Monday, May 10, 2010

Use Call Center services to Your Advantage

Whether you take orders over the phone or you take many customer service calls, an inbound call center can improve your business operations. A telephone answering service is ideal for the company that deals with many calls per day to order products and services. That can easily be outsourced to another organization and save time within the business itself. But even things like general customer service calls, complaints and inquiries can be handled by a properly trained inbound call center.

Why Hire a Telephone Answering Service?

First of all, hiring a telephone answering service means that people within your organization no longer have to field customer inquiries, complaints and orders. These are things that can typically be handled by call centers with no or few problems. It’s your responsibility to educate the organization and give them all the information they need to handle customers’ calls. But once that’s done, people within your business will be freed up to do their jobs rather than have to deal with multiple phone calls per day.

And not only will that free up your employees, you’ll be giving your customers better customer service in general. An inbound call center organization is designed to give customer service. That’s what they do as a business model, so your customers will be getting people on the other end of the phone who truly want to help them. They won’t be getting your employees who might be better at things like IT or sales when they actually have a complaint or customer service question.

Use an Inbound Call Center to Increase Profits

An inbound call center is one great way to make sure your customers are taken care of. They won’t get an employee who’s in a hurry because he’s in the middle of making a presentation, and they won’t get one who’s not experienced in taking orders or who maybe doesn’t know too much about a new product. That means customers will get the information they need without feeling rushed or as if they’re talking to someone who would rather be doing something else.

As long as the telephone answering service has been given enough information to do their jobs, your customer satisfaction will probably increase a great deal. That means you’ll have happier customers who will come back time and time again.

But you can also use the telephone answering service to increase sales in other ways. Without a hard sell, the inbound call center employees can be trained to offer certain specials, packages or deals to each caller at the end of the call. They can be trained to take orders and try to upsell each one to a bigger and better product or package. And because the telephone answering service has skilled telephone operators, you’re going to be getting people who have probably done this many times before. That experience can help increase sales for your company.

When you go to hire a telephone answering service, ask about things like their sales experience and the different types of calls they’re used to fielding so that you can get the company that’s right for you.