Phone Answering Service - Top 8 Tips to Evaluate a Service Before You Hire

An answering service is only as good as its customer service representatives. When you hire an answering service, the service staff is directly responsible for communicating with your customers and can have a significant impact on your business reputation and customer satisfaction. While customer-friendly and knowledgeable staff can improve customer loyalty to your brand and increase profits, unprofessional representatives can lead to loss of client base and business reputation. Therefore, it is pivotal to assess the performance of customer service representatives before hiring an answering service. The following criteria are designed to assist you to achieve this goal and help make every call a great one.

Smiling and Customer Friendly Behavior: When customer service representatives smile during conversations with clients over the phone, their inflection and tone changes and becomes more welcoming and friendly. This makes the callers feel at ease, and gives them the impression that they are valued and respected, which in turn, helps to build loyalty and reputation in the market.

No Eating or Drinking During Conversations: Eating or drinking while answering a phone call is unacceptable and unprofessional. It can disrupt the flow of the conversation and significantly lower your company's reputation and impression on customers.

Putting Callers on Hold: Answering service staff often has to put callers on hold, to transfer them to other lines or find the requested information. However, this must be done in a polite manner. Informing customers as to where they are being transferred and their expected wait time conveys a favorable impression about your business and your commitment to your customers.

Listening to Customers: Representatives should listen carefully to customers and pay close attention to their requirements. They should seldom ask for repetition of information as this can annoy the caller. Professional representatives also let the customers know how attentively they have been listening to them, by repeating the main points to the caller.

Clarity in Speech and Solution: Representatives should speak clearly and fluently, so that customers can understand what is being said. Additionally, they should give clear and unambiguous solutions to problems of the customers and not beat about the bush.

Professionalism in Tone and Speech: Answering service representatives should always speak with customers in a polite but professional manner. Though it is important to make the customers feel at ease, too much informality in language can give a bad impression about your business to your clients.

Reviewing all Issues: Before ending the phone conversation, customer service representatives should cover all aspects of the customers' query. Professional representatives take down notes during the call to meet this requirement. Important information must be repeated to enable customers to understand it.

Terminating a Phone Call and Hanging up Last: Professional customer service representatives will always give customers the chance to finish saying all that they want to say, inquire or clarify. They will terminate the phone call only after the client has ended the phone conversation. Hanging up the phone in haste while the client is still speaking can have severe negative effect on your customers' satisfaction.

Thoroughly evaluate answering service staff on the above-mentioned criteria and hire an answering service only after you have tested the quality and performance of its customer service representatives.