How an Answering Service can Give Smaller Businesses an Edge

Just because larger businesses have more resources doesn’t mean they have the edge over small businesses in every area of operations. In fact, there are quite a few areas that small and mid-size businesses have an advantage over their larger counterpart, and chief among these is customer service.

First, there’s the simple matter of size. The larger the company, the more they’re going to be bogged down with customer service issues, and the more people who are calling in to customer service lines, the less likely they are to get truly personal and helpful service, for a variety of factors. For one, it’s easier to get put on hold when calling into a larger company’s customer service line. For another, representatives who deal with customers having the same issues all day long are more likely to get burnt out, and therefore give less effective service. Smaller companies who use an answering service avoid both of those problems.

Small businesses are also nimbler than their larger competitors, in the sense that they are able to make business decisions much faster. Larger businesses need to pass potential decisions along a long chain of command and likely need various different ranking executives to approve them, but smaller businesses or startups can make the same decisions quicker since they don’t have as many people to pass through.

This idea of “nimbleness” is important when it comes to customer service, because it makes it much easier for smaller businesses to make changes they find necessary after reviewing their service records. For example, if groups of customers continually come to the business’s answering service with the same concern, they can address that concern in a quicker and more efficient manner than larger businesses can.

Finally, with larger companies, customer service representatives don’t have as much room to be creative or personal with clients. Every single representative is trained to follow standardized protocols and told to never deviate from them. With a smaller business, representatives can take more time to get to know their customers and treat them in the way that best benefits both the customer and the business, while still following the customer service guidelines that the business set in place.

So if you own or work for a small business, don’t worry! Using an answering service like TeleDirect can give you a leg up over even some of your largest competitors. Contact TeleDirect today to find out more about the kind of services that we provide to our clients.