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.
- 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.
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