Improving Operations with a National Answering Service

Posted March 13, 2013 in 24 hour telephone answering services, national answering services by TechArk Support

To drive a successful organization on a long-term basis you need two national answering service basic ingredients:
1. You must be good at providing your primary offering(s) to your clients; and 2. You must continuously work to improve your operations. The first one is obvious. It is the easier one because it is typically something you are passionate about and enjoy doing. The second ingredient is not as easy because it has to do with ‘everything else’ needed to operate a business; such as the tools and technology, the human resources, compliance with the law and good management of working capital. Lack of this continual improvement of operations is what may sink a successful business or at least prevent it from reaching its full potential.

Focus on Your Best and Outsource the Rest

If you are a business owner or manager, you likely have multiple talents that have enabled you to get to this level in your career. However, you should know the operational areas that are not your strength or that you have less interest in working on. These are the specific items, tasks or roles that you need to outsource – either internally to qualified staff members or externally to a trusted partner with specific expertise in that area. By truly focusing on expanding your strengths and assigning out those other areas or tasks, you are able to reduce or eliminate many of the barriers limiting the success of your organization.

Fixing Neglected Areas of Operations

As a national answering service, we have learned over time that, for organizations both large and small, communications processes are one of the most neglected operational issues. Larger businesses have multiple departments, each with different priorities. In these environments, disparate communications methods quickly evolve per department, creating a very inconsistent experience for clients across the board. Smaller organizations are often challenged here because they simply do not take the necessary time to define and map out a detailed communications plan on a periodic basis. In both cases, when issues do arise, the typical approach is to make a quick patch to fix the issue, instead of stepping back and looking at the process strategically to identify the root cause of the communications issue.

Ask a Better Question

When we talk to a new prospect for our national answering service offerings, they are often looking for more information than just basic answering services. We hear comments like “we are considering a new phone system” or “we keep updating our voice-menu options, but we’re still having issues” or even “we just need a provider that follows our instructions”. In other words, they know they have communications challenges, and they have some level of frustration because they are not sure how to go about fixing them.

Prior to asking vendors about service offering bells and whistles, the right question business organizations should be asking themselves are “how do my prospects and clients really want to engage with us, now and in the near future?” The toughest part here is putting your personal preferences aside. Because there are so many options, the preferences of your prospects and clients may be any of the following: e-mail, live-chat, web-form, instant messaging, text message or even social media channels. However, given all these options, you can be sure that if they pick up the phone to call you, they want to talk to a live person, and not have to leave a voice-mail. This is where an answering service with a national presence can become a good partner in your communications process.

The Big Picture

Having the discipline to continually improve upon your organization’s operations is not easy to do; however all the successful companies I’ve engaged in my life have had that discipline. If you have an operational area where you’ve recognized a weakness, start with a basic question like the example above. This can help you get to the root cause of the weakness much quicker. And if that weakness is in the area of communications, you know who to call!
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