What's the deal with all these answering services?

Factual Questions
1

As I’m calling customers, I have noticed a huge increase in the number of answering services I get. Is there a reason for this? I just find it curious that in the age of cell phones, answering machines, voicemail, . . .it just seems arcane. Even pagers seems weird to me anymore.

I understand that some people believe in having a “live person” always answer the phone, but frankly a lot of time I have a detailed message I need to leave, and a lot of these women don’t seem too interested in writing all that info down. They aren’t all that friendly either.

I was just curious as to the reasons to still use an AS- is it maybe cheaper? or am I missing something . . .

2

I don’t know what kind of customers you’re calling–companies or individuals–but with ever more unwanted calls coming in, fewer people–myself included–want to answer their calls live. Simple as that.

3

I’ve had a similar experience with answering services. They can’t tell you anything (“When is the best time to call to speak to this party?” “I don’t know, ma’am, I’m just the answering service.”) and they don’t seem to want to take anything down other than your name and number, either. I’d rather navigate a voicemail tree, or just have no one pick up.

4

There are definite advantages in having an answering service instead voicemail.

  1. You don’t have to navigate the voice mail system deleting call after call after call.

  2. Important calls can be patched through immediately. No need to give out a cell phone, pager, or home phone number to people other than your answering service.

  3. Unimportant calls can be screened by the answering service. Just because they take your name and number doesn’t mean they actually have to convey this information to the party.

  4. Callers feel like they are talking to a human being and not a machine.

  5. Less expensive than a secretary or receptionist.

5

I prefer an answering machine or voicemail. In 7 years, I have only TWICE had answering services take a message from me. If they were to even pretend to take a message and then never deliver it, I would accept that but they almost never agree to take a message and almost never know when someone will be available at the office I’m trying to reach (and I’m calling during normal business hours, so why is there no one in the office anyway?), so I usually have to call at least two or three more times before I get hold of someone. At least with voicemail, I can leave a message and know that the person I’m calling will call back when they actually have time to talk to me.

6

I used to work for an answering service. The reason many of our customers wanted a live person rather than a machine or voice mail is that a machine can’t carry out complex instructions for handling calls. We had clients who constructed elaborate routines for call handling. Clients included everyone from plumbers and electricians to doctors and therapists handling suicidal calls. Can’t speak for any other answering service, but we also took messages as simply or as complexly as clients wanted us to take. We had clients who insisted that we take nothing other than a name and phone number. Offices would transfer calls to us over lunch or we would handle overflow calls, and would generally not give us detailed schedule information, so we often had little to say beyond “This is the answering service, I don’t have her schedule.”

7

Whoa, there, now. I manage an answering service. I can assure you that our services are much needed (ask the customers who have been with this company 15 years or more) and certainly not “arcane”.

If you’ve had problems with getting no information from an answering service, look at it this way: They pay us to answer their phones and relay the information they’ve given us to callers, or to reach them in the event information needs to be relayed to them. Most companies that use an answering service employ us in case there is an emergency. They don’t want a thousand B.S. calls waiting for them when they check in with us in the morning. Each company has its own protocols. In effect, we have as many bosses as we have companies to answer the phones for. They tell us what types of calls to take - and they don’t want to deal with any other calls, especially after-hours. For example, the three abortion clinics we answer for will only take calls from post-surgical patients, doctors, or hospital (thus, no hysterical women at 3 am screaming about how could the doctor have let her ruin her life this way - no, we get to deal with them instead). The small family-owned businesses we answer for, like the landscaping guy and the roof-deck people, get a break so they can go out to lunch and still have someone “in the office” to take their calls. The three wrecker services we answer for find it a lot cheaper to use us to dispatch their calls than to pay someone to sit in their building all night waiting on 2 or 3 calls they really can’t afford to miss (and to be on police rotation, they must have a LIVE PERSON to answer the phone 24 hours a day). The apartment complexes we answer for don’t leave their prices with us because they want to talk to you personally and tell you how nice the pool is before you hear that you’ll be living on a peanut butter diet after you move in. I answer for two Red Cross chapters and dispatch for two rural ambulance services. We also answer for some businesses that we do not screen calls for, like OB-GYNs and general practitioners who will speak with any of their patients any time of day, but will not allow us to take “office calls” or Rx refills, etc.
As for answering services not having the information you want, that’s on the company you’re calling. It’s their job to provide us with open/close times, out-for-lunch times, or whatever they want callers to know. If that information is not available to you through the anwering service, it’s because 1.) They checked out, left, got excited about leaving for the weekend, and didn’t tell us jack, or 2.) They don’t want you to know anything - particularly if you’re selling insurance, or should have called the office before it closed since you’re out of Xanax and taking off for vacation at 4:00 tomorrow morning. They figure you can call back tomorrow if it’s that important to you, because it’s usually not that important to them.
It’s irritating to be unable to get the information or help you need when you want it, but it’s equally irksome to be treated poorly by callers who should be venting their frustrations elsewhere (such as the office they’re trying to reach). We provide an important service (sometimes a matter of life or death in this rural area), and I love the work.

