From the best answering service to kind and compassionate help both in person and through the best answering service possible, customer service is hugely important and should never be overlooked. As anyone who has worked in the service industry can attest to, how you interact with people matters and should not be discounted even in other areas of the professional world. Having the best answering service possible is one way to do this, and this article will detail not only the importance of having a business answering service, but qualities that the best answering service should always have.
For one, the best answering service will be a telephone answering service, often one that incorporates an after hours telephone answering service. This is because even as we have fully entered this age of technology and more and more means of communication have become possible and widespread, many people still feel most comfortable resolving their problems either in person or in a telephone call. In fact, far more than half of all customers (around eighty percent, to be more exact) actually prefer talking on the telephone as opposed to an online chat program or exchanging emails. For these people, the vast majority, the best answering service will be one where direct contact with real human people is not only possible but probable. The success rates for telephone answering services is also considerably higher than the customer satisfaction that is obtained through using other forms of solving customer concerns. In fact, while the best answering service will have a satisfaction rate of very nearly seventy percent at the end of the day, other forms of customer service and customer outreach channels will not be nearly as successful and are therefore not nearly as reliable as a way of ensuring loyal customers.
There are, of course, a number of things that should be kept in mind when you are trying to build up the best answering service possible to serve your customers. For one, keep in mind that the vast majority of people do not particularly like to be kept waiting and put on hold. Being put on hold can interrupt your day, especially if the hold is a long one, because you can’t really do anything else while you wait for someone to be ready to speak to you – and there’s really no telling when that might be. For this reason, being on hold can be an entirely frustrating process, and many people will simply hang up and never get their customer service concern resolved, leaving them less likely to frequent your business or buy your products again. Instead of keeping customers on hold, calling them back when a customer service representative becomes free is a much better option, and one that is preferred by as much as three quarters of all customers – approximately seventy five percent of them – which makes it the best option for customer satisfaction. It’s important to note, however, that you must be careful with having a voicemail. If a customer hears a voicemail and is not certain that they will be called back promptly, as many as eighty percent of them will hang up right then and there.
Hiring competent customer service and phone answering employees is also incredibly crucial, as an answering service is far from likely to be the best answering service around if employees who don’t really know what they are doing are hired. It’s important that your customer service employees are well trained in handling customer concerns and are proactive thinkers, able to come up with creative solutions to even the most difficult of customer concerns. In fact, the primary concern of the majority of customers is to have whatever problem it is that they might be having resolved as quickly as is possible. And if you and your customer service team do a great job of thoroughly handling their problem, the payoff is likely to be worth it, with nearly fifteen percent of all customers frequenting a place of business again after having a good customer service experience, no matter what kind of business it might be here in the U.S.