How Answering Service Came to Life

For the remaining days of her life, someone bedridden had a simple idea that turned into a legacy for her children, a business for some people, and a worthy service for the rest of the world.

In 1923, a bedridden woman named Margaret Smith realized she could still make money by taking calls for busy doctors from her bed. She might not be able to move much but she can still talk and use her mind. From there, she started her own company, Mrs. Smith’s Doctor’s Exchange. The company was under her supervision for two years, until her death. Seeing the feasibility of the business, her children took over the business, and opened it up to a wider scope of commercial clients in 1933. The company continued to succeed and eventually, in 1955, they moved their business from their home to an office block downtown. In 1980, they made use of a computerized system for their operations.

This was the start of an answering service founded by a single proprietor, representing the the number of professionals who work from their homes, making use of their own technologies to offer the service to clienteles.

On the other hand, call centers offering answering services also have their own roots. Its history goes back to 1969, many years after the birth of the answering service. The company 1-800 We Answer started similarly to Mrs. Smith’s Doctor’s Exchange, operating from a residential apartment. With the efforts of its founders, the company grew; in 1992, Robert Porter, the son of co-founder Bob Sickinger, took over the operations of the company. The company focused on businessmen and medical professionals as their clients.

How about the technology they made use of a computerized system for their operations answering service? These tools have provided a solution for the problem of unanswered phone calls. They have dominated offices and households for years, even when the presence of the answering service already becomes prominent. People have opted to use these technologies rather than acquiring the service, since it’s more affordable for the people.

The following are forms of the earliest answering machines:

Telegraphone – invented by Valdemar Poulsen, a Danish inventor, in the year 1900. It was a magnetic device, which stores the sound on a thin piece of wire. The wire would then be replayed on Polsen’s machine, where the original audio could be heard. After a few years, he updated the device to automatically answer the phone before recording the sound.

Telescribe – invented by Thomas Edison in 1914. It was a device that records audio on wax cylinders. It was based on the idea of using the phonograph as a telephone recorder. It was short-lived and the device didn’t succeed.

The First Automatic Answering Machine - German inventor Willy Muller was thought to have created the first answering machine in 1935. It was a fully automated answering device, standing at three feet tall. It served the religious communities of the Jewish Orthodoxy, who were forbidden to answer the phone during Sabbath.

Ansafone – the first answering machine sold in the US was invented by Dr. Kazuo Hashimoto, a prolific inventor in the ’50s. His device hit the market in the 1960s.

Model 400 – this was introduced by PhoneMate in 1971. It weighed 10 pounds and allowed the person to listen to the recorded message in private.

The birth and innovation of two technologies have brought services that provided options with benefits to individuals, depending on their needs.

The answering machine that can record messages, and is most suitable to be used for households, and the answering service that can cater business functions most suitable for offices and busy professionals.

Older Post:

• Is It Time To Have a Virtual Assistant
• Why Add Voice Mail to Your Answering Service?
• When Physicians and Medical Call Centers Don’t Go Well

Is It Time To Have a Virtual Assistant

Are you wondering why your colleague can finish all the tasks and still has time to enjoy a good eight to ten hours of sleep? While here you are, cramming with all your business’ paperwork and emails at the wee hours of the night.

The sound of hiring someone to fill the position of doing administrative tasks like answering your calls, checking the email, accounting, etc., worries you about the expense of letting another person in to your company, tagging along company responsibilities like employee benefits and other needed actions for employee retention.

Worry no more about these issues that keep on nagging your mind. The outsourcing industry has offered yet another solution to your woes.

Virtual assistants, or commonly called as VAs, are the persons in charge to handle the tasks that is covered by the answering service. The VA can be a single person who owns and manages his/her own answering service business or they can be working for a Call Center Outsourcing company.

Most of the VAs work as self-employed individuals who offer services like administrative, technical, creative (social) tasks to professionals who need to gets all the work done. Most of the people who avail of the VA services are doctors, lawyers, businessmen, and other high-ranking people who need secretarial services, yet don’t want to hire a person literally.

VAs can also come from call center outsourcing companies which offer virtual assistance services to various clients—from individual professionals to small businesses. Outsourcing companies can assign one or a group of VAs to do the specific tasks that need to be done by the client.

There are an estimated 25,000 virtual assistants worldwide, an indication that it is a growing profession in centralized economies where high attrition staffing practices is rampant.

Hiring the service of a VA is one strategic move for any individual or business. VAs does not make their clients responsible for any employee-related taxes and any insurance and benefits. Clients are also saved from adding spared office space, equipment and supply. The only expense clients have to shoulder is the direct payment for the service, either to a single VA or multi-VAs.

