A growing business is an exciting time of new customers, revenue, and opportunities. But scaling a business also comes with new challenges.
While business expansion is amazing, it also means that it’s harder to dedicate the same amount of care to customers. A scaling business receives a higher volume of customer inquiries that can be hard to tackle when other parts of the company need to be tended to.
Maintaining a high-quality customer experience becomes a common pain point for many growing businesses.
Not addressing these growing pains can hold a brand back from scaling and result in negative customer experiences. An excellent way to combat this is to outsource your customer care to those who can dedicate their full attention to giving your customers a great experience. This is where an answering service can help.
Implementing an answering service can help address these pain points and allow your business to grow even further.
What Is An Answering Service?
An answering service handles any customer inquiries to your business for you. This can be via answering your business phone line or handling customer inquiries on other platforms such as email or chat. Answering services ensure your customers reach a live human who positively represents your company to help resolve any issues promptly and efficiently.
How Can It Help Your Business?
For an elevated customer experience, you can go a step further than an answering service and get a virtual receptionist. Virtual receptionists not only help handle customer inquiries, but they can also handle other admin tasks to help free time up for you and your staff. At Smiledog, our virtual receptionists embody the tone and personality of a brand to become an extension of the business and give customers an authentic brand experience.
When An Answering Service Is The Solution For Your Brand
Outsourced answering services are great for businesses looking to improve customer service and communication and ease some growing pains startups experience. The most obvious question is when does the benefit outweigh the cost? Luckily, several key indicators can help determine the answer:
1. You begin experiencing a higher volume of inquiries
Increasing business opportunities will cause it to become nearly impossible to keep up with every single phone call coming in, which (ironically enough) could actually lead to more missed opportunities.
It’s difficult for business owners and employees to manage all aspects of a growing business while caring for their customers. When a business misses customer calls over an extended time, it can damage its bottom line.
You may not be surprised to learn that 75% of callers hang up when they get a voicemail. Even worse is that 85% of those callers never call back. You can lose a substantial amount of revenue and damage your reputation.
Answering services can help address these pain points and allow your business to grow even further by ensuring calls are not missed and customer waiting times are kept at a minimum.
2. You want to level up your business productivity
Maintaining a high level of productivity is essential if you want to keep scaling your business. By increasing productivity levels, you can generate higher profits without adding too many more employees. In competitive markets, this increases the likelihood of long-term success.
With an answering service, you can be sure your customers are being taken care of so that you can concentrate on other aspects of your business that are more or equally as important.
You can even go a step further and hire a virtual receptionist who can handle tasks other than answering phone calls, such as scheduling appointments.
3. You need support on a budget
As businesses grow, their first instinct can be to hire more employees for support, but this can get quite expensive. Most businesses’ largest expense is labor, with payroll averaging 70% of all expenses.
Hiring an outside solution, like an answering service or virtual receptionist, is a great way to resolve your business needs at a lower cost than hiring more in-house staff.
4. You’re experiencing a decrease in customer satisfaction
When you’re considering purchasing a product or service, do you read the reviews first? You’ve probably come across a review that said something like: “3/10… I was really interested in the service this brand offered, but the customer service was HORRIBLE!!! I called twice, and nobody answered, and the third time I called, I was on hold for over 30 mins! Never again.”
People tend to feel a lot less attracted to a company after reading such a review. In fact, 65% of customers said they had changed to a different brand because of a poor experience.
When you’re on the other side as a business owner, you may not even be aware of customer satisfaction issues because you feel like you’re working your butt off and getting everything done. But unresolved negative customer satisfaction is a major pain point that will lead your business down a very narrow path with little chance for success.
An answering service can alleviate poor customer satisfaction by never missing a call, answering all questions, maintaining the ‘customer is always right’ attitude, and using a positive tone when speaking with them.
Wrap-up
Now that you know how an answering service can assist you and your business, the next step is to find the right service.
Smiledog’s professional virtual receptionists ensure you don’t miss calls and help increase revenue opportunities. You can count on us to leave your customers with a lasting impression, provide your customers with fully informed instructions, answer all questions, and go above and beyond for your customers.