Friday, April 29, 2011

Call Center Services - Reservations & Scheduling

Our reservation specialists help free you and your staff from this time consuming task so you can better focus on other objectives. You get an easy cost effective solution which saves time, prevents overbooking, and exceeds your client expectations. Please be sure to ask your answering service sales representative about the various solutions we offer. We can utilize your web site for reservations and we also offer an in-house solution.

Messages may be delivered in a variety of ways: hold for call in, call out (to cell phone, home phone etc.), digital page, alpha-page, e-mail, fax each as taken, voice mailbox, fax summary and e-mail summary.

Contact us today for more information: 1-800-645-2616 or http://www.answerfirst.com

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

International Answering Services

Today’s business climate and the introduction of the World Wide Web have transformed many traditional businesses into international businesses.

Our international call center can provide not only nationwide service in the United States, but international service as well. We provide toll-free service for inbound callers from selected countries and we also can make outbound calls on your behalf to any country. With clients in Ireland, Australia, India, Canada, Mexico, England and a host of others, our center has the experience and reliability necessary to provide you a cost effective solution which meets your need.

Our international service provides English speaking operators for your use. Efficient, friendly and helpful operators who consistently maintain a “May I Help You” attitude helps provide your business a solution to a variety of needs in the international marketplace. Plus, our U.S. based call center is open 24/7/365 and staffed with U.S. agents.

Here are just a few of the services we can provide for you:
  • Message gathering and delivery anywhere in the world
  • International answering service
  • On-call escalation protocols involving international employees
  • Patching callers to staff in international locations
  • Outbound Calling
  • Customer Care or Notifications
We provide international service on a 24/7 basis and can deliver messages or data by a variety of means. Calls, text messages, faxes, e-mails and web access are a few of the methods available to you. Billing for international service is simple and straightforward. The cost for international calls on a per minute basis is simply added to our normal charges. To get more information about the various per minute rate for countries, please give one of our account executives a call at 1-800-645-2616.

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Disaster Readiness

The best plan for your business in dealing with disasters is to be prepared before the disaster occurs. Disasters, natural and man-made, are sometimes unavoidable. AnswerFirst is uniquely positioned to help you respond, survive and recover when the unexpected happens. Unlike many businesses, our lights will be on during an emergency. We have full battery backup systems plus a diesel generator for long outages. We also have redundant T-1 and PRI telephone circuits to our center which are not reliant on a single vendor.

Avoid Downtime By Planning Today

As mentioned, the key to working through disasters successfully is to plan your response for them before they occur. Arrange to seamlessly redirect your calls to AnswerFirst. Let our agents act as your emergency communications go-between. Create a disaster readiness strategy with us that works well for your business. You may choose to have only our center as your disaster center or we can arrange for a redundant solution where another of our centers would be a “backup” for our primary center.

Here are a few of the services we can provide to you:
  • Employee Contact Center - Consider the business impact if your primary communications are inoperable and the affect it will have on your emergency operations. Vital personnel must first be made aware of an emergency before any emergency contingency plan can be put in effect. Communications are needed to report emergencies, to warn personnel of danger, to keep families and off-duty employees informed about what's happening at the facility and to direct response actions. How can you keep the lines of communications open in the event of disaster? How will you get in touch with your employees or they get in touch with you? Since disasters come in all shapes and sizes, it is important to plan for all possible contingencies whether the outage is short term or temporary in nature or a total communications failure. The best place to start is to analyze the everyday functions performed by your facility and the communications, both voice and data, used to support them.

  • Tier One Customer/Vendor Contact Center - How will your customers react if no one answers your phones? How will you keep in contact with customers and suppliers? How will they know when your services will be available again? Don't make the mistake of letting them guess what has happened, our call center can act as the temporary go between to keep you customers and vendors informed. Silence is definitely not golden in a situation like this, if you do not keep your customers informed, they are likely to start looking elsewhere for your type services. Automatically transfer your customer calls to our answering service and we'll keep your customers informed and happy.

  • Tier Two Customer/Vendor Contact Center - We can assist in keeping some of your primary business functions operational. We can re-direct shipments from vendors, process orders and serve your company in a variety of ways in your time of need. Talk to one of our sales associates for details about some of the custom solutions we can offer in this area.
There are many communication options available and the crucial factor is redundancy, do not rely on a single type of backup communication for all of your business functions. Should that single backup communication type fail in the disaster, you’ll have nothing to fall back on.

