5-Point Checklist in Finding the Best Professional Answering Service in Brisbane

A quality professional answering service in Brisbane could be everything your business needs in order for it to be able to scale up its operations, as well as to improve its overall telecommunication services. Finding the right professional answering service to invest to often means balancing a number of factors for your business.

The good news about hiring a professional answering service in Brisbane is that they can adapt to almost any industry. It doesn’t matter what type of company you run, they can help to elevate your customer service and the level of professionalism throughout your company.

In this article, we will detail what a professional answering service entails and how you can go about choosing the right telephone answering service for the needs of your company.

What is a Professional Answering Service?

A professional answering service ultimately comes down to a definition that involves a telecommunications service provider that can process incoming telephone calls. These businesses work at taking messages and then delivering them based on the instructions of a customer. Unlike an answering service that implies the use of a recorded call, there are an actual person on the end of the line that will process the calls, relay them and more.

A virtual office in Brisbane can often work to relay the most urgent calls directly to upper-level management within a company. They can answer some of the early inquiries and cut out some of the simplest communication calls for frequently asked questions within a company.

The ultimate goal of a telephone answering service is to screen calls in order to protect company personnel from the least urgent calls that come in. With a real person available to answer urgent calls and to screen calls, a company can have almost like an off-site secretary or front office personnel to prevent excess traffic to the company phone lines.

These types of professional answering services can alternately make a company seem much more professional and it can free up a lot of extra time for company officials to run the day-to-day operations. Most professional answering services are made up of career-oriented staff using highly advanced equipment to answer the phones for the companies that they represent. The companies can remain open for extended amounts of time to ensure that the companies they are representing as operators are able to offer 24-hour customer service. The process monitoring delivers reports directly to business owners to help them track the number of issues pertaining to the provided service.

Staff training and performance measurement also ensure that the quality of the calls and the scripts from a virtual receptionist in Brisbane are properly monitored each step of the way. The goal is to have a service that will be regularly monitored and delivered based off of the quality standards of the client.

A professional answering service can cover a number of different functions within a company as well. An organization can commonly use one of these answering services for setting info like appointment setting, schedule management, emergency call management, ongoing messaging, sales support, customer service, ongoing order taking, product and service support, and more.

Your 5-Point Professional Answering Service Checklist

If you want to make sure that you're getting your money's worth with a professional answering service, you should strongly consider the idea of using a professional checklist when you are finding the best in answering services for your company. There are usually five main points that companies typically judge a professional answering service on. The five main aspects that you should be judging any professional answering service on should be some of the following:

1. Finding reasonable upfront pricing. Any call answering service needs to have legitimate pricing upfront when it comes to their charges and the services that they have to offer. Pricing shouldn't have any type of hidden charges or special setup fees. Extra cancellation fees and contracts can often affect the payment services and this is why simple upfront pricing is such a requirement.
2. Privacy and confidentiality agreements. Any employee needs to have an established privacy and confidentiality agreement in any answering service. When taking calls from another company, it’s very important that the confidentiality of each call is properly monitored. A virtual assistant in Brisbane service provider needs to have nondisclosure agreements and ensure that confidential information will be properly handled. This is the only way that you should proceed when hiring an answering service company.
3. Training. The staffs need to be appropriately trained in call answering and ready to handle the demands of your industry. Call agents often need to be properly equipped with an ongoing knowledge of the industry. With proper training, the team will be able to properly solve any problem and provide excellent customer service no matter what type of industries they are going to be working in. A call center staff with proper training will often be able to deliver a much more streamlined service that is better directed for the objectives of an organization. They can deal with difficult customers and they can practice good etiquette over the phone to work as great representatives for your company.
4. Services and features not offered by the competition. If a telephone answering service in Brisbane can offer features that are not offered by the competition such as 24-hour call answering, reporting or other features, this can often lead to a big reason to choose their company over some of the other options you might have. Features like call screenings, reports that you can view at any time or appointment-setting tasks are all good indications when you decide working with a company.
5. The ability to work holidays or off hours. The ultimate goal of having a call answering service for your company is to be able to answer customer inquiries over the phone during a holiday or during your off hours. There are many companies that can offer this type of service but sometimes on holidays, you may be forced to pay some extra fees. If you could work with a company that has just a basic contract that covers you for holidays and off hours, it can often be a much cheaper experience for your answering service experience.

