Selecting A Telephone Answering Service

Selecting a telephone answering service with all of the telephone answering services available on the market can be a daunting task. To ensure that you make the right choice, here are some helpful guidelines to follow when selecting your next TAS:

1) Match The TAS's Services With The Services You Need With Room To Grow And That Your Company May Need Later On. Its always better to have more options available to you than options that limit the scope of services the telephone answering service may offer. Every year, call centers are presented with a new array of service offerings from computer software and hardware manufacturers. These new systems offer a large amount of scalability when combined with network operations. For corporate clientele that receive thousands of calls a month, answering services in certain networks now have the ability to bind a number of smaller call centers together to act as one, even if they may be located throughout the United States. Standard services include virtual secretary, voice logging, message delivery, 24/7 customer support & emergency dispatching, a wide array of message delivery options, online account management, scheduling, and more. Partnering with an older telephone answering service could prove to be troublesome as scalability and service offerings will likely be limited.

2) Ensure That The Telephone Answering Service Has Some Level Of Redundancy, And Is Not Located In An Area Where Large Scale Natural Disasters (such as hurricanes/tornadoes) May Affect Service. You would not want to have your call center located on the coasts of any Southeastern states, nor would you want it to be located in tornado alley in the Midwestern states or in Northern states where a freeze may frequently damage power or telephone lines. If you have all calls pointed to a call center in one of these areas, and have automated forwarding for your telephone lines sent to them, it could take days to reforward the lines to a new answering service. A telephone answering service located at least 150 miles inland should be OK. Even these answering services that are located more inland are not immune from service disruption, and therefore, clientele should look to see if they have redundant systems in house. These redundant back up systems should include: backup phone lines, backup power systems, and backup computer systems.

3) Look for an answering service that has the latest training & operating software. The single biggest problem with a call center is that many may answer for hundreds if not thousands of medical doctors, plumbers, apartment complexes, and other professionals. Take for instance a medical answering service with 100 practices under it. Each of these 100 medical practices answered by the telephone answering service will be unique in how they want their telephones answered after hours. A good software package empowers telephone answering service operators enabling them to provide better answering services. For instance, the latest software has the ability to be controlled by the customer via the Internet. The medical practice using a medical answering service with the latest software can place a specific doctor on call, and the system can actually tell the operator to call the on call doctor if the system classifies the call as an emergency or tasks can be automated to alpha page/digital page/text message the on call doctor. Some systems are so sophisticated, they can remove a live person from the after hours emergency call handling process all together, though many medical professionals still try to keep a live person in the loop.

4) Telephone Answering Service Pricing and Quality Ratings. It should by no means be your only method of determining which telephone answering service to partner with. There are three types of telephone answering services you will come across with regards to their pricing:

The bargain basement, low cost telephone answering service is almost guaranteed to have the highest hold times, because they make the majority of their money on a volume basis. Expect your bills to be lower, but your customers to be flustered from poor service and longer hold times. The longer hold times of the low cost, high volume telephone answering service will cost your company sales, as most customers will generally hang up within 30 seconds if no live operator picks up the call. The average hold times for these high volume, low cost providers averages around 2 minutes during peak call hours.
At the other end of the spectrum is the high cost provider. It is likely you will have far better service, shorter hold times, more sales calls, and ultimately more sales, but you'll be giving a bigger chunk of those sales to the telephone answering service. Depending on your business, if you make a lot of money on a single sales conversion, the value inherent in a telephone answering service that knows what they are doing will make you far more money over the long run than a low cost, high volume provider. Even though this is the case, I do not recommend this type of provider.
The final position, and the one I thoroughly recommend, is the best value telephone answering service. This answering service will have some of the latest technology and good services, but will not charge you an arm and a leg. Telephone answering service pricing can vary based on which type of service you are looking for, and are broken down below:

1) Low Cost Provider - $.50-$.60/per minute
2) High Cost Provider - $1.10-$1.25/per minute and higher
3) Best Value Provider - $.70-$.95/per minute

One key element to remember when looking at the telephone answering service pricing is to make sure the call center charges on a per second basis. Some answering services charge on 6 or 15 second increments, highly devaluing the value of your call plan, and adding 10%-25% in hidden costs to your bill.


I hope this article has helped to thoroughly prepare you in finding the call center that best meets your needs. If you have any questions or would like recommendations on a telephone answering service, you can email me at lupitchr1@aol.com