Hiring an answering service to take calls for your business is easy, but making the relationship successful takes a bit more effort. As unfortunate as it may be, you can't just have another company start taking your phone calls and expect everything to go smoothly.

The answering service is an extension of your business

The fact is, when you outsource your calls to another company and have them work on your behalf, they become an extension of your business. It's true that they are an independent company, but if they're viewed that way the relationship is destined for failure.

Here's why: they are doing tasks that you would normally do in your office, or tasks that callers expect to be handled by your office, so giving them some vague instructions and sending them on their way doesn't mean that they €get it.€

Would you hire a new employee, give them a handbook, and then expect their work to be on par with the rest of your staff? Probably not. For the same reason, you can't expect an answering service to be able to do everything up to your standards right out of the gate.

Treat the answering service like you would a new employee or a new position within your company

In order to get the most out of your answering service partner, you need to treat the relationship like you would a new employee or a new position in your company.

Using the new position analogy - imagine setting up a new customer service position in your company. This new position will be responsible for handling customer service calls and other telephone related tasks.

Now, when you're setting up the position, you likely have a lot of ideas regarding what the position will be responsible for and how they should go about their work, so you write it down and document it. That's a great start, but it's far from perfect. Until the position is in place and people are actually performing the work, it's hard to cover everything.

There are going to be customer service situations that you never thought of; customers are going to react poorly to a specific procedure that you put into place; the technology you planned to use for everything will end up only working for half of the tasks; steps will be missing from different procedures. A lot of this stuff will be easy to fix, but it takes time and your procedures will continually be refined.

You have to be patient and take time to refine the relationship

Just like a new position in your company, the answering service will need some time to work the kinks out. If you notice they aren't handling a certain call correctly, you'll need to speak with them and go over the instructions. Perhaps there were some steps missing.

If customers aren't responding properly, they may need educated on the answering service's role and why they are important. Instead of making a hasty decision and choosing to end the relationship with the answering service, you may just need to inform customers that you're changing your business processes. They'll often understand.

In summary, choosing to use an operator answering service can be extremely beneficial for a variety of reasons, but it takes time to integrate them into your business and fully define their role. Nothing goes perfect the first time around, especially when it comes to outsourcing a part of your organization.