What Can an Answering Service Do For My Business?

As your business grows, however, it’s not possible to be on call 24/7; it’s not really possible even if you’re a single-member business. If you and your key employees spend all your time fielding customer calls, you won’t be able to actually do the work or run the business.

Too many business owners know the feeling that can come with being strapped to your phone in case an important client or vendor or even an employee calls. You worry that missing a customer call could mean missing their business, and you know the importance of handling everything quickly as soon as it pops up.

That’s where answering services come in. High quality, US-based answering services can help your business in a number of ways, giving you a little more breathing room while offering multiple distinct benefits. In this post, we’ll go over the most advantageous benefits that services like ours offer and how they can impact your business.

Guaranteed Great First Impressions

Answering services like PATLive use experienced agents who will greet customers exactly how your business prefers, guaranteeing a fantastic first, second, or third impression.

Having a warm, knowledgeable agent fielding your calls will show that your business is established enough and committed enough to your customers to have help on hand to take great care of them. This can give a big boost in credibility and trustability, and it will make you look professional.

Consistent Message-Taking

If the answering service can’t resolve customer questions or complaints for any reason, or if they just have to pass along information to you, they offer diligent message-taking services. Here at PATLive, this is something that our clients appreciate, as we’ll immediately pass along any urgent messages to the people who need to see them.

Fast Appointment Scheduling

Hiring a full time receptionist can be expensive and may be out of budget for a large number of businesses; an answering service is the best and only stand-in for an in-person receptionist that you need.

PATLive agents can actually handle appointment scheduling for you, as long as they have access to your schedule and your preferences. They can take in customer calls at 2AM, get them on the books for a Thursday meeting with you, but still ensure that your afternoon is blocked off from calls so you can enjoy the company party that evening.

Reliable Lead Collection

You work hard to generate leads, and may even have multiple sales funnels set up online and in person to get people reaching out to express interest in doing business with you. The last thing you want is for those efforts to be squandered because you aren’t available to answer the phone when those leads come knocking.

Answering services like PATLive are available 24/7, 365 days a year so you never have to worry about missing a call from a lead. Our agents are also well-trained to take lead information and answer their initial questions or concerns before passing them along to you.

Streamlined Event Registration

When you’re hosting an event, everything can get real crazy real fast. Trying to field the increase in questions, the event registrations, and your typical workload could send things spinning out of control without the right systems in place.

High-tier answering services will have you covered here, handling all event registration tasks at hand. We can accept entire event registrations or applications over the phone, even processing payments so that you don’t have to. If you’ve ever had to ask customers for a credit card and listen to them rummage through their home to find it for five minutes, you’ll understand what an incredible time saver this will be. Let us take this off your hands while you focus on preparing and hosting the event.

Call Overflow & Transfer Abilities  

Are all your in-office lines tied up even when you’re actually in office and taking calls? The thought of losing a potential sale by missing a call when you’re actively answering that phone at rapid-fire paces can be almost unbearable, so you need to consider call overflow options.

Sure, the customer could leave a voicemail, but the last thing you need is to get behind on client calls and voicemails, which can sometimes start piling in faster than you can catch up, sending you on an unpleasant spiral that’s hard to come out from.

If you’re tied up, answering services offer call overflow, ensuring that every call is answered in a prompt manner. Those 24/7 hours really come into play here, and ensure that you never walk into the office with fifty voicemails to start your day off in a chaotic way.

If the call must be directed to you, the answering service agent can either take a message and bring it to your attention immediately, or transfer the call directly to you. This tells the customer that they are a priority, and that while you’re tied up now, you’ll be with them soon.

Conclusion

As your business grows, it’s impossible to do everything yourself, and if you try, you won’t be able to do anything well because your attention will be too divided.

Answering services will take an enormous burden off your shoulders, allowing you to focus on running the business you love while expert, enthusiastic agents handle some of the incoming calls that could disrupt your day otherwise. With so many distinct advantages available with the right service, there’s no reason not to invest.

