For most small to medium enterprises (SME), the building of long-lasting customer relationships correlates directly with company success. However, creating these connections in small to medium-sized companies can be tough, as providing dedicated customer service means having dedicated customer service agents. Often in smaller business models, employees can’t be spared to focus solely on phones and reception. That’s why many SMEs have been leveraging an outsourced virtual receptionist and seeing tremendous improvement in creating and retaining valuable leads to remedy the issue.
This article will cover how a live answering service can improve gaps in your relationship management and take customer service to the next level.
Prompt Response
Customers don’t enjoy waiting, and when it’s so easy to hang up and call the next result on Google, why should they? In today’s fast-paced world, the longer customers wait for their calls to be answered, the more likely they will hang up or report negative feedback to the business. While hiring an in-house receptionist can help, urgent or priority calls can occur at any time of the day and need to be moved to the correct agent quickly.
When using live answering services, you can answer calls at any hour with no hold times. Professional virtual receptionist service also ensures customers get helpful and accurate responses to their enquiry, indirectly capturing leads maximising customer satisfaction.
Make a Great Impression
The quality of customer service received remains on our minds long after the service or product and prompts us to leave reviews or recommend friends. Using a virtual call answering service allows you to deliver outstanding customer care and leave enquirers with an excellent first impression. As discussed above, new customers are making split-second decisions about your company, and if they can’t reach you already, they’ve had a negative experience.
In using a 24/7 virtual call answering agent for your business, calls are managed so that customers know their questions, issues, or even complaints have been heard and are in the process of being answered. Depending on how you utilise your call service agent, they can even provide non-urgent support and care, so your customers won’t have to wait.
It’s often that even disgruntled customers can continue using service after they’ve felt their concerns have been voiced and heard, which is a core component of successful customer care!
Quick Query Resolution
While not always urgent, a phone call means they’d like a solution sooner rather than later. However, depending on the question or problem, employees might feel pressured to stay on the phone while they handle the issue, which can sometimes slow down the process for both the company and the customer. While at the same time, you don’t want to dismiss the customer to get to work. Here’s where funnelling in calls through a service can help with improving your support pipeline. Urgent or ongoing issues can be directly sent to the necessary agent, while problems that need to be investigated or worked on without the customer can be recorded and passed to an employee, eliminating the need to multitask. In addition, 24/7 virtual call agents invest a great deal of time understanding your business and use this knowledge to triage your call lines giving employees more space to work on issues and their day to day operations.
Cater to International Clientele
As a business owner, you should grab every opportunity to expand the companies reach, including movement into different geographical locations. When looking to target an overseas market, there are many factors you need to consider including, time zones, cultural nuances and even translation. For many SMEs, it’s difficult to build a solid customer service team in one language, let alone one for every international market you’d like to target. Luckily, you can look for bilingual agencies to assist and build a team to reach new customers using a call service.
Consistent, Professional Live Answering Service
An excellent live answering service should directly reflect your internal customer service and support teams. This seamless transition guarantees that your customers’ calls will be answered and handled with the utmost professionalism and care. We believe every action taken in dealing with a customer directly affects how they experience and perceive your business. Hiring receptionists without verifying skills or hands-on experience can be a risk for your business as it only takes one careless action to damage customers’ relationship with your company.
Virtual receptionists are rigorously trained customer service professionals who understand how best to represent your business to the standards you set, with their speed, empathy, digital literacy and problem-solving skills. In addition, a professional virtual receptionist service always makes sure the response is friendly, consistent and persuasive towards the customers- even in heated situations.
Final Words
When it comes to finding the right customer service team for your business, don’t hesitate to use the resources available to you, as a virtual receptionist can help build long-term customer satisfaction and improve your support and enquiry pipelines.