But it should be remembered that self-employed virtual assistants are not employees but business owners; thus, they gauge their own rate and formulate their own standards and policies, pay their own employment taxes and control the management of his/her work flow.

VAs from Call Center outsourcing companies are managed and directed on what they have to work on. They are paid by the call center company they are working for. Thus, bear in mind that you are not their direct boss, but you are one of their customers.

The common modes of communication and data delivery are the Internet, e-mail, phone call conferences, online work space and fax machines. VAs in this business works in a contractual basis; thus, cooperation between the client and the VA is significant.

Many of the VAs specialize in tasks, that is why most of them are also called Virtual Specialists. Most common tasks that would be specialized by VAs include Marketing, Web Design and Programming, Social Media, Bookkeeping, Reception, sales and management. But besides these, most VAs can provide across-the-board administrative work.

Whether you are a professional that needs general secretarial services or a business owner who also needs to accomplish all the administrative tasks, the VA/VAs needed would depend on the volume, type and the variety of work that needs to be done.

VA services mostly come with minimum cost, compared to the expense of hiring an actual person for the job; thus, critics about the service have also surfaced. One common critic is that you get what you paid for. If you availed for an hourly service for only $3 compared to an hourly service of $5, you don’t have the full power to expect the most sophisticated work delivered to you.

Also, since VAs usually come from different time zones, challenges in communication and maintaining the contact is also questioned. Many have experienced disruption of service from VAs coming from three time zones away, so how much more for those from ten time zones away? There’s no need to worry that much about this. Many of these VAs offer free trial periods for you to try and evaluate their service.

In conclusion, the pros and cons of acquiring virtual assistance services are always present. After all, not all things are good enough. In the end, you are the one who’ll decide whether or not hiring a VA is a must for you and your business. Just weigh the pros and cons and your needs, and you can come up with the answer anytime soon.

Older Post:

• Why Add Voice Mail to Your Answering Service?
• When Physicians and Medical Call Centers Don’t Go Well
• Answering Calls for a Difference

Doctors Answering Service: A Useful Device In Modern Times

With the stupendous increase in the volume of calls, doctors answering services are also seeing an increase in demand, becoming almost a necessity for medical practitioners, physicians, and doctors.  As their aim is to provide the best possible service to their patients, this service helps in reducing their burden.

All they need to do is sit back and relax and their work will be done by the answering service company. This service It can be customized according the services offered by the doctors. Ideally, it helps in scheduling and rescheduling an appointment, taking messages, confirming the visiting time of the doctor, asking for reports, and many other such myriad tasks.

That is not all, apart from setting up appointments; the services also remind the patients of the same. The doctors answering service are mostly effective where there are a large number of departments and numerous physicians working within these departments. It helps in easily transferring calls to the concerned departments.

With a system like this, proper communication between the doctor and patient can be maintained. If the doctor is unavailable at the moment, the service records the patient's message so that the physician can access it anytime they want. As per statistics, patients would rather listen to an interactive voice program on the doctors answering service instead of a dial tone or voice mail recording.

Keeping an answering machine in any clinic or hospital is more affordable than appointing two or three persons at the reception to answer phone calls. The service is quite reasonable and works 24*7. 

Lastly, it does not require any monetary maintenance, does not involve any bonuses or increments, and works in just the same way. So, a doctors answering service helps in reducing doctors’ burden with just a minimum one-time investment.

How To Find Reliable Medical Answering Services

Medical answering services are a great help to independently practicing physicians and small or medium healthcare firms. A doctor answering service allows doctors to do what they like or know best – treating illnesses and offering medical consultation to patients.

Bridging the Communication Gap

Good communication is nearly as vital as medical know-how for the success of a physician or hospital. That is where medical answering services come handy.

Selecting an Answering Company

There is no dearth of answering services in the country. On the internet, they are aplenty. But if you do not choose a reputable and reliable doctor answering service, chances are you will regret the decision sooner rather than later.

The following are some factors to consider when choosing a healthcare answering company:

• Experience
• Professionalism
• Use of technology

Experience

Greater the experience, better will be the doctor answering service. Never choose a company that has been in existence only for a few years. There are companies that have been providing a stellar service for decades.

Professionalism

Never settle for anything less than the service of the best call executives. In this era of global outsourcing, it is important to know with whom your patients will be talking to when they call you. Make sure that the executives are thoroughly professional and sufficiently experienced.

