Service industries are competitive and customer-driven. Missing even a single call could mean losing a contract or a potential lead. Customers have high expectations. When someone calls for a broken faucet or needs to fix a leaking roof, they don’t want to hear stories. Instead, they want an emergency technician to deal with the problem immediately.
If hiring more people doesn’t look practical for your service business, consider using the live answering service from signpost.com. Signpost’s solution is designed for small businesses and services, and their agents are based in the US, which means the responses feel authentic and natural. Here is an overview!
- Immediate Human Response: Customers are less inclined to use services and businesses that take too long to respond or keep them waiting. With live agents answering calls 24/7, your business can ensure consistent availability, even beyond standard hours and when your staff members aren’t available.
- Higher Lead Conversion: First impressions matter. When a professional agent answers questions in a personal way with focus on the request, it automatically creates a relationship with the caller. You can expect to turn more interested customers into paying clients.
- After-Hours Coverage: Even if you have one or two people to take calls, they aren’t usually available beyond standard hours. By hiring professional experts and live agents from a service, you can ensure coverage around the clock. Remember, people often call after 6 pm for emergencies.
- Customized Call Scripts: You don’t have to worry again about customers getting boring or generic answers. Live answering services enable clients to share call scripts and other details, ensuring that responses align with the value and protocols of the brand at all times. This also offers consistent customer experiences.
- Appointment Scheduling: Live agents can also take care of appointments and ensure all slots of your calendar are filled. There is no need to coordinate between team members and field technicians anymore, as new bookings will be shared immediately.
- Real-Time Message Delivery: This brings us to our next point, which is real-time summaries of calls. Calls with live agents are recorded, which your team can use later for better answers and improving services. Details like names, numbers, and service requests are captured in the system.
- Spam Filtering: Incoming calls often include wrong numbers, sales and spam calls. When you outsource call handling, these are filtered by live agents, and only genuine customers and leads are passed to your team. You can save time for your staff members.
- Support for Emergency Dispatch: If there is an urgent call or someone is in an emergency, live agents can escalate the matter to managers of your team or technicians. This will ensure customers get urgent support when they need it most, which further enhances overall experience.
- Seamless Integration: Live answering services also allow integrating their system with your existing CRM and other tools. This will ensure there is no gap in communication, and everyone is on the same page about jobs, bookings, payments, and everything else.
- Scales With Your Business: If your business experiences a seasonal increase in service demand, you will do better with live agents from a service than hiring your team. Hiring people is not just expensive but also complicated and time-consuming, especially for small service providers.
Takeaways
There is no denying that your business needs to elevate customer support to stay ahead in the industry. With a live answering service, you can achieve that without the corresponding costs. Even the prices are tailored to match client requirements, so you only pay for the calls that agents attend. If you want to know more, consider listening to a few recorded calls. You can easily judge when the agents are making things simpler and better for customers.
