How to Use Your Small Business Answering Service to Convert Leads
One of the biggest benefits to businesses from using an answering service is an increase in leads and customer inquiries being converted into sales. A business answering service does more than just take messages outside of office hours. The services live answering providers render are an important part in many businesses’ ability to convert leads. Here’s how working with an answering service can help improve your business sales.
Never Miss a Call
One of the biggest sources of missed sales and dead leads is when businesses are not able to respond to potential customers’ calls fast enough. Every potential customer has a limited amount of time during which they maintain interest in actively pursuing a business’s services and, for many, that timeframe can be surprisingly short. Consumers expect quick responses to their inquiries. Yet, many calls to businesses go unanswered or are routed to voicemails. When this happens, the chance of converting a call to a sale can decrease dramatically.
When businesses work with an answering service, they never have to worry about this problem again. Phone staff can be made available as many hours of the day as needed, and customers will always find someone there to take their calls as quickly as possible.
Improve Customer Service
Having people there to answer customers’ calls is not the only thing it takes to reliably transform inquiries into sales. Businesses also need to be able to provide a high level of customer service to potential customers when they make contact. That means having phone staff members who are polite, knowledgeable, and responsive to customers’ concerns.
Finding people who meet all of these criteria is not an easy task, and many businesses find they do not have the resources to do it. As such, they either go without the necessary number of staff answering the phones or end up hiring people who may not have the necessary skills or training just to make sure they have people answering the phones.
Hiring an answering service relieves businesses of the burden of having to find phone staff with the necessary customer service skills and lets them focus on their areas of business instead. A business answering service’s one and only focus is hiring and training the best phone staff possible and then putting those employees to work to help businesses like yours.
Save Money
For many businesses, hiring their own phone staff can be prohibitively expensive. Even a single full-time secretary or administrative assistant can be a huge financial burden. By working with an answering service, businesses do not have to devote resources to hiring more staff, letting them focus instead on hiring and keeping a staff that does the work that brings the money in.
Want to learn more about the benefits of hiring an answering service? AnswerMTI works with businesses big and small to provide them with the highest-quality answering and call center services possible. Contact us today at 800-673-2000 to learn more.