Use of Technology

The best medical answering services use sophisticated technologies, which include:

• Reliable battery back-up
• Latest telephone and call diverting technologies
• A communication system that comprises text messaging, pager, fax, and emails.

Keeping these pointers in mind will ensure you hire the best services for your needs.

Things To Consider When Changing A Professional Answering Service

Physicians and self-employed professionals consider a change of professional answering service company for two reasons:

1. When they are genuinely dissatisfied with the service of their existing telephone answering services,
2. When sales executives from a new call answering business approach them.

In both the cases, it is worthwhile to consider the option of changing the existing call answering service. If one gets better service at the same cost, it would be foolish to not accept it.

But where is the guarantee that the new service will be better than the old one? You cannot act just by believing the words of the sales executives of telephone answering services.

As a matter of fact, no one can guarantee that the new service will be better than the old one. And that is why people who are thinking about changing their professional answering service might find this post helpful.

Here are the things one must check when changing an answering service.

Reasons

If a physician is happy with the existing healthcare answering service, there is no need to change the service – however persuasive the new sales executives are.

If a physician is genuinely unhappy with the service of existing service, it is time to change the company. Modern companies offer better services and invariably better results.

Personalized service

There are numerous telephone answering services. But only a handful offer personalized services. Patients generally feel calmer when they hear their doctor’s voice and so the greetings can be recorded in the physician’s voice.

A good professional answering service company must also ensure that the clients get the exact details they want in the precise form they prefer.

Why Add Voice Mail to Your Answering Service?

In every business, it is a prime principle to please the customers or clients. Many practices and guidelines have been formulated by business professionals in order to obtain the optimal satisfaction from clients.

Offering a variety of options for customers to consider is one of the many ways for them to be pleased. As we all know, not everyone has the same reaction and attitude towards certain options laid out by a company. Thus, providing a few tabs for clients to use is more suitable than giving a lone choice.

This also applies to voice-based customer service, or how a company responds to the calls of clients. Many companies settle for a voice mail system to answer their clients, leaving the customer's concern/s to course through an automated voice prompt. There are also some companies who have an answering service, where a live operator attends to the needs of the client.

Customers or clients, however, have different preferences. Some of them cringe at the thought of having a talking robot at the other end of the line, while others are not comfortable talking to a stranger and prefer to follow through an automated menu.

How about your company? How are you taking the calls of your clients? Are you sticking to traditional voice mails or providing a live answering service?

Most companies have either the voice mail or an answering service. There is, however, the option of combining the two and thus being able to provide most, if not all, of your clients a satisfying customer service.

The integration of both an answering service and a voice mail platform gives your business, in a way, the best of both worlds. By combining the two, you get to offer your customers more options on how to bring their concerns to you, cut down the cost of live operator time, and communicate with your customers with efficiency.

A term used in an answering service, "live operator time" refers to the length of time a live operator takes a call, which also translates to the cost of the call. Voice mail services, on the other hand, have a fixed cost (e.g., unlimited voice mails for $15 per month).

Aside from the cost-saving benefit that you can get from combining the two types of customer service, here are more reasons why you should make both available to your customers:

• Callers get automated help menus.
• All messages for the voice mail service are available in one place.
• Callers can be transferred to multiple extensions including a live operator in the call center.
• No hardware/software are needed to set up the two services.
• Both toll-free and local numbers can be routed to voice mail services.
• Localization of communication, including fax and voice mail.
• You can check voice mails and faxes any time of the day.
• You can plug in a company jingle, short audio product ad, or music for your customers to listen to while putting them on hold.
• You can receive messages any way you want: e-mail, text, mp3 format.
• You can extend your voice mail services to a live operator 24 hours a day.

Also, here are different ways of setting up voice mail with a live answering service:

• Local or toll-free telephone number.
• Combined messaging for faxes, e-mails, voice mail messages, and live operator messages.
• Long message limits – your callers can then give you a detailed account of their problem or concern.
• Live operator option – your callers can press "0" to speak to a live operator.
• Notification through SMS – you will be notified each time someone reaches your voice mail.
• Caller ID – you can screen your calls and filter which ones can be sent to the voice mail.
• Customized on-hold greeting – You can make the greeting an introduction about your business.

A survey has reflected that 7 out of 10 callers do not leave voice mails. However, this shouldn't discourage you from adding a voice mail to your live answering service. Remember the main benefits of adding voice mail: (1) lessening live operator time and thus increasing the time to accommodate pending calls, (2) filtering calls, that is, determining which ones are in dire need of a live operator and which ones can settle for automated menus. Surely, the benefits outweigh the mentioned statistic.

