After Hours Answering Services are becoming increasingly popular in the USA as more businesses realize the benefits of having live local professional receptionists answering calls from customers outside of regular business hours. These phone call answering services offer lots of real benefits for businesses – especially ensuring current customer loyalty and gaining new business.
It’s incredibly important to keep aware of your customers, how they think, when they want to shop, when they have free time – smart business owners doesn’t just react to the changing habits of purchasing – smart business owners gets pro-active. Not everybody checks the time before they call a business to ask if they have a product stocked – what happens to the prospective sale if the callers contacts your business at 5.30pm after your office staff have left for the day?
American’s are always adapting and changing, trying new things and using the latest technology and so many people work from home these days and don’t commute as much. Now people who work from home just adjust their work day to when they want to work. If your business doesn’t adapt to these changes and you still think everyone in your city just works nine to five then you’ll lose revenue, fast.
Just imagine when a busy working mother has some free time after picking up her children from school and getting dinner ready – it could be 6pm when goes online to find a stockist for her favourite skin product. Is your business going to be ready to take her call live from San Diego?
Think about a business executive suddenly having to fly to a conference on a Friday and urgently needing dog boarding service for the weekend in Phoenix – if they call at 7.45am on the Friday morning, it’s the pet boarding business with a live professional after hours call service that can answer questions and quote the prices and explain the service that will secure the sale – not the competitor with voicemail.
Another benefit of using a dedicated professional after-hours answering service staffed by expert virtual receptionists is the freedom. Freedom for you and your team. There is no need to stress your in-house employees. Simply subscribe to after-hours call answering and you can always leave instructions to transfer those absolutely urgent after hours calls to your key staff or yourself and let all the usual calls enquiring about services go straight to your after-hours service team to manage. This really helps to improve productivity and morale and efficiency, as regular employees will not be forced to interrupt their leisure time by taking calls.
All across America after hours answering services are spreading the message that service matters. Really connecting with customers matters.
Call answering services after normal office hours are also extremely important for US businesses that operate across multiple locations or have customers in different time zones. If your business provides a specialist service or a distinct product, its likely customers from all across America will want to buy from you. But that means lots of time zones. And when you have a special product that might be expensive, that often means customers may want to ask questions. So if your main offices are in Los Angeles California, but you always have a lot of regular customers calling from Florida and even Hawaii, then you really need to be available with welcoming live answering services outside of the traditional 9 to 5. Its just good business sense.
Some important things to consider when you are thinking about using after-hours phone answering services are whether the service is bi-lingual and can answers calls in Spanish, how long the call answering service has been in business, how many virtual receptionists the business employs and whether you can trial the service for free. A free trial is always a great idea and it is a real test to check if a service is so confident in their professionalism that they’ll offer a free week’s trial to check it out.
Cost is also an important factor but in virtual business services like virtual receptions, you really only get real value when you pay for it. A very cheap after hours call service will usually be a real let down and instead of boosting sales – untrained and unprofessional call handling will lose customers. It is important to research and compare different providers to find one that can provide the service you need at a cost that is within your budget. Did we tell you that Virtual headquarters offers a free 7 day trial?
So we all know that the business world is changing. Internet connectivity means we can do so much more from home or remote working, and we don’t need to commute and physically travel to do our work and our shopping. And Americans are great consumers, we value a good product but we are also pretty impatient and that’s why afterhours call answering services are so popular because they make sure that your business captures and retains customers. Live after hours call answering is just part of the service for smart and successful American businesses.