Sep 17 2008
Pick Up The Phone
As I start looking at a new business we are developing, I keep looking back at all of our existing services from email and databases to phones and telecommunications. While looking at the phones bit, we are more and more intrigued by hosted Voice Over IP, and are probably going to go with a service like that from Qwest. But, we are also looking at the staffing levels behind those phone. Something that we really hadn’t thought off until recently was to outsource the initial level of call answering and triage. This would not only mean our phones could be answered 24 / 7, which we don’t do know, but that we could reduce staffing internally because the cumbersome part of the call would already be taken care of.
As we started looking at the benefits of an answering service a few more advantages came to mind. First, with answering services there is enhanced disaster recovery since the equipment and staff is not physically located in the same area we are. So, whatever might hit us would probably not hit them. Second, things like all-hours 800 numbers and tie-ins with our web site are much easier to accomplish since we don’t have to worry about the hours and whims of our normal staffing.
For an example of what can be done with an answering service I went and did some research and came back impressed by Map Communications. Not only do they have a long history in the business, but they have a very impressive feature set. Sure, we could do all this in house, but to build all of that – especially in these tough economic times – just doesn’t seem like the fiscally responsible way to go.
Do you have any experience with outsourced answering services and call manager functions? Can you give me any feedback?
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Tags: answering services, call center, helpdesk, telecommunications