Having both types of service available for your customers or clients can stretch the capacity of your company to offer dedicated and quality customer service. As pointed out, addressing the concerns of your customers through voice mail and live answering service is very advantageous for your business and for your clients as well.

Older Post:

• When Physicians and Medical Call Centers Don’t Go Well
• Answering Calls for a Difference
• How to Choose the Right Answering Service

Medical Answering Service: How It Affects Doctor-Patient Relations

Before, medical consultations, prescriptions, diagnoses, and the like can only be obtained by personally seeing a doctor. Now, with the rise of the outsourcing industry, the face of doctor-patient relationships has drastically changed.

Physicians used to win the trust of patients by constantly having one-on-one meetings, gaining the latter's loyalty by accommodating regular visits to the clinic to listen to health concerns. However, along with an increasing number of loyal patients comes being swamped with so many responsibilities and medical concerns to attend to. Situations involving life-and-death matters would all come at the same time. In turn, some patients are left unattended, making the number of loyal patients dwindle.

Doctors have to cover their areas of responsibility at all times, may it be after their shift or even on vacations, posing a problem on how to efficiently manage everything in need of their attention.

A solution to the problem came in the form of a medical answering service, a type of service doctors can avail from BPO (business process outsourcing) service providers. This service allows dentists, physicians, veterinarians, surgeons, etc., to channel their patients' calls to an operator (i.e., call center agent, customer service representative, or virtual assistant) should they be unable to take the calls, especially on weekends, holidays, vacations, and after-hours.

The operators are usually selected for having medical backgrounds or above-average familiarization of concepts in medicine. Also, they still undergo continuing training to enhance their ability in understanding and relaying received medical information from/to patients and doctors.

A patient who is unable to reach his/her doctor is redirected to an answering service, wherein the operator may inform the patient of the whereabouts of the doctor, takes note of the concern, and then relays the message to the doctor. Also, a medical answering service operator can directly address simple concerns such as providing another copy of a lost prescription, scheduling appointments, confirming availability of lab results, and the like.

The service enables doctors to handle major responsibilities without sacrificing relatively-minor concerns of their patients. Seeing the advantages of the service, many doctors availed of the medical answering service from outsourcing companies (or third-party service providers).

With millions of doctors worldwide taking advantage of the service, the traditional nature of doctor-patient relationships changed; it became more of a "patient to operator to doctor" relationship.

Although the medical answering service has several advantages, it also has the following issues:

• patients are redirected to the service even during clinic hours
• inaccessibility of doctors increased
• inaccuracy of relayed medical advice or information
• mistaking a caller for a different patient, thus the wrong medical data are given
• caller is being put on hold for too long (i.e., minimum of 30 minutes)
• service is used as a means for the doctor to evade a patient 

The aforementioned disadvantages have made a lot of doctors lose some of their loyal patients. Some medical answering service providers were even reported to have operators who tend to conduct a medical consultation with a caller or take the liberty of referring the caller to another physician.

Despite the downside of a medical answering service, many doctors still opt to have the service since it greatly helps them keep up with their demanding schedules. As for the patients or the callers, they take extra steps in making sure that the operator has the correct information.

Outside factors such as MCOs (managed care organizations) or HMOs (health maintenance organizations) have played a part in the emergence of medical answering services. Patients usually have a lot of concerns regarding such organizations (e.g., how these are supposed to apply to their payments for the doctor, the coverage of their contributions to an HMO, and the like). The doctors, on the other hand, usually leave it to the operators to make the explanation to the patients.

Perhaps the outsourcing industry still has areas to improve on when it comes to medical answering services. Indeed, matters regarding a person's health are delicate, urgent, and sure to take a toll in the long run; hence, a service in connection to medicine ought to be flawless, prompt, and efficient.

The outsourcing industry's offer of the medical answering service has greatly changed the interaction between doctors and patients, bringing either fruitful or problematic relationships. It is certain, however, that the outsourcing industry will not only continue to affect doctor-patient relationships, but also create changes for the better of such relationships.

Older Post:

• Answering Calls for a Difference
• How to Choose the Right Answering Service
• Is It Time to Hire an Answering Service?

A Physicians Answering Service – The Key To Keep Your Patients Satisfied

A physicians’ answering service is believed to be the most effective means of ensuring client satisfaction. When you hire medical answering services, you can be sure your patients will never be alone in times of a medical emergency.

Why you need a physicians’ answering service:

·         Very often, doctors are unable to take patient calls which can come in any time of the night or day. During these times, patient calls are attended by these medical answering services. This ensures that the patient is attended to at once, all emergency calls are routed to the appropriate physicians, and treatment is not delayed.

