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Going Back to Home Phones

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Going Back to Home Phones

Do you remember the days before everyone on earth carried around a cell phone in their pocket? If you needed to get ahold of a friend, you called them when you knew they could answer. If you were out and about with your family, you didn't need to worry about staring at a little screen all day long to check emails and look for text messages. I was eager to get back to that simple way of life, which is why I banned cell phones for my family and installed traditional phone service. My blog discusses the benefits and drawbacks of traditional landlines, so that you can decide how you want to approach communication at home.

Does Your Live 24/7 Answering Service Have What It Takes?

3 September 2015
 Categories: , Blog

Wondering about how the best 24/7 answering services deliver benefits to their clients? If you're looking at purchasing these services from a firm, check out these absolutely crucial aspects of service and strategies that will make all the difference in this type of off-hours assistance.

Addressing the Technology Gap

The best call answering firms have cutting-edge technology at their disposal to assist clients. That means employing auto dialing and predictive tools for handling either incoming or outgoing calls, along with different kinds of customer relationship management tools that pop up on a telephone's digital screen during a call. New technology gets all the right information in front of operators, so that they can work more efficiently and seem more knowledgeable and skilled about what they're doing. But if your call answering firm doesn't have things like CRM or data-rich systems, you may be missing out on the best results that the industry has to offer.

Skilled Operators

Call center operators need to have particular skills and understand their job role to do their jobs well. They're getting a collection of callers who have missed the window for talking directly to the company -- as a result, these people have specific types of questions, and they are in specific kinds of moods. In many cases, they're calling about problems, whether it's delivery, product defects or any other types of situations in which they've already become irate or aggravated. So the skilled operator needs to know how to defuse the situation and stay calm and professional on the phone.

Capturing Feedback

The best call answering center systems also offer data capturing services. That means you'll be able to see at a glance what kinds of problems callers have, and how they were served as a result. These kinds of tools are critical in planning a better response every time and really serving customers in a comprehensive way.

Offering Call Metrics

Another big plus for live answering services is the delivery of call metrics that help clients figure out whether or not the service is working well.

There's a disclaimer here -- you don't want to only go by call metrics. Sometimes, it takes longer for operators to help customers in more comprehensive ways. But if you see that calls are consistently taking a long time, that can be an indication of various problems that can affect the efficacy of the answering service. These can include:

  • language gaps that make calls longer when callers can't understand what staff are saying
  • lack of knowledge about directories or company chains of communication
  • operators who get caught up in long, involved conversations irrelevant to the service

These and other issues can be dealt with if business leaders know about them. If not, they'll continue to contribute to inefficiency.

These are some of the big questions about live answering services and what they provide to clients.