What Is A Telephone Answering Service?

A pleasant telephone manner and excellent communication skills are the only talents needed to start a home-based telephone answering service. Business owners, professionals and sales consultants are all beginning to realize that when they call a business/ consumers want the personalized service of talking to a live person, not a pre-recorded message. During normal business hours, on weekends, during lunch breaks and when nobody is available to take incoming calls, many business owners turn to forward their calls to a telephone answering service.

Telephone answering services include: answering incoming calls, answering basic customer questions, sending messages and often additional office services, such as sending and receiving faxes and e-mails. Rates are based on the number of services provided to consumers, and standard non-business-hour telephone response rates start at approximately $200 per month. Securing 10 to 15 customers for the service could easily generate revenues of between $3,000 and $5,000 per month.

It is important to distinguish between those replying services that provide consistent quality and those that do not in the concept of telephone answering service. Within the telecommunications industry, wireless, paging and voice mail services providers have achieved a generally consistent high level of quality as their products are machine-driven without the moment-to-moment human feedback element which is the essence of any telephone answering service.

Thus, the quality of service answering by telephone varies greatly due to the human call-processing factor, even between two answering services literally across the street from one another. The telephone answering service, which offers a superior level of quality, is able to do so because of the attention of management:

• a long-term, career-oriented staff with each individual paid in accordance with his or her own personal performance
• technologically advanced equipment
• precise and consistent operating procedures that include:
• rigorous documentation
• moment-to-moment process monitoring
• intensive staff training and performance measurement, and
• stand-alone customer service/quality assurance departments.

Call Center

A call center is an office set up to handle large volumes of telephone calls, especially for order taking and telemarketing. They gather several instructions and, in the form of a blast, send the information to the client; that is to deliver all the information at once.

Note: There is an obvious difference between a telephone answering service and a call centre. An answering service can provide a personal and intimate experience that your company needs. There are also several advantages of having an answering service, including details below:

Extending office hours

• Ridding your office of menial tasks
• Elevating internal work load
• And reducing the number of calls missed by your business