·         Hiring a professional answering service is economical because it helps to cut down on overhead costs of maintaining a full-fledged administrative staff to attend to patient calls 24×7.

·         All patient messages are recorded and stored accurately, eliminating any chances of error which can arise when messages are taken down manually.

·         The system filters calls, sending the ones needing immediate medical attention to the specific doctors. It handles routine calls concerning appointment schedules or prescription clarifications on the next work day.

·         Professional medical answering services understand the importance of every call made and ensure that all callers are treated with respect.

·         These services can customize their functions according to the needs and preferences of their customers.

You can use the medical answering services for a 30-day period to test their effectiveness. If you are not satisfied with the results, you are free to withdraw their services because there are no legally binding contracts.

Answering Calls for a Difference

The invention of the answering machine in 1898 and introduction of the first commercial answering machine to America in 1949 were considered by companies as a rescue from having unanswered concerns (i.e., unanswered phone calls).

Way back, an answering machine became a great advancement for companies in accommodating more calls. Further advancements were made and thenceforth came the voice mail feature; this time, companies are able to accommodate all their calls.

But let's face it. Getting the machine or voice mail doesn't readily translate to having an "answered" call, as opposed to having an actual person receive the call.

Nowadays, when clients or customers call a company and only hear an automated response at the other end of the line, they would immediately hang up, thinking that their call will just be ignored. In a study, 70% of callers do this.

How your company takes the calls of your clients or customers is also an indication of how much you value them and their concerns.

Many companies have availed of an answering service from BPO (business process outsourcing) service providers. The answering service has been an efficient means for companies to accommodate all of their customers' concerns, having a live person take every call of a client so as to give prompt solutions to the latter's problems.

With an answering service, anyone who usually has a lot customers or clients trying to reach him/her—especially business owners, physicians, company executives, and the like—can have a live operator address the concerns of the callers.

The operator—who is usually called a virtual assistant, CSR (customer service representative), or call center agent—functions as a secretary per se, with the following tasks:

1. answer the call/s of the customer
2. take note of the concern
3. relay the message to the "boss"
4. get back to the caller

This is the common cycle of what an answering service operator does. Also, an operator has access to basic information a caller may need, enabling the former to readily assist customer concerns on his/her own. Apparently, a person who avails of an answering service can then have more time to focus on matters in greater need of attention.

There's no telling when a customer or client would need assistance; hence, an answering service is there to cater the clients' concerns even after-hours, holidays, weekends, or vacations. The service can also provide round-the-clock assistance, especially for companies with minimal manpower and yet have a steady influx of callers.

Answering service operators are commonly housed in a call center, which is an organization or a company itself that employs professionals with above-average communication skills and a good grasp of the English language. In turn, call center answering services are delivered with efficiency and quality.

Companies that availed of call center answering services have already attested to the advantages the service gives to the business. This type of outsourcing service may be set according to the standards of the company. BPO service providers usually have the resources needed to customize the service, incorporating a system or determining what communication tools are best for the company in order to attend to the needs of its customers and clients better.

It has been pointed out that call center answering services have changed the face of customer relationship management (CRM). The service has satisfied the preference of a caller to have an actual person take the call instead of a machine. Also, it not only met but also exceeded the expectations of all the parties involved—the company, its customers or clients, and even the service provider. It has enhanced business partnerships and professional relationships.

A BPO service by nature, call center answering services provide the main benefit of outsourcing, and that is for a company to run its business functions with cost-effectiveness. Having an answering service operator instead of a full-time employee for the position can eliminate training costs and salary budgets. Also, the cost of outsourcing the service is much lower than hiring a full-time employee. The service helps the company achieve the goal of maximizing the business's function (if not the necessity) to consistently accommodate the clients' calls at a very low cost.

In providing call center services, outsourcing companies in the Philippines have gained the preference of foreign businesses. An outsourcing company of note is Taking You Forward, Inc. (TYF, Inc.). When it comes to call center services, outsourcing to TYF, Inc. has become the foremost choice of several foreign companies. This is due to how Taking You Forward, Inc. creates a unique business partnership, offering reasonable rates, matching requirements, and having proficient professionals.

Now, it's high time for your company to make a difference—to your customers, from your competitors, and even to your revenue. Build up the advantages of your business by not only having an answering service but availing it from a reliable outsourcing company as well.

Older Post:

• How to Choose the Right Answering Service
• Is It Time to Hire an Answering Service?
• Bright Horizons of Call Center Outsourcing - Philippines