The Pros And Cons Of Hiring An Answering Service

Top 4 Reasons Why You Should Hire a Call Answering Service

Pro #1: To Expand Hours 

While few businesses are open 24 hours a day, customers increasingly want access beyond the typical 8-to-5, Monday-through-Friday business hours. While organizations can hire in-house employees to work after working hours, weekends, and holidays to meet their callers' needs, this is rarely a cost-effective approach, amounting to tens of thousands of dollars a month in additional pay, operational, and overhead costs.

Instead, wise business managers outsource their after-hour calls to the venerable answering service to provide their clients and prospects with 24/7 connectivity.

Pro #2: To Save Money

Hiring a telephone receptionist or customer service agent to manage telephone calls from customers and prospects costs money. Hiring only one employee, who will work at most forty hours a week, costs a few thousand dollars a month and more if you are factoring the cost of management, infrastructure needs and overhead expenses.

Alternatively, you can employ a call answering service to handle your phone calls 24/7 for a tiny percentage of the expense of one full time equivalent (FTE). That's the coverage at a small fraction of the price, many times.

Pro #3: To Improve Quality

The goal of perfection is trumpeted by many companies and organisations. We want perfection in everything they do. It means that they trust the service they get at any opportunity. The delivery of quality communications at first point of contact, the telephone, is of paramount importance.

Call answering services do one thing. They respond to phone calls. Deliver quality interactions and attract callers. It makes communications on every phone call, every day with  high quality.

Pro #4: To Offer Consistency

Quality is a companion to consistency. If people call a company they expect from one call to the next to have a consistent experience. The time they dial, they expect their call getting the same treatment. They want cohesiveness.

The fact is most people perceive service of higher quality when experiencing consistency from one call to the next. Not only do call answering services excel in providing quality telephone services, but they also focus on consistent interactions. It's what they do, that's what they're training for, and that's what they're doing.

Top 4 Reasons Why You Should Not Hire a Call Answering Service

Con #1: To Replace an In-House Employee

An in-house telephone receptionist knows the manager has hurried out to make an urgent meeting, but this is not communicated to the answering service— unless somebody is trying to remind them. Answering service personnel do their job extremely well, but it is not fair to expect them to receive divine knowledge that nobody ever told them. To believe that they can do that is a fast road to disappointment.

Con #2: To Have a Virtual Assistant

If you really need a remote assistant's full functionality then you can hire a virtual assistant. If your focus is on telephone communications, though, the ideal solution is a virtual receptionist from your call answering service.

Con #3: To Micromanage Phone Interactions

"Management by walking around" is a default management style for many managers. With this approach they see something happening in the office and they manage it. When problems arise, they fix problems. We know and can address problems because they are physically present to see what happened. Often critics call it micromanagement.

They also use this approach to manage the receptionist by telephone, often micromanaging them on every phone call. Nevertheless, you can't micromanage them when you employ a call answering service to handle your phone calls; it doesn't work out. Instead, you let them know what you expect — assuming your expectations are realistic— and then let them deliver the professional service they 're specifically trained to provide.

Con #4: To Have a Subject Matter Expert

If you need an expert on the subject to deal with unique situations but don't get many calls, it is best to hire and train someone in-house to deal with this.

Answering systems can handle comprehensive telephone contact situations when those types of calls are often received. The answering services can also manage them for businesses that receive infrequent, simple calls. But what is unreasonable is to expect a response service to provide comprehensive coverage for a type of call that comes in rarely.