Contact us today for more information about how we can help you be prepared for a disaster.
1-800-645-2616

Thursday, April 14, 2011

Client Expectations

Is it most important that your callers are greeted by a friendly live voice thanking them for calling your company?? Is it more important that the information gathered from your callers be accurate and delivered in a timely manner? Of course, these things are important. You are not alone in your realization that the staff of a call center answering your business calls are the face of your business. Callers dial your phone number and a call center operator answers in your name; why wouldn't callers assume they have reached someone at your office?

While every business would like to have every call answered by a live person every time and while every business would like for all information to be totally accurate 100% of the time, business owners must realize that almost no system works perfectly. You know that even your own staff will make mistakes from time to time and you know calls can be missed on occasion by your staff, your staff is human after all.

So what expectations should you have for your call center or answering service? What is considered "quality" performance when gauging a call center's productivity? From a client perspective, excellent call center performance can be guaged by three main statistical criteria:

  1. Average Ring To Live Operator Answer - 2 rings or less
  2. Average Percentage Of Calls Answered By Live Operator - 85% or greater
  3. Average Length Of Hold Time For Callers - 45 seconds or less
At AnswerFirst, we maintain or exceed the three main citeria for excellence and try to make it as easy as possible for our clients to know exactly how we are performing on their accounts. Through our Client Web Access feature, clients have the ability to run a variety of reports in real time to guage how well we are doing. Not only can you see our performance statistically, you can listen to your calls, view your messages and web form submissions and view your account screens with this feature. We WANT our clients to know how we are doing. It is only through our client's feedback can we improve on our performance.

A quality call center can be an enormous help to many businesses, but have limitations just as any other business. Ours is a business powered by people and people can make mistakes. We think one of our best qualities is how we react to those mistakes to insure they are not repeated in the future. People are also our biggest strength; cheery, helpful and efficient operators can add immeasurably to the satisfaction of your clients.

Give us a call and discover the AnswerFirst difference: 1-800-645-2616

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

What Industries Do You Serve?

We provide answering services for businesses in almost every imaginable industry. If your business has a phone number we can help you. Here are just a few of the many industries that use our answering service:
  • Business Answering Service
  • Medical Answering Service
  • Legal Answering Service
  • HVAC Air Conditioning Answering Service
  • IT Support Answering Service
  • Funeral Home Answering Service
  • Property Management Answering Service
  • Real Estate Answering Service

Contact us today for more info about answering services, call center and virtual office solutions: 1-800-645-2616 or our answering service website.

Thursday, April 7, 2011

What technical support services does AnswerFirst offer?

Our technical support representatives will field your first level support calls transparently as though they worked directly for your company. For example, our agents can answer questions, log trouble tickets and issue registration keys. Our services allow you to make technical support available to your customers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Live call monitoring, review of call recordings and one-on-one training with our staff are all part of our comprehensive solution for specialized technical support accounts. Our nationwide call center is a fully web enabled, true 24/7 service, so you are never charged extra fees for holidays, weekends or nights. Our true one second billing also insures you never need worry about minutes being rounded up - you pay for EXACTLY what you use each month.

Contact us today for more information about our technical support call center services: 1-800-645-2616

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Do I receive a discount if my call volume increases?

With our call center you do.

Most services offer discounts for prepaid packages; these packages are very difficult to utilize because they require you to forecast your incoming calls. If you buy too many minutes or calls then nothing rolls over and you wasted money paying for services you didn't use. If you purchase too few, then you end up paying exorbitant overage fees. For example, if you sign up for 1000 minutes and only use 400 minutes, you'll have 600 unused minutes that don't rollover. If you sign-up for 1000 minutes and you use 1200, the additional 200 minutes are billed at a much higher rate than your package minutes.

Our billing system automatically discounts your rate EVERY billing cycle when certain thresholds of call volume are reached. For example, if 1000 minutes are used in a billing cycle your invoice will be automatically discounted to our 1000 minute package rate; there is no need to commit to anything. The higher the volume the larger the discount and you are not obligated to use any amount of minutes per billing cycle.

Just pay for what you actually use.

Contact us today for more info about answering services, call center and virtual office solutions: 1-800-645-2616 or our answering service website.