How Much Would it Cost to Get a Professional Answering Service in Brisbane?

The cost of offering 24-hour customer service and having call answering for your business may actually be far less expensive than you might think. If you already have full-time employees manning the phones within your company, you might be able to get access to a much more flexible solution through a professional answering service.

Working with a professional answering service can cost as little as $20 a month to reserve the service and then $2.80 will be added for every call answered by the service provider. You can get up to 50 calls per month for $115 and for a larger business, you could get up to 1,000 calls in a month for just $1,750 per month. These prices are significantly less than paying a full-time receptionist over the course of the month. Getting access to a skilled and professional answering service could easily be within the scalable budget of the company at any size. As you continue to upgrade your abilities as a company, you can eventually work on getting a professional answering service in Brisbane where the availability of service can simply scale along with your needs as a company.

These services can be especially helpful in a small industry or with a startup company because you can have the vast majority of your service inquiries handled by a professional off-site while you handle day-to-day business operations.

Why Should I Choose Virtual Office Brisbane by Virtual HQ?

If you are looking for one of the most celebrated virtual office answering services in Brisbane, you may strongly want to consider going with Virtual HQ. The company has a number of reasons why they should be considered as your virtual receptionist of choice. Some of the top reasons that you should consider choosing Virtual Office Brisbane by Virtual HQ can include:

• • Simple setup process. Getting started with a brand-new telephone answering service in Brisbane can actually be quite simple. You can register with virtual office Brisbane and begin with a seven-day free trial so that you could see exactly what their professionals are capable of. The trial number can actually serve as your main telephone number to divert incoming calls and to help you control every aspect of your customer service. After you've gotten used to the system, you can sign up for one of their comprehensive plans to have messages relayed to you or have ongoing scripted responses to inquires. You can receive SMS messages for various alerts or even checking on the progress of the answering service online.
• • Professionalism. Virtual Office Brisbane is a highly professional telephone answering service. They work with small businesses around the world, as well as with major corporations. When you need assistance in answering various sales inquiries or you have a need for taking on incoming telephone calls, the company can adapt to your industry into the script that you have outlined. You could have a wealth of calls and unique improvements for your business all handled through the use of virtual secretaries. This can save you time with your ongoing telephone calls and day-to-day operations.
• • Scalable and skilled team. There are Brisbane and Queensland-based receptionists who are highly skilled with their jobs. As trained experts in their field, local Australian receptionists available are here to help to make sure that everyone gets the same quality of service and ensure that a professional handles every phone call. This ensures that all of the incoming calls can be properly focused and without the use of outsourcing. The company has over 4,500 happy customers and they have a large call center that capable of handling the needs of enterprise-level businesses all the way down to small start-ups. There are also a variety of services to choose from, which includes 1300 numbers in Brisbane and virtual address in Brisbane to help ensure that your business can operate with as little manpower as possible.
• • Options for your calls. Offering a scalable service that's all covered under various contract options, it's possible to have access to the chance to deal with ongoing calls in a number of ways. The ongoing calls and changes made can be customizable to the needs of each customer. Every customer can have direct call transfer to other phones, SMS message delivery on certain types of messages, ongoing info collection on each caller as well as the chance to transfer calls to colleagues for advanced level inquiries within the company. These types of customization options can help to save time within a business and make sure that there is always the option to improve efficiency at every level of your company.
• • A prestigious number. Having access to a 1300 number can alternately make your business seem much more established. With the help of a phone answering service in Brisbane, you can make sure that your number is instantly ported over to a 1300 number so that you can seem more like a major corporation. A prestigious number can make it seem as though you've been in business over many years and that your company has gained international attention. Setting up one of these numbers for call forwarding is possible within minutes through Virtual Office Brisbane.

With some of these top support items, you could be up and running with a virtual answering service for very low fees within just a few minutes. Save time today and offer a better level of customer service with virtual answering services!

You may also want to read the article from the previous month titled “Ultimate Guide: After Hours Answering Service in Brisbane.”