Business Call Answering
Business call answering is the primary function of call answering services. Most people can get by with voicemail or a centralizing service like Google Voice for personal use. However, business call answering is a little more complicated.
There are a few possible uses for business call answering. It can give those who are on the go and regularly receive critical calls a way to receive these calls or messages filtered precisely the way they wish. Businesses who need to support customers can use interactive voice response systems, (IVRS,) alone or in combination with call answering services to point their customers in the right direction or route them to an appropriate representative. They can also use these same systems to provide relevant information to their customers without the need for human intervention. Businesses that sell products advertised 24 hours per day can use call answering services to take orders around the clock. There are as many applications of these services as there are businesses to use them.
A growing trend in business call answering is to use an IVRS equipped with text-to-speech functionality to deliver current, relevant information to callers without the need for live human operators. In some cases, these systems are combined with voice recognition to make a relatively seamless information retrieval service. Voice recognition technology is still a little rough around the edges, but you can look forward to seeing more of this type of system in the future.
More traditional business call answering services involve a standard IVRS capable of routing calls to the appropriate department or location. You’ll hear this system in operation at just about every business you call today, big or small. The merging of telephones and computers means that most of these systems can be accessed from a computer. In fact, some companies used software-based telephones, which are software programs running on a standard PC operating system like Windows or Linux. The user can interact with these systems the same way they would any computer application.
Business call answering also includes services that will route your calls to a human 24 hours a day. This is helpful for specialized, critical businesses, such as doctors, equipment repair technicians or companies that sell niche products. Callers are immediately greeted by a human, and this person prioritizes the caller’s business accordingly and either forwards the call to the appropriate party or takes a detailed message. Companies using these systems to take orders merely need to provide answers to basic questions, and these business call answering services will do the rest.
Business call answering is the bread and butter of call answering services. The explosion of technologies and services that allow businesses to receive most of this functionality for little or no cost has hurt call answering companies, but there will always be enough business call answering requirements to keep most of these companies alive and well. Though computers are getting better and better at prioritizing calls, we have a long way to go before human call answering services will be threatened by automation.
