3 Answering Service Software Features That Work (But You’re Probably Not Using)!

By now, you’ve probably been through the Specialty Answering Service portal, explored a few of the features, and focused on the features you use every day – like viewing your call log or updating your on-call schedule. As you continue to use the portal and take stock of what aspects are most important to you, consider that the SAS portal itself has some pretty powerful tools that you may not be using that can contribute to the success of your business as well as your outsourcing experience. After all, what’s the point of all of the bells and whistles we offer if they aren’t being used to your benefit?

We’ve worked hard to develop some useful tools that small businesses can use to create a more streamlined answering service experience for them, and an overall better customer experience for their own customers. However, it’s easy to overlook these features when the tools we do offer aren’t traditionally offered by answering services who offer a web portal or web access. Your outsourcing experience with SAS should be more than having us answer calls. That’s why you should take a look under the hood and at least use these three tools available in your portal:

Letting Callers Rate the Operators

On Specialty’s portal, not only can you listen to calls, rate operators and provide feedback, you can let your callers rate their operator experience as well. That’s right – your callers can directly provide feedback on the agents handling their calls right after each interaction. Once you’ve configured your survey, your callers will immediately get an email after each call where they can rate their experience from 1-5 stars, and even leave a comment if they want. If your customers do leave reviews, you can view that information in the Call Details view within each individual call.

How this helps shape your answering service experience:

• Allows you to gain insight into how your customers are experiencing the service.
• Their feedback helps improve the service and brings attention to issues.
• Hearing their feedback may lead you to make necessary changes that will streamline your workflow.

Already using this feature?

Here’s a few ways you can get more out of it:

• Add personal text to customize the message that is sent to your callers instead of using the standard text that is already in there.
• Allow your callers to leave their name and feedback on specific calls.
• Customize the survey by adding your company’s logo.

Dispatching Call Center Surveys

Dispatching surveys among your client base is a great way to not only gauge their experiences with your business, but you can also get their feedback on specific products to see what improvements can be made. Whether we’re emailing callers a link to your survey or if you’re posting the survey on your own platform, our goal is to make sure your customer’s experiences are nothing short of amazing. That means asking for feedback, and listening to the needs of your customers. With SAS, mining customer feedback has never been easier!

A post call survey can:

• Help you determine if there are products your customers would be interested in.
• Help you refine and improve any products or services that you do already offer.
• Help you determine how and where consumers are hearing about your company so that you can beef up marketing.

Great questions to ask in your survey are:

• How would you rate your experience?
• How did you hear about our product/service/company?
• What can we improve upon?
• Would you recommend us to a friend?
• What would you like to see from us in the future?

Already using the SAS survey app?

Here’s how you can get more out of it:

• Add alerts to be notified after each survey is completed so that you can follow up with customers quickly.
• Give your customers the option to take the survey via email or by phone.
• Create multiple surveys depending on the type of calls that are coming in. For example, new customer calls can receive one survey while existing customer calls can receive another.

Adding Call Status Labels

Whether you’re sharing your online portal access among your employees or you’ve set them up with their own access, adding call status labels is a great way for everyone to stay organized. For example, you can add custom status labels for each employee, and attach them to the particular calls in which those employees need to follow up with. So, Jan from Accounting will know which calls are for her without having to spend time sifting through each one.

Labels help you:

• Stay organized by differentiating calls between staff members or departments.
• Mark which calls you’ve already responded to.
• Prioritize call backs.

While these are just 3 examples of features within the Specialty Answering Service portal, we offer many other features that can help maximize a business’s performance, like on-demand reports and various app integrations. We always put our customers (and our customers’ customers) best interests in mind while trying to offer the best possible answering service out there, and we’d love to hear your feedback!