Answering Service That Keeps Its Promise

How much of your new business comes in because another provider was not doing answering  service that their job?  I recently did a client visit at a newer client, and was happy to hear he was very pleased with our services.  I recalled from my initial contact with this person (before he was a client) that he asked a lot of questions and seemed skeptical of the things I was saying.  I reminded him of this and his response was “well, it was hard to find an answering service that keeps its promises”.

I asked him to elaborate a bit.  Apparently he had engaged a few different answering services over the years and had some, shall we say, less than positive experiences.  The first one just got too many messages wrong.  It was usually small stuff, either the phone number, the spelling of a name, or the address.  But this made time-consuming extra work for him and his staff and, on occasion, look bad in front of prospects.  The next answering service that he engaged was more accurate, but they stuck to a very basic script and did not seem willing to accommodate his specific needs as the business grew.   The worst one was a service that simply stopped answering calls over a long holiday weekend, which is one of the busiest times for his business, costing him lost revenue.

A Common Issue Across Many Professional Services

As he shared these stories, I began to understand the skepticism from our first meeting.  And, although this example uses answering services as the offering, I don’t believe this scenario is very different from most other professional service business offerings out there.

It seems there are three types:  The first likes to compete on price – these are typically the lowest end service providers, they’ve commoditized their offering and don’t provide any real differentiating value so don’t expect top notch service from these guys – you’re just paying for a warm body.  The second  type is the sales driven providers, they will tell you just about anything to close the deal, but after all is said and done, the buyers from these providers often get that ‘over-promised – under-delivered’ feeling.  The third type is the service driven providers.  The primary focus of these organizations is to be the best in their industry or business niche, and they tend to have the longest, most successful client relationships.

We would like to think that we subscribe to the third type – after all, managing client expectations on a regular basis and working with them to understand their specific answering service needs over the entire life of the relationship is very important to us.  And maintaining the highest level of staff professionalism, along with meeting or exceeding all industry standards has been a core philosophy of our business for many years.

What are your thoughts?  Have you had similar experiences with service providers to your business that just didn’t seem to get it?   What is the factor that makes you say “okay, it’s time to look for a new provider.”  We would like to know your thoughts.

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Answering Services – Not All Are Created Equal