Tips for Hiring 24 Hour Call Center Answering Services

So your business is growing big enough that you can’t handle all of your calls. You frantically try to make sure that you can treat every customer fairly and with the same customer service, but knowing you can’t keep up, you begin to look for options, and ultimately decide on the big move; hiring a 24 hour call center or answering service. But where do you begin? How do you pick the best 24 hour call center answering service? Well here’s where it gets tricky, and where these tips from Direct Line Inc – 24 hour answering service can help.

1. Make Sure Your Answering Service has Experience with Your Business Type
   This can’t be stressed more. You don’t want an answering service that can’t handle you as a client, or your customers. If you’re in web design, you want a support team and answering service that can assist customers with questions they may have about their websites, or other online issues that revolve around this for example. You don’t want to hire someone who has no experience with this, but just has call forwarding experience.
2. Find out About Their Call Process
   You need to know how the call center handles your calls. Do you want them to just be there as technical support agents? Do you want them to handle sales and other aspects? What about simply filtering calls to help you better organize which ones you need to resolve first? Or do you want it all?
   These are all common questions you need to put into a checklist and compare what companies offer the various scopes of call-handling you are looking for.
3. Check the Price
   Most of the time, these answering services will charge you either per call, or by the time their agents are spending dealing with customers. Live agents is what most businesses often go with. Remember that extra features usually increase the price that an agency is going to charge you for your services. If they have online e-mail and internet support, you’ll pay a lot more, as it’s the standard today for how most people actually deal with 24 hour support due to convenience. And with the price of convenience, the amount is always higher. If the 24 hour call center answering service you choose is open and always running on the holidays and weekends, make sure that you are getting charged the same rate you would get paid. Don’t ever pay extra just because they ask for it. If they offer to be a 24/7 service for a flat rate, then they should be just that.
4. Location, Location, Location
   Just like with any business model, location of your call center is one of the biggest factors that can affect your business. Hiring projects that are overseas may be a lot cheaper for you, but not only are you getting what you pay for, a lot of your customers want to talk to someone locally (no matter where you are from). Keep this in mind for future decisions on hiring a 24 hour answering service.
5. Make sure you have access to EVERYTHING.
   This is also crucially important. Your company is your baby, and the answering service’s job is to respect that. They are a service to you, even if your business is a service to your customers. Remember that you should have access to know where all of their data goes so you can access it at any time, and make sure that they are keeping your information and customer information private, don’t sell information to other third parties, and aren’t stealing and phishing information from you or your customers. This happens a lot more than you think, especially if you go outside of your country for a call center answering service.

Knowing everything that is listed above, you’ll be able to find the 24 hour call center answering service that suits your business needs better than anything else, and do things right the first time, rather than go with simple trial and error. Make sure the business you’re trying to go with is a top quality company, who does everything you want them to do, and for the right price.