Interested in learning more about how PATLive can help you advance your business and improve customer relationships? Try it free for 14 days here.

Source: https://www.patlive.com/blog/what-can-an-answering-service-do-for-my-business/

2023 Buyers Guide

Get Listed

Speech Technology

 

1.)

Premium Listing Call Center Studio Call Center Studio Call Center Studio is the world’s first call center built on Google and is one of the most secure and stable systems with some of the industry’s best reporting. It is one of the most full-featured enterprise grade systems (with the most calling features, one of the best call distribution, outbound dialing features and integrations—including IVR, AI Speech Recognition, blended inbound/outbound calling and includes Google’s new Dialogflow and Speech API. Call Center Studio is the absolute easiest to use (with a 10 minute setup), and is the price performance leader with lower equipment cost and less setup time.

2.)

Aculab VoiSentry VoiSentry is a voice biometric engine for speaker verification / identification. It is delivered as a virtual instance to be controlled by an application via APIs and can be deployed in whatever is the most appropriate environment i.e. public cloud, private cloud or on-premise. It is generally deployed as a white-label or OEM product, whereby Aculab’s partner integrates it into their own solution/platform and offers it as an integral part of their service. Unless they go public with it, none of their clients would even know that it was Aculab’s VoiSentry engine under the hood. As with any biometric speaker verification system, VoiSentry is language and dialect independent.

3.)

Agara Agara is an autonomous virtual voice agent powered by Real-time Voice AI. It is designed to have intelligent conversations with your customers, vendors, and partners without any assistance from human agents. It can handle a wide variety of calls including inbound customer care calls, outbound lead generation calls, appointment scheduling calls, and overdue payment recovery calls. Agara is available for several industries including banking, insurance, retail, e-commerce, airlines, and telecom. Powered by advanced Real-time Voice AI that understands speech in real-time, automatically determines the right process to follow and guides the caller along in the process with natural conversation.

4.)

Call Tracking Metrics Execute automated actions based on words spoken by your customer. Our intelligent word detection and transcription tools make it easier for you to decipher the content of your customer conversations and automate action based on those insights. Transform the audio of your calls into speaker-organized scripts so you can easily search your call log for specific words from a conversation, or automatically detect when words of intent are spoken by your customer. Listen in on and highlight common patterns in order to execute triggers to initiate a new action or workflow, such as emailing a manager if the word “cancel” is spoken on a call. You can also set up to automatically redact content from a transcript, such as sensitive health information transmitted on a call.

5.)

Daisee Daisee Daisee builds technology that empowers people to solve problems by making interactions simple and smart so they can have a more significant impact, be more productive and be better at what they do. We believe incremental improvements carry huge potency and provide exponentially greater change for the better. Genesys customers can now automate risk and quality management using Daisee’s speech and sentiment analytics and remediation workflow software. Daisee helps improve customer experience, ensure regulatory compliance, identify missed commercial opportunities & training requirements as well as provide valuable insights back to the business directly from the frontline – the true voice-of-... (read more)Daisee builds technology that empowers people to solve problems by making interactions simple and smart so they can have a more significant impact, be more productive and be better at what they do. We believe incremental improvements carry huge potency and provide exponentially greater change for the better. Genesys customers can now automate risk and quality management using Daisee’s speech and sentiment analytics and remediation workflow software. Daisee helps improve customer experience, ensure regulatory compliance, identify missed commercial opportunities & training requirements as well as provide valuable insights back to the business directly from the frontline – the true voice-of-the-customer. Unlike legacy speech analytics providers that simply transcribe audio to text and use ‘word spotting’ (i.e building a database of synonyms for every use case - ‘angry’ and ‘manager’ as well as ‘upset’ and ‘supervisor’ and simply spotting for those words), the engine has proprietary use of its sentiment language – a University innovation developed at Daisee, resulting in far more accurate transcription, enabling derivation of the context of a conversation. The Programmable Scorecard™ scores every call, and automatically activates a workflow for low-scoring, high-risk calls in near-real-time so they can be immediately reviewed and remediated. As the solution is pre-trained out of the box, deployment is a matter of weeks, not months and there is no setup or professional services fees – just a straightforward SaaS based pricing model. Ensure 100% of your phone interactions are not only monitored but also analyzed and scored with high-risk calls triaged for fast review and remediation.

