Customer satisfaction is vital to keeping your business going. Positive interactions with your business can lead to great reviews or word-of-mouth referrals—in turn sparking more leads and sales. Negative interactions are more likely to have a greater impact when a bad review is left or the customer who experienced the negative interaction tells others about their experience.

How do these positive and negative interactions affect your need for an answering service? A simple missed phone call, less-than-professional answering of the call, or poor customer service over the phone are just some of the examples of negative interactions that could lead to dire consequences for your brand.

Poor Customer Service Costs Your Business

According to Small Business Trends, 89% of customers who have a bad interaction or customer experience with a company will switch to new one. Data collected by ClickSoftware, “poor customer experiences result in an estimated $83 billion loss by U.S. enterprises each year because of defections and abandoned purchases.”

How A Call Center (Answering Service) Can Improve Customer Satisfaction

Addressing customer service issues can be a complicated aspect of any business. How, you may ask, when all businesses provide customer service in some way? While all companies may have to provide customer service in one form or another, handling customer service issues with equal quality, response time, and similar in manner can actually be quite difficult if you leave your customer service calls, emails, and other interactions to just anyone in your company.

Different employees can have different perspectives on how things should be handled—especially if they are managing customer service care in addition to their regular job tasks. When customer service response is not the same for each customer, those who feel they received less quality service will have even more to complain about. In turn, you end up with a bigger customer service issue and stronger negative experience.

The Harvard Business Review provides some additional insight in how customer service should best be handled. Customer dissatisfaction often does not stem from just one interaction with a company, but rather a cumulation of experiences—often through several channels (call, email, in person, etc.).

So, how does a call center address this issue? By providing uniformity in customer service resolution.

• Customer service needs are filtered to a single source—your customer service call center answering service. This eliminates a customer being transferred or passed off to the right department when they reach out.
• Call center employees are trained to your specifics. This means each and every call is answered with your branding and handled exactly as you have advised it should be. Each customer receives the same quality, and each issue is addressed equally.
• Customer service call centers can handle multiple issues in one call. Whether the inquiry is about a delivery, an in-person experience, a product failure, or general question, your outsourced answering service can handle it all.
• An answering service can provide a more sympathetic ear. Although your direct employees may also be able to do this, they are more focused on resolution (even if it is a satisfactory one)—which can make customers feel more “like a number” or that the business is just “putting a bandage” on the issue with a quick resolution. A call center employee has distance from the company which can enable them to provide more empathy to the customer’s plight. While also delivering the satisfactory resolution desired by both you and the customer.  

Interested in learning more about finding the right answering service company for your business? Contact us at (800) 370-1131 and learn about our award-winning service and what we can do to help improve your business and customer service satisfaction.