8

Jane, thank you for answering the question and if my OP came across as a slight to you in any way, I apolgize, it’s just that in this era of cell phones, I found it peculiar, but what you said made tons of sense. Just a FEW more questions: :slight_smile:

Can you give me an idea of how much it costs to have an answering service?

How do you go about getting clients?

What do you say to that abortion patient at 3 am after the fifth call when the doctor has not called her back?

Does the client call in for his messages? Or do you emial them?

Have you ever had someone hang up after saying they will not deal with someone that uses an answering service?

How many total calls do you field a day? How many people work for you? Do you work out of your home?

9

I think the OP was referring more to the mainstream and less to clients like doctors etc.

For example I work for one of the largest hotel companies. It was mandated by corporate that we always LIVE answer the phone than transfer to voice mail or take message.

This to me is stupid. Also because we tape all conversations when you call you get the standard warning "Thank you for calling the ACME hotel, you call may be monitored for quality purposes). Then it goes to the hotel operator then it goes to the department manager who if they don’t pick it up someone else will. Then we say so and so isn’t here would you like her voicemail or would you prefer I take a message. Then they say voicemail and we put it in there.

This frustrates so many people. I have worked there two years now and NO ONE NOT ONCE has ever asked me to take a message they all wanted voice mail.

It seems much better to go into the voicemail and say if you wish to speak to someone live hit 1. Our system can do this.

10

Well, you just found the person that can answer just about all of your questions, feel free to e-mail me if ya like. I’m a supervisor for an answering service in Austin, Tx. We have just been voted #1 by ATSI (Association of Telemessaging Services International) for the 5th year in a row.

Yes, you are correct, in this day and age of electronic gadgets and voicemail-hell, clients calling a business DO want to speak with a LIVE person. Yet, even when we, at the answering service DO pick up the line, we’ll often-times get the line “Oh, is this just the answering machine… I mean, the answering service?” How RUDE! You mention that “…a lot of the time I have a detailed message I need to leave, and a lot of these women don’t seem too interested in writing all that info down…”, I say “SHAME on them!” if they’re not taking the info from you and the (answering service’s) client requests it. Every once-in-a-while, I’ll have a person call up and leave a long, drawn-out, detailed message and I’ll be typing it down verbatim. Per my training, I verify the spelling of both first and last name, even if it’s just “Bob Smith”, by spelling the name back to the caller. I’ll verify the area code and phone number by repeating it back. In the case of the long messages, I’ll repeat it back exactly, only to be praised with “Hey, perfect, you do an excellent job! Wanna come work for ME?” This is the kind of call I live for…the one where the caller shows appreciation for all of your hard work. If you’re getting answering services with employees that provide sub-par work, then ask to speak with a supervisor, tell them what you were/weren’t happy with…maybe they’ll improve.

My particular answering service isn’t cheap, either, we’re probably the most expensive in town and have been around for just over 50 years. In regards to the cost, though, it’s probably cheaper and better to have the calls routed to us, where we can have at least 20 people answer your calls 24/7 than to have 1 person answering all of your calls.

When it comes to answering services not being able to tell you “anything”, hey, we can only tell you what our client has provided to us. And if they want us to tell you that they have four 2-bedroom units available for $1200/mo, then they’re probably gonna have to pay a little extra. Just don’t come yelling at us when you get there and there isn’t anything available, and the info we gave you was incorrect because the client neglected to update us (again). The basic client info we have is: Company Name, Phone/Fax #'s, Office Hours, (limited) Staff Listing, Services Provided and Address. When it comes to the information we’re supposed to get from the caller, it can be as simple as “Name & Number” or “Name, Number, Alternate #, Company, Regarding, Urgency, etc.” It all depends on how the CLIENT wants to set up their account…pretty-much customizable. Then there’s the PROBLEM CALLERS, our client can tell us “If John Doe calls up about that RX refill, take a message but don’t contact anyone, he has an addiction problem.” Or “If Mary Franz from #1034 calls, let her know I got her message, and the carpet in her unit will be cleaned as scheduled, she doesn’t have to keep calling.”

For those of you that have the attitude of “Oh, I hate answering services, they never give my messages to the company.” I’ve got some news for you, we’re giving them the message, they’ve just chosen not to call you back! Sure, we flub every once-in-a-while, a message will not get through according to instructions and slip through the cracks, but that’s a very small percentage considering that we take over 11,000 calls a day.

