Posts Tagged ‘answering services’

Meeting the Needs of Hospice Care Agencies

Monday, March 28th, 2011

Home-healthcare call answering Hospice care centers have their own specialized needs when it comes to call handling but one thing is certain — every call must be answered. 

 ”Our clients need to be able to talk to a live person 24 hours, 7 days a week,” says Michelle Garcia, Office Manager of Pro-Care Hospice in Oxnard, California, “So Alert covers our phones after hours, on the weekends and sometimes during regular business hours if needed in case of an emergency.”  Hospice and home-healthcare callers can be patients or family members reaching out for advice and counsel during very stressful times. Alert’s agents are specially trained to treat these callers with great care, understanding and respect. Not only are they knowledgeable about the industry, but our agents understand the different types of questions and concerns hospice patients and their caretakers have. We also provide bilingual services at no extra charge, making it easier for callers to communicate needs or concerns. 

Alert’s customized call protocols ensure agents capture all critical information and handle each call appropriately, based on the callers answers to questions. We also provide customized client call reports that show the caller’s information and needs, who was contacted and the response time. 

“The customized reports are a great way for our agency to have a tracking system that corresponds to our on-call nurses notes to make sure all situations were handled in an appropriate time and manner”.

Alert’s trained agents are a critical link between hospice care centers and their clients. Our services are only a phone call away, 24 hours a day, for hospice patients and their caretakers.

Frances Starr, Director of Sales & Marketing for Alert Communications.  Alert Communications provides 24/7 call answering support including: physician answering service, hospice answering service, home healthcare answering service, and medical equipment supply answering.

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Call Answering Services in Real-life Terms

Friday, August 13th, 2010

Whenever I talk about the benefits of call answering services, I feel like I’m running through a list of bullet points. Those benefits are hard to convey in real-life terms. A while back, though, I received an e-mail that did a great job of doing just that. Let me tell you the story.

In early February, a 17-story building in the Northeast caught fire. The police needed barricades to close off the street to traffic. That call came through a call answering service.

The fire department needed the transit authority to send buses to help evacuate the people from the building. That call, too, went through the same call answering service.

When the Red Cross needed to provide water and shelter for the tenants, that call also went through the same call answering service.

Many residents of the building had pets suffering from smoke inhalation, and they needed a veterinarian. That call went through the same call answering service.

After the fire was put out and the barricades were taken down, a contractor was needed to clean up the debris. That call, too, went through the call answering service.

When salt and sand were needed to spread on the streets to prevent icing, the call for the trucks went through that call answering service.

When the electrical safety authority had to restore power to the building, that call also went through the same call answering service.

Calls from evacuees wanting to know if they could go back home were handled by that same call answering service.

Sadly, in this case, when two lives were lost, and they needed the coroner, the call answering service took that call, too.

It’s easy to think about call answering services handling after-hours phone calls, but when you see the reality of how the service unfolds, it takes on a whole new meaning. The woman who wrote the e-mail about this incident not only works at the call answering service that handled all those calls, but her mother was a tenant in the building that caught fire that night. For her, the benefits of call answering services will never be just a list of bullet points.

Frances Starr, Director of Sales & Marketing for Alert Communications.  Alert Communications is a 24/7bilingual inbound call center, specializing in professional attorney answering, virtual receptionist, Spanish answering and business answering solutions.

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High Praises to Our Legal Receptionists

Friday, May 7th, 2010

This past weekend I attended a tradeshow promoting Alert Communications’ attorney answering services. Based on the traffic at our booth, I’d say it was very successful. Many well-qualified candidates interested in using our services stopped by to ask questions and learn more. But since I would like some sales figures to confirm our success, I won’t make a final decision until we’ve done some follow up, and I see those final numbers in a few weeks or a month.

As I said, we had a lot of traffic. The people were very nice and had a lot of great questions to ask us. Are you available 24/7? Do your agents speak Spanish?  Can you schedule appointments for me, and how do you do it? What makes your service different from other call centers/answering services?

All the visitors spent a lot of time explaining their situation and gave us a chance to tell them how our lawyer answering services could truly help them. But guess what the most popular question was — How much is it?

