Call handling services

What is call handling?

‘Call handling’ describes the function of answering calls from potential and existing customers trying to get in touch with your business.

This function may be performed by a single person – often a receptionist – or by an entire department within your business, or it might be outsourced to a dedicated call handling service.

Which of these solutions is most suitable for your business will depend on your specific situation. A business that doesn’t receive many calls might be best served by with a single receptionist. A small business that only receives calls during normal business hours might choose an internal call handling team.

Outsourcing call handling is best for businesses that need the flexibility of out of hours call answering, have periods of high volume, and operate in industries where missed calls means lost business.

Problems solved by a call handling service

Many businesses attempt to answer all calls by themselves. As your business grows this can lead to several problems:

• Because you or your team will often have responsibilities in addition to answering calls, many calls will go unanswered due to the difficulty of juggling responsibilities. Your customers will get frustrated as their calls are sent automatically to voicemail, which feels very impersonal and wastes their time.

• Your customers will often find that they have to wait a long time for their calls to be answered, and this can be a great source of frustration. When consumers are put on hold for more than a few minutes, they are likely to abandon the call entirely and seek another company; your competitors. They are also more likely to give your company negative reviews or recommendations.

Associates at a dedicated call handling service solve this problem by answering calls within seconds and by handling your clients’ queries at a consistently high standard.

The high cost of poor customer service

It is a fact of business that as your business grows, customer service gets harder. As interest in your business increases how do you manage the larger number of calls? Processes that used to work when you were smaller won’t necessarily scale well.

Failure to provide a consistently high-quality customer experience will mean that your business will struggle to gain and retain customers. Poor customer experience leads straight to the bottom-line. Just as your business seems to be growing you lose business; instead of growing you plateau.

If your company acquires a reputation for being slow to answer calls, you will also develop a reputation for poor customer service which can be very hard to rectify. As the popularity of review websites grow, you need to pay careful attention to your reputation. Unfavourable reviews tend to linger.

Three signs that you might benefit from a call handling service

Many small businesses believe that they are ‘too small’ to use professional services. But there comes a point when poor customer service becomes a restraint to growth. In the reputation economy, how customers experience your business is a key consideration.

Here are three signs that suggest that it is time to think carefully about enhanced customer experience, and how a call handling service might help:

1. You have been receiving negative online reviews about your customer service. In particular, customers complain about the time that it takes for you to answer telephone calls.
2. Core business tasks are suffering due to the fact that your staff are inundated with calls from customers and cannot keep on top of their other work.
3. Your team hasn’t received the right training in call answering or dealing with clients’ issues over the telephone. Issues raised in customer calls remain unresolved because team members are constantly in ‘firefighting’ mode.

If you’ve noticed one or more of these issues, it is worth considering whether a call handling service might prove a worthwhile investment, improving your customer’s experience doing business with you, and, ultimately, fuel growth.

Three alternatives to a call handling service

There are a few other ways of dealing with customer queries aside from a call handling answering service. Here are a few of the main ones, along with an explanation of the key reasons why a handling service might be a preferable option.

1) Do nothing. Let your team handle customer calls

There are reasons you might want your own team to answer calls. If this is the case, you will still need to offer training to deal with higher volumes customer calls, processes to resolve calls, and task prioritisation should your team also have other responsibilities.

Task prioritisation is an underappreciated aspect of internal call management. If not adequately addressed, personnel can be distracted from their work by the need to answer calls from clients.

You also need to consider overflow and out of hours calls. Many people refuse to wait on hold and won’t leave messages. Instead, they’ll keep phoning providers – your competitors – until someone answers.

2) Choose an automated call handling service

Many businesses aim to save time and effort by utilising an automated customer help service. Customers call a given number and, instead of speaking to a human being, punch in numbers on their handsets to receive answers to the relevant questions.

This is often a cheaper option, but most customers prefer the human touch. When dealing with a problem, they much prefer being able to talk to a real human being who is well trained and who has access to all relevant information. Automated responses seem very impersonal when attempting to resolve an issue.

