No one can work 24/7. We all need sleep and the business can only be done in the time when everyone else is working. However, a lot of the times there’s a need for people to call the company’s headquarters after the working hours.
Some of them are living in another part of the world, sometimes it’s an emergency, and sometimes simply people love to spend their time learning about their opportunities in a time when the business stopped working.
This doesn’t interest some of your potential customers and clients, they’d like to call you in the time they most fill like it. It’s their right. You can only do something about this and keep them as your clients, or do nothing and lose them. It’s up to you.
What can I do to solve this?
Let’s say you’re selling products of some kind and you only work from 9 to 5. You realize that a lot of people call after this time and they’d like to know more about your products. Some of them are interested in buying right away, but there’s no one to answer the phone and make the sale.
The answer is hiring someone to work after-hours, right? Of course. This means paying someone more to do this and when you realize that you need to make this a double shift, it will turn out you’ll have to pay more than you’ll eventually earn.
However, there’s a solution to this problem too. It’s called outsourcing. See how they solve this in Australia on this link – businesses.com.au. You probably already got an answer from some other place where you called for information where the person talking to you was obviously not a native English speaker.
Lots of companies decide to outsource their answering service to another country. This option turns out to be a lot more affordable, but what they don’t realize is that Americans don’t like to be guided by people living thousands of miles away from the store they’re calling across the street. It’s insulting their intelligence.
What you need to do is hire a local company and will know a lot about your business. At the same time, the customers won’t have a problem with the person talking to them over the phone because they’ll think it’s working in your offices.
How is this beneficial?
Think about how you’d like to be treated when you call somewhere. You’d like answers right away and you’d like to get what you need in the shortest time possible. Let’s say you’re calling for information about real-estate. You’d like to know more about some property but it seems like all of the agents’ work hours have passed.
The only solution you have is to call the customer service and talk to a person over the phone. If this person takes too long to schedule an appointment, can’t find the properties you’d like to know more about, or have no information about them, then your call was just wasting time. See what annoys people mostly when they are calling companies here.
The owner of that company will lose you as a client because you’ll probably call someone else right away. If you get a better treatment you’ll make the deal there. Now imagine, the real-estate business is hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth. Losing a client is a big deal.
All this explains why you need to take care of every person calling the phone for getting information. All of them means a potential sale, no matter what you’re working with. You can be in the healthcare business, real-estate, selling products, construction, whatever, losing a customer is losing money.
Where to find such companies?
More companies are working with this matter. A simple search in Google or any other search engine will give you results of firms who are working in the call service business. Do some research about which one is the best and make sure you find one that is local.
Read some reviews on webpages who are specially made for this need and see if clients are satisfied with them. Those who don’t have top of the line employees capable to solve all problems that people calling on the phone have are simply not the best ones.
Understand that no one can manage to maintain 100% of keeping happy callers. It’s simply impossible. However, those who have the best record are the ones worth hiring.
Conclusion
With everything written above, it’s clear that managing calls after hours is not such a big deal. Every company must have someone responsible for this and hiring the pros is the best option you have.
Remember that happy clients over the phone are the ones that will be happy when they get to your office.
