In 2024, businesses face a predicament: how do you provide consistent customer service on a 24/7 basis? More importantly, how do you do that without the costs of hiring a customer service team to work around the clock?
Outsourcing your customer service to a call answering service – using real people or AI – gives businesses the freedom to scale up their customer service without the massive overheads of an in-house team.
And that’s ultimately what all of these services are about. They give businesses the customer service clout of a multinational corporation without the usual staffing costs.
But which is better for your business? In this article, we’ll explore:
- The differences between virtual and automated receptionists
- Which is right for your business
- Quick tips to help you get the most from either service.
Coverage
Most businesses first realize they need an answering solution when they get messages about missed calls and complaints about wait times. And regardless of why you missed it – due to high call volumes or the call coming in outside of business hours – a missed call can cost you.
Customers expect businesses to offer round-the-clock coverage but also want real responses from real people. 78% of people prefer to chat with a person, be it by phone, live chat or email, instead of a bot.
Response times
How fast do bots answer? Pretty fast. In conversation, phone chatbots often leave a delay after being asked a question. That’s partly to ensure the customer has finished speaking, but it’s because rapid responses can unnerve people. People want to feel like they’re talking to a real person, even when they’re actually speaking to a chatbot.
Likewise, bots can respond almost instantly to questions in live chat conversations. But again, people are put off by the immediacy. To counter this, chatbot programmers include an option to add “bot delays.” Bot – or message delays, as they’re also known – allow you to specify the time (in seconds) a bot waits before it sends the next message in the queue. These are often accompanied by “typing” bubbles to make it seem the chatbot is crafting an answer from scratch.
Businesses without chatbots can take between 3 rings of the phone to 30 minutes, depending on their system. AnswerConnect answers 98% of calls within four rings. That’s essential to customer satisfaction, with 82% of consumers rating an immediate response when they have a marketing or sales question as important or very important.
But the real question is, how quickly do both options resolve a query or issue? The answer will define which solution offers the best customer experience.
Customer satisfaction
Customer satisfaction is the key differentiator of your business today. As Jerry Fritz said, “You’ll never have a product or price advantage again. They can be too easily duplicated. But a strong customer service culture cannot be copied.”
Chatbots can provide some level of satisfaction. Chatbots offer a quick solution for smaller businesses who struggle to answer calls in under five minutes. Perhaps most importantly, they seem a better alternative than letting the call ring out.
But are chatbots really better than nothing? A 2021 international survey into consumer attitudes to AI has the answer: over 35% of consumers say automated services never resolve their problems. And while a quarter of consumers think AI is improving customer service, 45% think it’s making the experience worse.
Versatility
People are adaptable. Bots operate in a binary sense. Despite all the improvements in AI in a relatively short time, it still lacks a person’s versatility. Sure, AI is more capable of recognizing, processing and responding to different accents, syntax, and language than ever before. But it’s still nowhere near a real person’s comprehension level.
Take Facebook Messenger’s automated ‘M’ chatbot. Initially launched using a combination of automated replies and human input, Facebook envisaged M as being entirely AI-powered within a few years. However, the platform never surpassed 30% automation, even at its maximum capacity.
ROI
In business, cost informs every decision. But the price of a product or service isn’t a true measure of its value. So, how does the return on investment between a virtual receptionist service and an automated chatbot stack up?
The cost of an automated chatbot service varies according to several factors.
In comparison, virtual receptionist services tend to price per call or minute.
Ultimately, you need to figure out how many sales you make a month before adding any kind of answering service and how many you’d need to make after setting up the service.
But you also need to consider how it will affect your existing customers. Run customer satisfaction surveys before and after launching your answering service. It’s difficult to quantify what increased customer satisfaction means in terms of ROI. But, it’s worth considering what impact (if any) it could have on extending your customer lifetime value.
Lead capture and qualification.
Gathering lead information is like drawing a breath for your company; without it, you won’t survive. After all, if you can’t collect information accurately, how can you give callers definitive solutions to their queries?
For industries such as healthcare, patients can be more likely to divulge sensitive information truthfully than when speaking to a real person. But for other sectors, an AI responder’s anonymity can encourage people to leave false information.
AI still has a narrow range of data-gathering tools, often offering callers just a limited number of options. But real life is often far more complex than a narrow range of choices. Only people can interpret the huge range of information in the diverse ways of communicating that information.
How to get the most from an answering service
- Set clear objectives before writing your script – What do you want to achieve from this? Most people simply want their calls answered, but you can expand this to include conditional transfers and lead qualification, among other actions.
- Identify your elevation process – Who will you transfer calls to in your team? Of course, that depends on the nature of the call. Is it a lead enquiring about a service or an existing customer calling to complain?
- Keep it simple! – There’s a temptation to add as many different scripts as possible to cater to every possible scenario. But your answering service works best when it fulfills clear objectives. Plus, when the answering service uses real people, they can adapt to hundreds of unscripted scenarios while staying on-brand.
Conclusion
Ultimately, it’s up to you what solution is best for your business. However, the data is unequivocal in the importance of offering real responses. People prefer it, and many countries are already drafting laws that make it a legal requirement to have a real person available for callers.
AnswerConnect’s huge team of customer service experts is on hand 24/7 to give callers a professional response. Want to find out what people-powered customer service can do for your business? Book a consultation with us using the link below.
