Improve Lead Response Time with a 24 Hour Answering Service

Hi everybody! Steve here at Specialty Answering Service and today I’m here to talk to you about improving your lead response time with a 24-hour answering service. now when your leads are reaching out to you, they’re looking for something and they’re looking for it fast. So if you don’t have that quick and instant response time you’re losing business. I mean you’re practically daring your callers to call your competitor and you’re out of luck if your competitors have a quicker response time than you do. I mean the ability to get back in touch with your leads and that timing from their initial inquiry is crucial on your ability to close those leads. According to a study by the Harvard Business Review, businesses that were able to get back in touch with their leads within the first hour of their inquiry were seven times more likely to close that lead than businesses that weren’t able to get back in touch with them and got back in touch with them outside that first hour. If you want to take it a step further, businesses that were able to get back in touch with in that first hour were 60 times more likely than the businesses that got back in touch in over 24 hours. So as you can see timing really matters when you want to close those leads. Now of course you’re probably wondering, “What am I doing? I’m not closing all my leads within the first hour!” And you don’t have to worry because you’re actually in the majority because only 37% of businesses are actually consistently getting in touch with their leads within the first hour.

So you’re probably thinking “Alright. How do I get in that elite 37%? How do I get back in touch with my leads within that first hour so I can close them and increase my business?” Well I have a solution for you and that is a 24-hour answering service. And today I’m going to show you what solutions we can put in place to help you out and close those leads as quickly as possible.

So of course when it comes to reaching out to you and your team for those leads that are answering service with capture after hours we do realize that not every single call needs to come through to you and your team. We realize that your businesses are run by real people who are the other priorities and responsibilities outside of working. And, of course, nobody wants to be on the phone and on the clock 24/7. So we’re able to work with you to set up specific protocol so we can make sure that the calls that are being transferred over to you and your team are only there’s really urgent and important hot leads. And then those calls that are maybe not as urgent – some questions that we could answer for the callers they can be sent a different way.

So as you can see here, of course, those calls that are maybe a wrong number or like I said those basic FAQ’s that you can provide our operators to answer on your behalf, those maybe can just get a text message and email and they are free with our service. And, of course, you still have a record of that happening, but it’s not disrupting whatever activities you’re presently engaged in. But then, of course, as we get a little hotter, maybe it’s those messages that are being left for you, maybe not as urgent as those hot leads, but still something you may want to attend to. You can have the choice of whether those would be transferred or, again, just those written messages be sent to you. And then, of course, with those hot leads we want to make sure you’re able to close those leads right away.

So in those situations, of course, we suggest and what would be most beneficial from our experience is that transfer over to you and your team so you can get right on the line and close that lead before they potentially go and call one of your competitors or something along the lines of that. And, of course, we have many different ways that we can transfer calls to you and your team and I’m about to show you how that can be done

So there are many different ways that we can transfer those hot leads over to you and your team to make sure you can close this leads, of course, in the quickest way possible. Now the three I am going to outline for you today that we here at SAS can do for you are: A Warm Patch, Cold Patch and Reach.

So the first one, our warm patch, what that can consist of is the caller would call in to Specialty Answering Service we’d say “Thank you for calling, the name of your business, how can we help you?” and if it’s somebody who is looking for your services, wants to buy your product – whatever you qualify at your business as a hot lead. We want to make sure we get them right over to you and your team so we’ll take their name and their number and then tell them “Please hold I’m going to try to get a member of our team on the line for you.” So they’ll be put on hold for just a second with a little music and then we’ll reach out to you and say, “Hi I have John Smith on the line looking to speak to you about services, product …” like I said before whatever you qualify as those hot leads that you want to close if you are available to take the call. Then, of course, we’ll connect the caller right to you and we’ll, of course, be on the line to introduce the caller to you make sure both parties are connected and then once you guys are connected we’ll take ourselves out of the equation and then you two can continue to converse, close the lead and make sure that everything is handled accordingly.

Now the next option that you have is a cold patch. It’s very similar to the warm patch, it’s just a little different on when we would connect the caller to you or a member of your team. So, of course, just like that warm patch, caller calls into SAS same friendly and customer service oriented greeting, “How can we help you today?” And then after they’ve also announced that they have interest in your services or product, we, of course, want to get them right over to you again. But with this one what we will do is connect the caller directly to you. So the operator won’t stay on the line to introduce the caller. But, of course, this helps than the caller isn’t put on hold and gets right over to you and your team so you can handle the call, close the lead, and make sure everything is successful.

