Business Time Saver: Answering Service

Ring, Ring! Does the sound of the phone strike fear about who’s answering the phone. Is training and developing high skilled phone staff taking all your time? Getting the phone answered is one of the most important functions in most businesses. Over the last year, I’ve been outsourcing many functions to save time and keep my staff to a minimum. I found that using an answering service has become my biggest time and money savers without sacrificing quality.

If your business is an appointment driven business like mine, finding a good answering service is one of the most cost effective and time effective services. My answering service provides 24/7 call answering and appointment scheduling for only about $150 per month. Before you wave off an answering service as something that your business can’t use or feel that you can do it better internally, read on.

Advantages of and answering service
Cost effective - For $150 per month, there’s no way you could staff your small business for answering the phones with that small of a budget.
24/7 answering – The great thing about an answering service is they answer your phone around the clock. My answering service has scheduled appointments for me as late as 10:00 at night. One of the most difficult things is getting a client back on the phone after they leave a message. This never becomes an issue because the phone is always answered.
No training required – Since answering services specialize in answering phones, they also provide you with trained phone staff therefore saving you the time of mentoring and training your own staff.
Better results – One of the major surprises of switching to answering service is that I experienced a better phone call to appointment conversion rate. Why? First off, the answering service is totally focused on scheduling appointments and strictly follow a script instead of your own staff providing two much information and kind of winging every phone call. Second, if the answering service does not immediately schedule an appointment, they get all of the prospects information for follow-up. This provides you a second chance for a follow up call.

Focus Internal Staff other more important activities – With the phones outsourced, my internal staff can concentrate on servicing student and working on upgrading memberships without being interrupted.

In my business, I answered most of the calls and inquiries. By going to answering service, I virtually saved eight additional hours of work per day. Almost overnight, I gained 40 additional hours to use on other high value activities. $150 is a small cost pay for so much more free time.