3) An instant chat feature on your website

Live chat allows customer queries to be answered in real time. Many people prefer to talk over the web rather than over the phone: this can be useful for customers who are deaf or hard of hearing, for example.

However, you will still need to have team members manning the chat service 24/7 if you do not want to end up with customers unhappy that you are unresponsive. You may wish to choose a service that can answer your calls as well as your chat features.

Talking over the phone has a more personal feel and gives your company more of a human face. A web chat customer service outlet can be maintained as a complement to, rather than a replacement of, a telephone-based service.

How to calculate the return on investment of a call handling service

You can assess your ROI when using a professional answering service by understanding the relevant cost savings and revenue uplift:

• What is the average cost of receiving a call?
• What is the average revenue of a call?
• How many calls can now be taken (including out of hours calls)?
• What are the tasks that you/your team can now focus on rather than answer calls?

Assuming that you are charged per minute for each incoming call, you can perform a basic cost-benefit analysis:

Let’s assume the cost of a call handling service is £1 per min

And that the average call you recieve is 2 minutes

That makes the total cost: £2

Let’s assume that 30% of your calls result in new business.

And that each new customer is worth £200 to your business.

That means the average call is worth is £60 (£200 x 30%) to your business.

Average cost per call: £2

Average revenue per call: £60

With an external service, you can now take out of hours calls. If your business could now take 10 extra calls a month and, with a conservative 30% conversion estimate, get 3 new customers a month, then a call handling service would essentially pay for itself.

In addition, your team will most likely be working more productively as they will not be distracted by incoming calls from customers. This optimised productivity will further increase your ROI.

Rather than taking back-to-back calls your receptionist can now spend more time talking with customers and building better relationships. Or spend more time helping with marketing campaigns. Or help run the office more efficiently. Any of these tasks will help your business.

How to start using a call handling service

Setting up a call handling service is simple: get in touch with a provider and they will create an account for you. You will then need to redirect your calls to the service. It will be your choice whether you redirect all calls, overflow calls, or out of hours calls.

The call handling provider will then be able to start taking your calls, though it’s best to spend time with them to create an accurate ‘call script’. Call scripts help call associates to understand what your typical calls are like and what information callers are likely to ask about.

Once you have had the service set up, you will start to notice the following:

• More peace in the office, as fewer customers are calling your office directly with their queries. Employees are able to get on with other tasks more productively.

• Customers choosing your company over your competitors’ due to the fact that you provide better quality customer service.

• Customers leaving more and more favourable reviews of your customer service on social media and other online forums.

• A more satisfied, more engaged client base.

Here are a few points to consider that will help you to get the most from the service:

• Brief your answering service on your company’s services, culture, and values so that they can manifest these in how they deal with your customers on the phone.

• Request regular reports on the progress of your calls, or ask about a live dashboard. For example, are you able to find out how call volume changes over the course of a year? Or what types of queries customers have been making? This will help you to adapt your business operations to better suit your clients’ needs.

• Ask about quality assurance procedures. Can you make test calls to assess customer service experience? It’s also best practice to monitor reviews left by your customers online. This an impartial assessment of whether people are happy with their experience of calling your business via an answering service.

Integrating a call handling service into your business

You may not even have to change your customer care hotline number if you don’t want to because most answering services provide you with the option of simply rerouting calls from an existing customer care number to their call centre.

This means that you do not need to change the contact details on your marketing materials or send an update to your customers.

Integration will usually be seamless: all that happens is that calls from your customers are picked up by the call centre service and operatives will deal with basic and common queries – such as scheduling appointments or taking orders – while talking to your customer.

It is wise to keep an open channel of communication between your business’s headquarters and the call centre. This is useful in the more rare cases when a customer has a query that would best be dealt with by a manager at the company itself. It is also useful for receiving regular reports on the progress of your answering service, and for gathering statistics and other data that you can use to formulate ever more successful marketing and customer care strategies.