Who Is Answering Your Phone? Don’t Lose Potential Customers To Voicemail
Communicating with your customer effectively and efficiently is paramount to a successful business. We are taught early on in our careers that customer service is important. Remote reception can help you take your customer service to the next level. Here’s how:
FIRST POINT OF CONTACT
In many businesses, the reception person is also an administrative person who has other tasks to complete in the run of a day. Oftentimes, calls are sent to voicemail due to the workload of the administrative person or receptionist answering your phone.
A receptionist is the first point of contact when a potential or existing customer calls your business. Your receptionist (or whoever you have answering your phone) represents your company the moment your phone call is answered. Now, the question is can this person help you convert a new phone call to a new customer? You bet!
THE COST OF A NEW CUSTOMER
What any good business needs to do is figure out what it costs you to acquire a new customer. This is the amount you pay for advertising and marketing. Also add in salaries for outside and inside sales staff along the expenses such as travel related to those people. This starts to become a pretty big number!
The next exercise to go through is how many prospects or potential customers do you or your staff need to communicate with to close a sale? You now have the cost per contact or interview of a potential customer. This cost is most likely in the hundreds of dollars per customer.
HOW DOES VOICEMAIL IMPACT YOUR BUSINESS?
Why do so many businesses continue to use voicemail or an automated phone attendant knowing that 80 % of first time callers to their business hang up and move on to call your competitor?
There are several options depending on the size and the make up of your business. If your business is big enough to have a full time reception person go for it. Train that individual on how best to handle product inquires prior to patching the call to the appropriate individual. If your company is not big enough for a full time person there are a number of ways to go that may surprise you how cost effective they are.
If you are going to keep it internal, have the customer service department become your reception. If you’re a small and growing business, many of your calls are probably going to voicemail. Do you know how many hang-ups you are getting? Do you know how many calls are going to voicemail? These are important numbers and can help you determine if you need to invest in a call answering service.
PHONE RECEPTION ANSWERING SERVICE
The following is a suggestion that is extremely cost-effective and puts a human voice to the phone call. Yes, consider employing a call centre to do your phone reception.
The buzz words are Remote Reception or Virtual Office Reception. The caller never knows. A point of caution is many call centers have different levels of technology when it comes to call handling. The level of detail stored on the server regarding your company is critical.
The other important part when hiring a remote reception company is do they have enough people power to handle multiple calls inbound and outbound? Remote Reception is a fantastic idea for regional companies that may have three or four employees in each of multiple locations. Remote Reception can be the receptionist for all offices and help you focus on your business!
HOW DOES REMOTE RECEPTION WORK?
Remote reception is easy to set up! Your main office line is forwarded to the remote reception centre – in our case Answer 365. The phone line is routed through a server which identifies who the call is for and that information pops on the call centre agent’s screen. The phone is answered as if the agent is in your office.
Now if your call centre supplier has provided you with good communication planning on your company details they should have the names telephone numbers (with local) and the department of all your employees in the system.
The call centre reception agent just puts the call through once the person or department can be identified. The time to patch a call is between 16 and 20 seconds.
In addition to having all your phone calls answered by a live agent, all calls are also voice recorded in the event of a misunderstanding.
Do you have questions about Answer 365 and how our remote reception works? Get in touch today.