Are you an SME looking for a Live Answering Service?

Are you an independent business looking to provide a more professional service to your customers? Or are you a company that needs support with after-hours calls? 

Either way, live telephone answering service is for you.

Live answering service for small businesses can help you increase your bottom line through personalized communications.

But like any professional support, you will need some kind of strategy to make it work.

So in this article, we’ve listed down tried and tested approaches to have a successful live answering experience.

10 Live Answering Service Strategies for SMEs

If you have no idea how to make your live answering phone service work for you, we got your back!

Here are some strategies you ought to know:

1. Use your live telephone answering service to generate and cultivate leads

Ever wonder what happens when you don’t answer your phone? Easy. Customers will turn their back on your brand.

If you are just relying on sending them voicemails, and not really talking to them, we will have a problem. 

The majority of callers will simply hang up after getting an impression that you do not care about their concerns or requests. In fact, most businesses believe that customer service is crucial to achieve success.

64% of organizations in the industry believe that customers should have access to a live agent.

Not being proactive in taking calls can damage your reputation. Even more so, it is much worse simply letting the phone ring. 

The truth is, some of your customers may accept these unpleasant business practices, but not all of them will. 

A prospect, on the other hand, will never call you back. Instead, they’ll dial your competitor’s number immediately. 

You not only lost a lead, but you also gave one to your rival. That is something you should never do.

Instead tap the potential of a live answering service. 

Hire a professional phone answering service to handle your calls around-the-clock. And let them cultivate leads with excellent customer service and get your more leads. 

If you’re in the office, they’ll back you up by taking in non-core activities. If you’re out of the office, they’ll take the lead, answering your calls with speed and precision.

This means more leads for you to fill your sales funnel.

2. React quickly to potential sales

Hot leads require immediate attention. Right? 

So what role does live answering service have to help you with it? They can notify your team and provide them with vital information to convert them into sales.

As a result, your team may be following up with your lead before they’ve had a chance to consider calling someone else. They’ll have little to no need to call someone else if you take care of them quickly.

No more cold calls for your business.

3. Friendly voice adds appeal to businesses

Would you rather try to talk to a computer or a real person? 

This isn’t a trick question, because the answer is obvious. People want to talk to people. If so, why do so many businesses force automation upon their customers and even their prospects?

More than two-thirds (67%) of customers will hang up when they can’t reach a live person.

While automation may save a few pennies per call, dramatically increasing your sales is more important than cutting expenses.

The personal touch of a live answering service can make all the difference. 

For a comparatively low cost, they’ll provide your prospects with the personal touch they expect and will appreciate. And when you do this for your prospects, they’ll reward you by buying from you.

4. Live answering service adds some professionalism flair to your business on first call

Professionalism goes hand in hand with the personal touch. 

The correct phone answering service can help you with both. Yes, today’s top telephone answering services providers engage much in training employees to communicate.

This training can help you make a difference in your business. 

As the saying goes, you will never get a second chance to create a good first impression. That is why your live answering service must be on top of its game, everytime. Or else, it’s game over.

5. Information gathering essential

Want to create a business persona for your business? Live answering phone service can help you with that.

Whatever you need, just tell your phone answering service, and they’ll do their best to collect the information you need on every call.

Of course, if a prospect doesn’t want to answer some of your questions, your service won’t push through. But even if they don’t want to, at least you tried. 

An in-depth knowledge in your market can help you yield desirable results. That is why it is important to keep in mind this strategy.

6. Pre-qualify leads

Other than creating a business persona, you can also harvest leads from customer information. You will be able to do this by looking at their information and filtering pre-qualified leads.

This varies from one business to the next, but a common example is asking the prospect’s timeline. 

If they’re in the information gathering phase and don’t plan on making a purchase, there’s no pressing reason to call them back immediately. Instead, work on their timeframe.

However, if their need is immediate, this warrants the answering service passing on the information to your salesperson right away. 

If you wish, your phone answering service can even connect the prospect to your salesperson. This provides the opportunity to close a sale on the first call.

7. Close more sales

As you can see, your live answering service team can help you increase sales. But did you know they can also close sales for you?

Other than capturing more leads for you and making a great first impression, most phone answering services are capable of sales talking.

This will help you save a lot, and most importantly, delight your prospects because you don’t need to transfer calls anymore.

8. Live answering service is affordable

Outsourcing a live answering service in preparation for your upcoming marketing campaign is a much more cost-effective strategy than hiring your own, in-house team of agents.

Assigning your call overflows to the experts will not only save you money with lower operational expenses but also plenty of time because your live answering service provider will be handling the tedious processes of hiring and training their staff.

This huge time savings can be channeled towards more income-generating activities of your business.

9. Scalable and flexible service

Customers and prospects crave new things and the more an object becomes limited, the greater our desire to own it.  

Outsourcing a live answering service to handle your call overflows gives you the flexibility you need to scale up.

You can also add as many live answering service agents as you need during the peak of your campaign, and reduce their number when the campaign is coming to a close, easily and quickly.

10. Experts delivering reliable, 24/7 service

Outsourcing a live answering service provider for your call overflows also upgrades your business by opening your doors to highly trained agents and extending your office hours to 24 hours, every day. 

Your customers are guaranteed to be greeted with the highest level of respect and professionalism, no matter what time of the day or night they call your company to ask about your special marketing campaign. 

You can rest assured that all incoming phone calls will be answered promptly when you have a team of agents dedicated to manning your phone lines and providing friendly customer support to your valued clients. 

Your business will experience an increase in its customer satisfaction score, more lead conversions, higher sales, and profits when you have professional agents attending to your customers all day and night.

The Only Phone Answering Service You Will Need

We are Order Taking Philippines, the #1 Order Taking service provider for SMEs.

We are an ISO-certified company with 10+ years of experience in the industry. You can guarantee that behind everything we do is attention to data security.

If you want to know more about who we are and what we do, just shoot us a message.

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