Telephone Answering Service ?

Edwards Finance > Phones

Q. The person answering the phone does not normally know computers. They are representing your company when they answer the phone. Is it worth a risk to your business name to have them answering? I for one only wanted the service to get a name and phone number and we would call them back. And that at times was difficult.

A. We are considering using a answering service to give info, take messages, take sign ups and do emergency dispatch, instead of a voice mail box with a 0 out to a pager. They (answering servicer) estimated it will cost about $100 per month. My questions is, is this worth it? I have some one every week or two ask about 24 X 7 support. We could say "We take calls 24 Hours, and we return support calls as soon as possible outside business hours" If we do this should we try to have them take sign ups? It is .55 cents per minute. An operator could take 3 -5 minutes for a sign up I am guessing. If we take sign-ups should we have the operator give basic directions for setup? Is it worth 3-5$ to get the signups from the people that call at 2:00 AM.? How many people call at 2:00 AM? We pay $45/month for 100 messages. It works great for us, but we are a networking company not an ISP. Most of our pages come from the servers themselves or from our monitoring equipment before a client can notice and call after hours. We talked to them about taking more detailed information. We would have to provide scripts for them. If it deviated from the scripts basically the call would end or they would take a message and we would have to call them back. We decided that was not very professional and have the operators take a message. Our rates were going to go through the roof too. They were going to charge per call on the detailed calls, it was something like $3.50 per call. Basically my experience has been that if the operators have to think, you will get charged more & charged alot. It probably would be better to focus on developing a web based sign up and maybe even a web based problem reporting form, that the users can select a severity (have it default to a low one;) and if it is a pri 1 then have it page someone. I have not seen that done, but it has to be possible. Even if you use a mailto cgi to an email addy that is tied to a beeper. We did something similar using beepit.net. As a consumer, I hate answering services. Reasons: 1. They have one operator handling multiple calls. They will typically answer after 1 or 2 rings. Then while they are talking with one person, if another call comes in, they will put that person on hold and answer the new call after 1 or 2 rings. And so on. It's impossible to have a 3-minute conversation without being put on hold a dozen times. 2. Their operators are poorly-qualified people who know prety much nothing about anything. 3. They lie. They answer the phone as 'xxx company' but they are not 'xxx company' at all. As soon as you ask them a question you realize that they lied to you, and they have nothing to do with 'xx company' other than that they are that company's answering service. 4. It's impossible to leave a proper message with an answering service. The operators typically do not know shorthand, so they can only take a very short meaningless message in the few seconds they give you. I hate answering services so much that I avoid doing business with any company that uses one. I much prefer decent voicemail where I can leave a proper message describing what I need. Then when the person returns my call and gets my voicemail, he can leave a message for me with the information I needed, and we don't have to play telephone tag.

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