6.)

Eckoh EckohASSIST Advanced speech recognition and natural language expertise that routes callers by simply asking ‘how can I help you?’. It allows customers to use their own words to ask for what they want and steers them to the right place. Menus are eliminated altogether and contact centres can use a single inbound telephone number.

7.)	MattsenKumar LLC SmartSpeech SmartSpeech – The Best In Class Speech Analytics Software An all-inclusive speech analytics application that enables you to visualize your audio using state-of-the-art speech recognition, transcription, and text analytics technologies.

8.)

Medallia V-Blaze Speech to Text Our GPU-accelerated, AI-based technology enables you to deliver greater insights to the contact center by transcribing audio into analyzable text. - Transcribe large volumes of recorded audio quickly - Integrate transcripts with your analytics or business intelligence platform - Reduce your hardware footprint and minimize total cost of ownership

9.)

Nemesysco InTone Suite - Emotion Detection via Voice Analysis InTone™ is a voice analysis tool geared to detect genuine emotional and cognitive reactions regardless of the speaker’s language or chosen intonation. It integrates into existing contact center environments and provides realtime indications of both client and agent emotional reactions throughout all ongoing calls. This unique set of indications assists managers and call center representatives to truly understand the client, improve call center performance, easily detect angry calls, elevate training efficiency and provide a tailored customer experience in every single call. Nemesysco's contact center technology is also available in API and SDK forms. Please visit our website for information about our product portfolio.

10.)

Voxjar Voxjar Voxjar is your one-stop-shop for driving better phone calls with your customers. We're a modern Conversation Analytics and Call Coaching Platform. - Custom Charts and Dashboards give you the freedom to analyze calls from the highest level down to the details of each conversation. - AI-Powered Speech Analytics transcribes, searches, and analyzes your reps' phone conversations, at scale. - Quality Assurance and Call Coaching tools let you evaluate and improve agent performance with a human touch. - Long term recording storage for historical analysis All of these together provide the holistic, easy-to-use software that you need to manage a modern call team and create better con... (read more)Voxjar is your one-stop-shop for driving better phone calls with your customers. We're a modern Conversation Analytics and Call Coaching Platform. - Custom Charts and Dashboards give you the freedom to analyze calls from the highest level down to the details of each conversation. - AI-Powered Speech Analytics transcribes, searches, and analyzes your reps' phone conversations, at scale. - Quality Assurance and Call Coaching tools let you evaluate and improve agent performance with a human touch. - Long term recording storage for historical analysis All of these together provide the holistic, easy-to-use software that you need to manage a modern call team and create better conversations with your customers. Voxjar brings value across all departments to improve Sales, Marketing, Customer Care, Collections, Compliance, and even your Product Team. Deep insights into each customer conversation will invigorate every corner of your business. Start today with a free 14-day trial

 

View more from PATLive

Recent Blog Posts:

Can Your Small Business Afford A Call Answering Service?	July 15, 2020
7 Things Every Virtual Office Needs	June 23, 2020
10 Things Every Virtual Office Needs	June 23, 2020
10 Answering Service Posts Every Small Business Should Read	June 2, 2020
How to Personalize Customer Service as a Small Business	April 29, 2020
9 Stress Management Tips for Business Owners & Team Leaders	April 21, 2020
Who’s Answering Your Phones During COVID-19?	April 8, 2020
Small Business Tips: Guide to Working from Home	April 1, 2020
How Technology is Changing Customer Service	March 18, 2020
6 Simple Ways to Create a Lifetime Customer Base	February 19, 2020