector of the population does their research online but still may want to talk to a customer representative about questions they may have.
What Is the Most Heartwarming Story You Have Seen on Your Social Media Feed?
You know that great story about the fast food restaurant worker who used her sign language skills to allow a teenager to order her own meal? What about the big chain store employee who took the time to help an Autistic child calm down during a major melt down in the produce aisle? The reason that these stories resonate so much with the internet crowd is that at the same time they are spending so much of their time online, what they are really craving is a real relationship with the products and services that they buy. In fact, some research indicates that many U.S. brands are losing a combined total of $41 billion each year due to poor customer service.
Authentic customer service is often difficult to come by. the decision to use a live call answering service, however, is a step in the right direction. Rather than offering their customers a long list of robotically generated responses, successful businesses are instead switching to the love answering service platform.
If your business is looking for a way to set itself apart from the digital customer service provided by many companies, an answering service contract might be a great decision.