Call Answering Costs
Call answering costs vary a great deal depending on the type and level of call answering service you need. Costs can be as little as nothing at all for a basic voice mail service to thousands of dollars per month for a dedicated 24-hour answering service. No matter your requirements, you should be able to find a plan with call answering costs that you can afford.
Let’s start from the bottom. If you’re a small business owner who needs voice mail on a few extensions in the office, the ability to receive incoming faxes, and maybe even call forwarding to your cell, you can pay as little as $20 or so per month for a comprehensive package that will give you everything you need. You’ll need to have someone record your greetings, and it won’t be as polished as the major interactive voice response systems you deal with when you call for your phone service, but it will get the job done at a reasonable cost.
Call answering costs rise steadily from there, especially if you need your calls to be answered by a human. Unfortunately, companies that provide these services are reticent to list their prices publicly. They prefer to talk to you directly to create a custom package or explain their options to you on the spot. Of course, this makes things more difficult to quantify and generally puts more pressure on you as the potential customer.
In any case, the most affordable packages are for shared answering services. This is where your business is shared with several others in one call center. Though more cost effective, you’re obviously not going to receive the dedicated attention you would if you had even one person solely committed to answering calls for your business. However, call answering costs for these packages are significantly lower than those for dedicated packages. They typically start at 300 minutes of talk time per month and go up from there. If your business is growing, and you need after-hours support but don’t want to hire someone to come in every day and jump through the logistical hoops of coming into a building after hours, etc., then one of these shared packages is probably perfect for your business. These are generally better for support than sales, as these operators aren’t trained salespeople, but if you need the ability to take orders at all hours but don’t think you’ll get very many, the call answering costs of one of these shared packages could be well worth it.
Finally, if you’re a larger business that needs a dedicated call answering staff to take orders, provide support or forward vital messages, you’re going to pay the highest call answering costs, especially if you need this help 24 hours a day. Prices for these services are hard to come by without undergoing an initial consultation with a company to determine your needs. But as a larger business, the services these companies provide will doubtless pay for themselves several times over in increased sales and customer retention for your business.
