Why Your Business Should Have an After-Hours Contact Center

Customers have now become so used to on-demand availability that when a business is not available when they reach out, that can seem truly odd. This means that your business customer service should be on call 24/7/365, even when you pull down the shutters for a well-deserved break during public holidays. Maintaining the same level of impeccable customer care, day in and day out, could be a challenge for many businesses.

If you want your business to have the reputation of being proactive with customer support, you need to ensure that all calls are promptly fielded. You might want to consider investing in a good after-hours answering contact center service.

Consider these stats from recent customer surveys:

• 80% of all business affairs continue to be handled over calls.
• Despite the ubiquity of emails, 80% of callers prefer to talk on the phone than type out a saga over email.
• Poor phone etiquette continues to be one of the top reasons why clients may be put off a certain business. Recent data indicates that 71% of clients will simply stop dealing with a business if they are not satisfied by their phone etiquette.
• Furthermore, 69% of customers will stop conducting business with an organization that does not have the requisite levels of customer service through phone calls.
• And the demands are only increasing. 60% of customers expect more from the customer service of a business than they did just a year back.

Here are a few more reasons why your business should have an after-hours contact center:

Reach out to customers globally

These days, your customers can literally be anywhere on the global map. Thanks to the Internet and highly improved logistics, businesses are no longer limited to customers within their own city, state, or country. Well this is good news for your sales, this also means you need to be available 24/7 for your customers across time zones.

Establish a strong brand reputation

Quality customer support across channels can help you win customer trust better than almost all other factors in your business except product/ service quality. One of the simplest tricks in ensuring long-term brand loyalty is to develop a reputation for your customer service to be available, professional, and reliable.

Reduced Operating Costs

According to a Mashable report, the average cost of all phone calls that come into a traditional contact center is around $1 per minute. That means it costs $10,000 for 1,000 10-minute phone calls. Using outsourced contact center services is an effective way to manage and mitigate the exorbitant costs, since you do not need to:

• Spend money on hiring and training additional staff
• Spend money on equipment purchase
• Spend money on leasing the space required for a contact center.

There is always a cost to investing in good customer care, but outsourcing your after-hours contact center service could help make that investment a must-have in this 2/47 world of customer care.