A telephone answering service is a company that specializes in taking phone calls for other organizations. There are thousands of answering service companies across the world, and they come in a variety of shapes and sizes. When choosing an answering service, companies often wonder what qualities are likely to make that service perform better than others. This article will help you understand what to look for. Experience In the world of answering services, experience can be a good or bad thing. Some experienced companies are stuck in their ways, using outdated technology that limits what they can do for their customers. If a company hasn’t evolved, their experience isn’t that valuable. Since we’ll be addressing technology and capabilities later, here we’ll assume that experience is a positive thing. If a company has been in business for awhile, it shows they’ve been doing something right (like taking care of their customers). When hiring an answering service, it’s worth checking into their company history and getting a feel for how successful they have been in the industry. Training and Quality Assurance People are at the heart of every successful live operator answering company. After all, it’s the people that answer the calls, interact with customers, and ultimately determine whether the service is worth the money or not. Good answering services pay their operators more and have an ongoing training and quality assurance program that ensures their employees are performing at a level customers expect. A successful phone answering service will be able to explain their recruiting, training, and quality assurance processes and talk quite a bit about what makes their personnel special. Technology and Capabilities With all the advances in communication and technology, it’s of vital importance that your answering service keep up and provide the capabilities necessary to support your operation. Today, a good answering service is a company more in line with a call center than a basic message taking service. Since answering service companies historically just took messages and relayed them on to the client, there are some services that still only provide that service. However, if you need a company that can interact with your website, customer database, calendar, etc. - a basic live answering company won’t cut it. Conclusion By examining an answering services experience, training processes, quality assurance guidelines, and technological capabilities, you’ll be able to find a quality company that you can trust with your calls and your customers. answering service
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