When should a company consider hiring an outsourced call center service? Many companies are leery to send their customer service to a third party, rather than handling customer complaints and contacts in-house. But, by not hiring a dedicated answering service to handle your customer service, you might be costing your business money and customers.
Are You Making the Right First Impression?
It’s an old truism in business that first impressions matter. A potential customer’s initial response encounter with your company and its employees is going to have a big impact on how they look at your business, and whether or not they even want to do business with you. That’s why it’s important to make sure that the first impression your company gives off is one that makes it appear knowledgeable, polite, and easy to work with.
For many businesses, this means spending lots of time coaching receptionists and customer service personnel on how to answer the phone. But, what many businesses forget is that the first impression often comes before anyone answers the phone. If potential customers find your website difficult to navigate, or barely functional, or are met with busy signals and disconnections, or unclear or complicated voice message systems when they call your office, they will have a negative first impression of your business before they ever speak with a human being who represents it. If they find making contact too much of a hassle, they’re likely to give up on doing business with you before you even know you’ve just lost a potential client.
Is Your Business Able to Respond in a Timely Manner?
One of the tasks that many small businesses find to be the most difficult is finding the time to respond to all of their customers in a timely manner. Businesses that have many clients but only a few employees often have to juggle many customer inquiries and complaints at once, forcing them to prioritize which ones they think need the fastest response, while momentarily setting others aside. While learning to prioritize is an important skill in business, not having the capacity to respond to clients and potential customers quickly and efficiently can cost a company money and damage its reputation. Customers expect to get responses to their inquiries sooner rather than later, and, if your business has a constant backlog of responses that it’s struggling to get out, then it’s not meeting its responsibility to its customers.
Does Your Customer Service Make Your Clients Feel Like They Matter?
When a customer contacts a business, they don’t want to feel like they are just a number; they want to feel like they matter. That means they expect attentive service, quick responses to their questions and concerns, and being given the correct information. If your company isn’t committing the resources necessary to make sure that all of its customers get those things, then its substandard customer service is probably costing it clients. Customers want to feel like the companies they do business with care about them and their service.
Creating and maintaining a high level of customer service is no easy task, especially for small businesses that have limited resources. If your business is struggling to maintain the level of service and attention that it knows its customers deserve, hiring an answering service can help. A professional call center service can provide your business’s clients with a high level of customer service, while taking the pressure to perform off of your business, allowing it to focus on other areas of its operations and save money on employees and training.
For more information on how Signius Communication can help improve your small business customer service, contact us today at 800-295-7000.