That same question was asked in a variety of ways. I quoted rates, explained our services are month to month and did my best to help them see our value. I made a point of explaining that our attorney answering services are designed to help them capture new clients they might otherwise lose. And I pointed out that  additional business would pay for the cost of our services. I was doing a good job, but not nearly as good a job as my existing clients did for me.

It was great! THEY were great! Many of our clients stopped by our booth to say hello and tell us what a great job we do. On several occasions, I had 5-10 people at my booth when an Alert client stopped by to sing our praises. This was live, word-of-mouth advertising that was better than anything I could possibly say to prospective clients.

Our current clients explained how great our staff is, how friendly they are, how our account managers help them and — best of all — how they had no idea how many calls they were missing until they started using our services. They went on to say their practices were growing because they were no longer missing those calls. If only my cell phone shot video, I would have some great video testimonials for our Web site!

While there are any number of effective online, electronic and printed ways to advertise in today’s business world, I have to admit there’s still nothing that beats the impact of word-of-mouth advertising.

If you don’t know what your clients are saying about you, it’s time to go find out.

Frances Starr, Director of Sales & Marketing for Alert Communications.  Alert Communications is a 24/7bilingual inbound call center, specializing in professional attorney answering, virtual receptionist, Spanish answering and business answering solutions.

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A Customer Service Paradox-Can a virtual receptionist help you be the exception?

Monday, April 12th, 2010

Here’s a paradox for you. Customers want more from the people they do business with, but they’ve come to expect less than they did before. How can that be? Think about it. When you go to the doctor, you want to see him immediately, but you expect you’ll have to wait because experience shows that’s usually the case. So you never schedule anything too closely around a doctor’s appointment.

I even got a survey recently from an orthopedist’s office I visited, and one of the questions was “How long did you have to wait to see the doctor?”  Notice the question wasn’t “Did you have to wait to see the doctor?” Waiting was assumed, even by the survey writers.

So where does your business fit into this paradox? Are you contributing to the expectation that your customers will get less even though they’d like more? Or are you the exception?

Are your customers disappointed when they call your office during the day or after hours? Maybe they expected to get an answering machine but were hoping they might reach a real person. Maybe you should give them more than they expect.

The whole idea behind using virtual receptionists and business answering services is to provide customers with an immediate response. Answering-service clients want their customers to speak with a “real” person, 24/7, who can either patch them through directly to someone or immediately get a message to the client. Shouldn’t that be something you want for your customers, too?

If your business is already the exception to this want-more/expect-less paradox, then good for you. If your answer is “not so much,” then I encourage you to think about what you can do to bring an end to it. If your customers are reaching an answering machine instead of a virtual receptionist during office hours or a business answering service after hours, maybe it’s time to reconsider. Professional answering and/or virtual receptionist services can help you be the exception to the paradox.

Frances Starr, Director of Sales & Marketing for Alert Communications.  Alert Communications is a 24/7bilingual inbound call center, specializing in professional attorney answering, virtual receptionist, Spanish answering and business answering solutions.

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Consider the Benefits of Business Answering Services

Thursday, March 18th, 2010

In real estate, it all boils down to three things — location, location, location. In business, it’s not so simple when you’re looking to turn prospective customers into paying customers.

Moving customers from the first to the second category basically boils down to how great an experience they have with you starting with their first phone call. So what can you do to favorably impact their overall experience? Consider business answering services.

People like reaching and talking to other people, not machines. If you don’t already have a business answering service, give it some thought so your phones are covered during lunch hours, while you’re out on service calls or attending to other customers, or after hours and on the weekends.

As soon as your business answering service takes that first call, opportunity is knocking, so take advantage of it. Depending on the answering service options you choose, you may be able to immediately receive call messages and/or have calls patched through. Quick response to potential customers is sometimes all it takes to win their business.

If your business receives emergency calls, then be sure your business answering service knows how to handle them, too. Set up specialized protocols so the answering service can gather the information you need from callers to make the right decision quickly. Once potential customers are interested enough in your company, it’s up to you to impress them enough to become paying customers.

Your knowledge and enthusiasm combined with great customer service will win you repeat business and/or great word-of-mouth advertising. Choosing the right business answering service is just one way to get things started.

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