In-House Capabilities
You're going to need to answer and make some calls in-house to facilitate business at your company. In order to figure out what answering services you need, you should look at what phone equipment you have in your office and what in-house capabilities you have at your disposal for taking calls.
Once you analyze your in-house capabilities, you'll have a better idea of what exactly you need from an answering service.
Call Volume
A lot of answering services will offer your plans based on the expected call volume your company will get.
Therefore, you need to have accurate data on how many calls your company gets on a regular basis or after hours when you're most likely to need an answering service.
Take some time to research your typical call volume so that you can give answering service providers accurate data on what you'll need as a client.
Service Offerings
Answering service providers offer a wide variety of different service packages.
While some answering service providers offer live representatives, others provide only a recorded message. While some answering service providers with live representatives will train those representatives to provide detailed information about your company to callers, others will offer representatives who will only take a basic message from the caller.
Do your research on the various capabilities of answering service providers and figure out which services you need and which services you can do without.
Language Capabilities
Depending on your geographic area and your market, you may need to be able to take calls in more than one language. These days, many businesses throughout North America need to be able to interact with clients who speak Spanish.
If you do business overseas, you may want to add even more language capabilities when it comes to finding an answering service that can be attentive to all of your potential and current clients.
Research your market reach to determine if expanding to other languages could potentially grow your client base and your company's profits.
Answering Service Schedule
The answering service schedule you need will depend on the hours during which you have staff members taking calls and the call volume you have at your company.
Not every answering service will offer round-the-clock call taking. You need to figure out your schedule when you're in the market for an appropriate answering service provider.
Projected Growth in the Future
If your company is young and still growing, you may want to look to the future when you hire an answering service. A lot of answering service providers will be able to adjust to your growth by offering different plans that are tailored to companies of varying sizes.
Ideally, you'll want to choose an answering service provider that offers the flexibility to adjust to your growth over time so that you can partner with the same company well into the future.
If you're on the market for an answering service that's open 24/7 and has a wide variety of service features, contact Kim's Answering Service.
