You and your small business are key pieces of the current economy: the United States Small Business Administration’s (SBA) Office of Advocacy reports that more than 99% of all businesses in the United States are small businesses. Whether you have 5, 50, 500, or 1500 employees, you are considered a small business no matter how many customers you have. Consider for a moment how important consistent revenue is to your ongoing success.
What would it mean to your business if you lost revenue because 5% of your customers felt frustrated enough with your business that they never bought from you again or worse, actively discouraged anyone else from buying from your business? What if it were more than 5%?
The power of a simple phone call is often one of the most overlooked aspects of growing a small business, ignored for the sake of product development and achieving deadlines. But the customer service phone call can impact revenue and growth in surprising ways. It pays to consider how your small business delivers customer service. To service that phone call correctly, someone has to understand and value the foundational role of customer service. Is that someone, you?
Here are 5 Reasons Why Every Small Business Needs A Top Answering Service.
- Power & Trust
- Profit & Sales
- People & Leadership
- Passion & Purpose
- Perseverance & Grit
Power & Trust
Even if your website has a great F.A.Q. section, a social media fanbase who supports each other, or a contact form a customer can fill out, there’s nothing like connecting to another human with the emotional skills and technical knowledge to help you solve your problem. The feeling of powerlessness is not something you can take for granted. When your customer service representative speaks to your customer, his job is to transform a problem into a solution. That is the power of a simple phone call. It’s that simple, but is it happening in your startup?
Profit & Sales
It is important that your website sells well and your salespeople sell even better, but the best and most famous marketing channel of all time – word of mouth – is when your customers sell. A top answering service acts as part of your sales force to receive customer inquiries, nurture leads, and close sales. What happens if a customer falls through the cracks? What if their message goes unheard and unanswered? Your small business can leverage a call center to answer calls with your unique sales flow in mind, designed to nurture leads through the sales cycle. A call center can help generate profitable new customers and develop relationships with former customers whether the sales territory is local or global in today’s wired and wireless age.
People & Leadership
Some small business leaders will consider the amount of money to be saved by hiring a call center as their answering service instead of a full-time employee with salary, overtime pay, benefits, and vacation pay. Cost is an important consideration, but there’s an even bigger reason to use an answering service to scale your customer service: leadership. When you hire a skilled team to be your answering service, you free up your leadership bandwidth to train less and act more. Your time is precious with your management team to create new value by understanding the market’s needs and messaging the benefits of your products. Your energy is finite for collaboration and translating the bigger picture into strategies for your business to win. In order to win in today’s landscape with speed and decisiveness, your business needs leadership.
Passion & Purpose
What does it take to provide top-notch customer service over the phone? It’s far more than you might think. A happy voice and a pleasant greeting isn’t nearly enough. The answering team charged with delivering great customer service needs to not only be trained in the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of your business’ unique benefits and technology, but also the ‘why’. Their ability to connect with customers who are frustrated and transform their experience into satisfaction and delight is what will win the day. If you hire for the role, you have to train the role. When you partner with a dedicated answering service, that company has already screed for, and trained for the skills and passion to deliver excellent customer service. They begin their role on behalf of your company with a running start that helps your business grow, scale, and do more than survive.
Perseverance & Grit
Survival is the name of the game for many small businesses who haven’t yet learned to thrive. Today’s competitive landscape means dealing with the pressure to deliver immediate customer service 24/7. Can you? Will you for 5 calls per month? 50? 500? What if scaling was not a risk to your business’s survival, but a path to thriving? Partnering with an answering service allows your business to compete, lead with purpose, connect good people to your customers, and upgrade your profitability. Is that the real call your business is trying to answer?
QCSS embraces communication and innovation to transform human interactions into powerful, passionate customer experiences and nurturing relationships. Through top notch answering services and call centers, we help small businesses scale frontline sales activities with customers, lead generation, manage appointment setting, improve direct sales and renewal sales, and more. We deliver inbound customer service and product support.
Message to schedule a call to discuss how we can grow your business through Customer Service Support, inbound customer and product support and outbound front line sales activities / call center solutions.
