04:49:27
With the plethora of different ways to keep in touch with clients today, it's sensible to wonder if a phone answering service is a waste of company money. After all, if they can't email they can IM, if they can't IM they can text, and so forth. As any IT professional who has been dealing with an angry client after an email server crash ruined a deal can tell you, if it's important, you should call. Your clients probably know this and, to that end, you should make sure they have someone to talk to when they call.
Nobody likes voicemail. While it's fine in personal communications, it's not generally conducive to good business relationships. Business people generally expect that they'll get through to someone and, given a choice between your cell phone's voicemail and your phone answering service, they’ll usually take the latter. The phone service may be able to route their call to someone else or may be able to interrupt you with a pre-arranged emergency indication, and that means that the right people always get through and that you don’t return to the office to find angry emails and voicemails.
A phone answering service can also explain why you're not available, if you so choose. For example, if there's a natural disaster in your area, the phone service can explain that to clients and make sure they understand why you may not be able to call back right away. This sort of disaster recovery is another reason that serious businesses use these services. If you always need to be available, you can't count on your one office with its single telephone service carrier. The answering services have several different levels of redundancy in their systems and are very resilient.
 |
|
