Here’s what to look for before you hire an answering service to answer your emails.

How often do you use your phone to actually call someone? Based on mobile phone usage trends, the answer is, not as often as you used to. For people in the customer service industry, manning the phones isn’t the only station that needs to be monitored. In fact, these days 94% of online retailers provide customer service via email.

When it comes to managing email, 24 hours or less is generally considered an appropriate response time. But most customers expect a response in 6 hours. If you are a small business owner who is juggling a bunch of responsibilities, you may not have enough time to get to all of your emails in a week, let alone 24 hours. The good news is that there’s a solution: email answering services.

When it comes to inbound email response, there are plenty of online answering services that can lend a hand. So what should you look for? Well, it depends on your needs. Here are 6 things to consider:

1. Does the service provide 24/7 coverage?
2. Can agents personalize responses based on your FAQs?
3. Are agents able to open helpdesk or support tickets via your CRM?
4. Can agents escalate service issues to on-call personnel?
5. Can agents enter new email orders into your online database?
6. Can the service also answer your phone calls?

It’s definitely in your best interests to ensure whatever service you choose offers a free trial period. If you are considering SAS, we offer a free trial and can respond to any emails dropped to our system the same way we would respond to a telephone call. Here’s a bit about how our system works.

1. We provide you with a unique key.
2. You would transfer any emails to us via our API. You can do this as am XML post or as a form post where the XML post requires a collection of fields + the key.
3. The post will drop into our system and the agents will handle it immediately as if it was an inbound call.
4. How we handle the call will be based on your call script.

For more information about our capabilities as an email answering service, please contact our sales team at sales@specialtyansweringservice.net.