If you’re calling a service company after hours, you’re a fool if you think you’re going to speak with a tech right off the bat. Think of it, you’re at your home having your A/C worked on by a local company’s service technician. His cell phone rings and he stops working on your unit right there in front of you to take the call. The caller is another person down the street wanting to know if he can schedule a service call for the same night, get rate information, wants to discuss in detail what the problem could possibly be, and see if the tech can drop everything he’s doing to troubleshoot over the phone. In the meantime, you’re sitting there dumbfounded, in the heat, wondering when the hell the tech is gonna start doing the work you paid him for! Now you tell me, why is it a good idea to have an answering service to take and dispatch the calls accordingly?

In regards to some of the points RainbowDragon made:

  1. Some of our clients are set up so that we take the message in the computer system and then record it on the voicemail, too. If they check the voicemail and delete it by accident, they just call a check-in number, get a live operator, and we retrieve the original, keyed-in message. If they’re looking for a saved/non-saved message from 7 weeks ago, we can find it in a matter of seconds, versus them going through many of their own saved voicemail messages.

  2. If you’re a client that needs to be reachable, do you want your personal contact numbers being given to everyone and their grandmother? With a service, WE have access to the numbers and contact you on the calls YOU want to receive and that YOU consider urgent or an emergency. From a caller standpoint, imagine having to use a payphone and only having enough change to make ONE emergency call to the business. You call and get an ANSWERING MACHINE or NO ANSWER AT ALL. Other scenario is that you call the company, who happens to have an answering service. The HUMAN on the phone UNDERSTANDS your plight and <PARK>s you on the internal phone system until someone can be reached, or <PATCH>es you through to SEVERAL numbers UNTIL SOMEONE IS REACHED. These situations happen ALL THE TIME.

  3. I once had a caller that lived in an elegant highrise (condominium) complex on the lake, she said something like “Yes, I have an EMERGENCY.” I say “Okay, I’ll be glad to take a message for you and get it to the appropriate person to help you out.” She says “I’ve got company coming in this weekend, and one of the bulbs over the vanity in the guest bedroom is burned out.” Okay, now tell me, Mr Maintenance man, do you REALLY want an automated system to page out this maintenance call at 3:30am, or would you rather have a PERSON with COMMON SENSE think to themselves, “Hey, this can wait until the morning, I’ll put the message on voicemail, fax it, e-mail it (whatever).”

  4. You’re feeling suicidal (and yes, we do have clients with these types of callers), you call up your psychiatrist because you’re about to take an overdose of pills and need someone to talk to. Would you rather get a COLD, HEARTLESS recording, or the soft-voice of a compassionate person on the other end of the line saying, “Please, don’t do that. Let me get Dr So-and-so, I KNOW she wants to talk to you. Everything will be okay…normally we’d ask her to call you back, but let me see if I can connect you to her directly…”

  5. I think I already touched on the subject of cost

In response to Kat’s message, I don’t know how the services in YOUR part of the country are set up, but how in the HECK do they make their money?! If we don’t take messages, we have NOTHING to charge our clients for. I mean, sure, there are base rates and different billing methods depending on the complexity of the account, but our JOB is to TAKE MESSAGES. If we refused or didn’t do our best to get a message (without badgering the caller), then we wouldn’t be able to make any revenue and/or get new clients. I mentioned earlier that we can only give out the info our clients give us, if they’ve provided us with the office hours, I’m going to do my best to make sure you are aware of those hours. If they’re from 8a-5p and you call at 3:15pm, and the phone is FORWARDED (something that is CONTROLLED on THEIR END), that doesn’t mean they’re NOT IN the office. Hell, maybe they’re swamped or short-handed that day or need a sanity break from the phones, that’s what we’re there for. When you call, they’re phone will probably ring once before the forwarding goes into effect, if they feel like checking in for messages a few minutes later (since they KNOW someone called), so be it. If they don’t call you back, take a chill pill, they’ll get to you when they can.

Otto kind of hit the nail on the head with his comments. Due to our confidentiality agreement between the clients and our company, I can not disclose the names of the aforementioned, but you would be SURPRISED to find out who we DO answer for. I disagree with the statement about “just being the answering service”, though. We HATE that expression at our company. We have specific, positive phrasing that we’re supposed to use on EVERY call. If you ask a question we can’t answer, we’ll respond along the lines of “The person that CAN ANSWER that question for you is ‘out,in a meeting,at lunch,etc’. What is your number and I will ASK (not MAKE) them to call you.” We are NOT “just the answering service”, we have a great deal of responsibility handed to us, and we deal with people’s LIVES in life-or-death situations SEVERAL TIMES A DAY. If you call to relay a message to one of our client’s staff-members, and it happens to be regarding a death in the family, are we “just the answering service”, or someone you can depend on to compassionately tell someone that they’re father has just passed away? I had to do this recently.

