How a Live Answer Service Can Supplement Your Virtual IVR

So you’ve decided to sign up with a virtual PBX provider. Good job. Give yourself a pat on the back—you deserve it. Today’s IVR technologically can address many common queries via an automated service and make life easier both for you and your clients. However, there will be certain times when your auto attendant will not do.

“What’s that?” you’re asking—am I trying to sell you out of the idea now that you’ve almost converted?

Not at all—IVR technology does a great job fulfilling its purpose, which is to reduce call volume. But this doesn’t mean that it’s the last you’ll be hearing from your customers. An IVR menu acts as a strainer separating simple queries that can be dealt with automatically from complex ones—such as sales or unique customer issues—where human interaction might become necessary.

So you’ll still need to man your phones.

For small businesses with limited staff and resources, pairing IVR with Live Answer can make a lot of sense.

Because Synclio’s parent company, AnswerConnect, is a major provider of live answering services catering to many Fortune 500 companies, we are able to offer smooth integration with our virtual PBX plans at a very attractive per-minute rate.

Here are some of the things a Live Answer service can do for you:

Keep you covered when you don’t have enough staff

As a small business owner, your team must be spread thin as it is, and if a key member calls in sick or a sudden surge of interest takes you unprepared, you may simply not have the manpower to handle calls and they’ll be relayed to your voicemail. But these could have been sales opportunities that may not return, or customers in need of support who are sure to feel unhappy.

A Live Answer service, paired with your IVR menu, could pick up the slack just when you need that little bit of extra help to keep your service tight.

Continue to provide service when you deserve a break: after hours, weekends, and holidays.

Even if you and your colleagues can manage throughout the day, everyone deserves a break. And you can only rotate evenings and weekends for so long before it starts messing with your head. Unfortunately, we’re all running on the same schedule, sharing the same evenings, weekends, and holidays—so hiring after hours help can be very costly.

Again, you could just leave it up to your voicemail—but would you really want to miss a sale only because it happened to come in after you left the office?

Being available 24/7 not only helps your bottom-line, it also boosts your brand image—a service just seems so much more reliable when customers know that, no matter what time or day it is, a support person is always within reach.

Support business growth

Business growth is a blessing. We all hope for it, work for it, pray for it... but—not unlike a rainstorm in the desert—we can’t always predict when it’s going to hit , even with our best plans and forecasts.

Live Answer can give you the confidence you need to go out there and garner business at full steam, knowing that when it does come pouring down you won’t be caught unprepared.

Provide the benefits of professional tools

When you sign up with a Live Answer service from a provider like Answer Connect, you not only get the equivalent of an in-house attendant, you get a team of professionals who’ve made it their business to provide exceptional service, and who do it with specialized tools that make them a powerhouse of efficiency.

These include:

• Lead capturing tools
• Lead generation
• Call routing & transfer
• Call forwarding
• Urgent Call Handling

And more...

Only Use it When You Need to

Sure, paying bites. No one likes it. But the best part about Synclio’s integrated Live Answer service is that you don’t have to use it unless you really need to. Simply set up call forwarding to your regular departments first, with Live Answer as the last resort. You can completely customize it to your preference, and you'll be billed at a low per-minute rate without anything upfront. This ensures that you don’t run into any more charges than you absolutely must in order to strike that golden balance between tight customer-service and your bottom-line.

conclusion

Just think of it as your contingency plan, as something to fall back on—kinda like the air bag in your vehicle. It cost a little extra and you bought it hoping you’ll never have to use it—but you’ll sure be happy it's there if you ever did.

Labels: 24/7, business, call center, customer service, how a live answer service can, phone system, virtual PBX