And then, of course, the third type of transfer we can do – it’s not as much a transfer, but it at least gets member of your team on the line so the situation at hand can be handled in a timely manner. And that’s a reach. So with this one the caller would call into SAS. “Thank you for calling how can I help you today?” And then once we gather their information that you’ve outlined with your customized call handling, we’ll let them know that we’re going to pass it along to a member of your team who can handle the situation and who will be right back in touch with them to help them with their situation. So then after this call ends, we then would begin a reach out to your on call. Now, that can be just one person, multiple people – or if you have a rotating on call schedule, we can, of course, implement that into your call handling to make sure they’re always reaching out to the right individuals. So, of course, are operator would first try to reach out to the first person on your own call schedule. If they’re available and take the call, we relay all the information to them. We can also send him a text and email you want them to have a written transcription of what we just told them. But then, of course, if that first person isn’t able to pick up and you want us to reach out to somebody else we can do that as well. You can have as many people as needed on that reach. Likewise, if we needed to cycle through your on-call schedule until we got somebody on the line because we know what those hot leads had that sense of urgency we can do that as well. So wish those reaches you can be as specific as possible with the protocol we need to follow to make sure that we get that lead over to you and that your team can take the appropriate actions to close that lead. Now, of course, if it isn’t one of those hot leads and it is one of the other leads – we, of course, want to capture those leads for you as well. And now I’m going to show you what we can do for maybe those calls that you don’t want to transfer after hours but you still want to get their information and get in touch with them to handle their situation

So, as I said before, not all of those calls that come in after hours or on the weekends require the action of a transfer because of course we don’t want to interrupt the lives of you and your workers when you have that time away from the office with family, friends, or just enjoying yourself and relaxing. But we do realize that you still want to capture that contact’s information and respond to them to, of course, deliver that quality customer service that you promise your customers, clients, and callers. So in the situations that don’t require a transfer, we have a number of different ways that we can get that information to you so that you can respond when it is most convenient for you and your team.

So, of course, like I said previously in the video – we can send texts and send emails to you and members of your team and there’s no limit to how many people we can send them to because they are free with the service to as many people as needed because we want to make sure that anybody who we can reach out to with that formation gets it so you can respond to your clients and callers right away. We also have the option to set up an integration with a system that you have at your business so that if it’s kind of to save you that step of data entry from an email message or a text message that we can send you. We could do a data push right into your system make sure everything is logged in a way that you and your team are used to. And, of course, as I said it saves you that time so that everything can be handled in the most timely manner possible.

Now what we do suggest if we aren’t transferring the calls to save those callers from maybe going on to your competitor or the next person on their list. We suggest that we let them know when they can expect your call backs. So some realistic return call times instead of just letting them know that someone will return their call. When it’s vague like that, they’re not sure if and when that will happen, but if we give them an accurate time to expect that, they’ll block that out on their schedule likewise prevent them from of course going down the list and calling out to a competitor that is in close proximity to themselves. We can also if you would like us to schedule out that call back. So just like that realistic call return time, they know when to expect your call and won’t be calling out to somebody else because they know that you’ll be calling them out at a particular time and date. They can put that in their calendar. Likewise, just like those integrations, before we do integrate with the number of calendars so I know if one for example Google Calendar very popular now we can schedule on there so that you have it logged for you right then and there as the operators doing it on the phone. So as you can see there are a number of different solutions specialty answering service can offer you to make sure you close those leads quicker than you’ve ever imagined before. And we know that there’s different ways of doing this which is why we allow you to personalize and customize how we’re handling your calls down to the detail so that we can match how we handle them as closely as we what can to how you and your team handle your calls.

So if you kind of want to find out how we can help you out feel free to dial the number I know it’s on the top of the screen just in case 888-532-4794. And if you want to go a step further, go ahead and request a demo with me or member of my team. We’d be able to walk you through our online portal as well as give you a brief overview of how we can help you out with your specific situation. Thanks and I look forward to speaking with you.