Vinnie, you had a couple of questions, here are some answers:

  1. Not sure if you’re asking the cost of starting and operating a service, but I’m sure it’s pretty damned expensive. As for their services, hey, if you just want voicemail, a couple of dollars a month. Need us to live-answer your calls? Maybe about $120 a month, it all depends, as there is so much customization we can do.

  2. We do very little advertising, we get most of our clients via word-of-mouth from other satisfied customers. We’ve got a website, and if you did a search, I’m sure you’d find us listed in there somewhere. The good ol’ yellow/business pages is also another means of advertising that we use.

  3. ANY caller that has called numerous times can pretty-much only be told that we’ll be glad to take ANOTHER message for them and assure them that we’re following our client’s protocol/procedure for their particular type of call. Due to client confidentiality, we DO NOT DISCLOSE what method we are using, IF ANY, to contact the client, UNLESS our client has requested that we do so. Keep in mind that if you call and leave a message with an answering service, a client very well may tell the service to continue taking messages from the caller, but to not call out on it. Hey, THEY pay US to do what THEY say, not what YOU want.

  4. Our clients call in to pick up messages, we fax them on a per call basis or at their request, we’ll put it on voice-mail, page them, e-mail them…did I miss anything?

  5. I don’t get those “I’m not going to deal with a company that uses an answering service.” people very often; it’s few and FAR between. What, I guess they’d rather use a company that uses an ANSWERING MACHINE instead, huh?

  6. We get about 9-12,000 calls a day (last count). We’ve got a small “Mom & Pop” company with only about 70 employees, I think. I don’t work out of my home, the owners of the company own a building in downtown Austin, just west of the Capitol Building. Hopefully I’ll be able to telecommute via internet someday, so I don’t have to drive in this traffic.

Markxxx, we DO have some clients that we answer for like this: “So-and-so is out, would you like to leave a message with ME, or on their voicemail?” Giving the OPTION to the CALLER to continue speaking with a live person instead of a recording.

Okay, guys, that’s my .02 worth, finally, something I know A LOT about.

11

Vinnie, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude, I simply forgot about this thread.

Cost: Can be as little as $40 per month for charities, such as the local chapters of the Humane Society or PUFA, since we like them, or several hundred dollars for a complicated account or an office with several contact people (doctors or lawyers, etc.).

Marketing: We usually gain clients by word-of-mouth advertising. This is a small town (approx. 50,000), and there are only two answering services in town. The guy who owns the other one is a real turd, and everyone who lives here knows it. We also have a yellow page ad, and the owner of the A.S. where I work has placards on his Blazer. That’s pretty much it.

Repeat Callers: I’d tell the caller to try the local Crisis Center, or to go to the ER if she has a medical emergency. Furthermore, I’d advise her to stop calling me, since I probably jotted down her number the first time she called (before recognizing that it wasn’t a legitimate call). In rare cases, we have had to notify the police about harrassing/abusive callers.

Call Delivery: It depends. Some clients check in, some we hunt down when they get a call (ambulance services, mortuaries who have to pick up corpses, etc.). Some prefer to be emailed, some check in when their offices open in the morning.

Hang-Ups: No, I’ve never been told that someone wouldn’t deal with an answering service. I’m sure some people would prefer not to, but if they didn’t NEED the services and/or information provided by the companies I answer for, they wouldn’t be calling. Like I mentioned, this is a small town. It’s not always easy to shop around for what you need.

Call Volume: We answer over a thousand calls per day. We’ve gained several new customers this month, but I don’t yet have the call count for August. We are a small company, (a “mom & pop shop”, so to speak). We currently have three employees but are in the process of hiring a fourth. I do not work from home, but our phone systems can be tranferred to my or my boss’s home in the event of an emergency.

Sysop, obviously you work for a much larger outfit than I. Very little of what you stated is true for the A.S. where I work. Our goal is to take as few calls as possible; the vast majority of companies we answer for want it that way. It’s easier for everyone involved if the caller calls back at an appropriate time: we don’t have a thousand messages to deliver each morning, the office doesn’t have a pile of return calls to make when they could be dealing with other customers in the office or who called when the office was actually open (that makes it easier for everyone but the caller, no? ;)). Unless it’s an emergency, or you’re calling on an account that specifies we take every idiotic gripe or inquiry that rings the phone, we’ll be telling you their normal business hours and advising you to call back.

BTW, I love my job. If I’m sounding a bit harsh here please forgive…it’s been quite a week here at the answering service. :slight_smile: