Sharpen Your Focus on What Matters Most
By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD
Telephone answering services face a myriad of challenges. These range from competing options to technological solutions, from cost-effective service offerings to ensuring profitability. As a result, it’s easy to lose sight of the basics.
Here are the key considerations of customer communications 101:
Answer 24/7
The first element in customer communications 101 is to answer your phone when people call. This may seem obvious, but too often it’s overlooked. The bottom line is that when people call, they expect someone to answer. It’s that simple.
Yet it’s expensive to offer round-the-clock telephone coverage for most businesses. This is the key reason why telephone answering services exist.
Whether a business receives one phone call after hours or many, each caller deserves the courtesy of having their call answered. Never forget this.
Tap People Not Technology
Building on this essential need to answer calls 24/7 is the need for the personal touch of a human being instead of the impersonal assault of a computer. This stands as the second element in customer communications 101.
When customers call a business, their first hope is to have their call answered. Their second concern is who or what answers it.
This people over technology principle will stand until we reach the point when technology can do a better job, performing it faster and more accurately.
Again, telephone answering services have built their business around this ideal of providing a personal connection to callers. Businesses that force customers to use technology risk losing business just to save a few pennies.
Focus on Caller Satisfaction
The third element of customer communications 101 is to focus on caller satisfaction. This means successfully addressing the reason for the call. You do it on the first call, and you do it correctly.
With a needed focus on efficiency, this is the hardest element for a telephone answering service to address.
Though it’s wise to look at statistical results, don’t focus on call length or calls per hour. Pushing to decrease the first one or increase the second are both detrimental to the paramount need of focusing on caller satisfaction.
Provided that you’re not wasting their time, callers will seldom grumble about the length of their call, but they’re quick to complain about calls that accomplish nothing. That’s why the right focus should be on customer satisfaction.
Customer Communications 101 Summary
To provide customer satisfaction, pursue three key objectives: answer around the clock, provide a human touch, and focus on satisfied callers. Do this and you’ll make your service indispensable.
Learn more in Peter Lyle DeHaan’s book, How to Start a Telephone Answering Service.
Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD, is the publisher and editor-in-chief of TAS Trader, covering the telephone answering service industry. Check out his books How to Start a Telephone Answering Service and Sticky Customer Service.
