Guess how many Americans surveyed said a single bad customer service experience would send them running to a competitor. Ninety-one percent of them said they’d leave. Good customer service is important.

Unfortunately, many companies cannot handle all of their calls themselves. In these situations, many companies hire telephone answering services. If the services are good, there are no problems.

Not all of these services are good. The resulting poor customer service can ruin the company.

But some telephone answering options are good. Read on to learn three tips for finding good telephone service.

1. Services Offered

Think about the exact kind of business services your company needs. For example, your business may need 24-hour coverage or holiday and seasonal answering assistance. Try researching some possible services that telephone answering services may offer.

Once you’ve figured out what services you need, write them down. After you find different business telephone answering services, look at what they offer. Make sure they offer as many items on your list as possible.

You shouldn’t want to hire a company and then find that they can’t give you what you need. This can be a huge waste of time and business technology.

2. Transparent Pricing

You don’t want to get any surprises when the bill comes along. To prevent that from happening, you need to make sure that you understand the telephone service’s pricing structure. An honest company should make its pricing structure easy to understand.

You should easily find out about any set-up, hidden, extra, or cancelation fees. You should also be able to easily learn how you will be billed. For example, some companies charge per minute and others charge per call.

If it’s impossible to know the pricing structure forward and backward, you probably don’t want to work with this company. They may be hiding certain payment details in their contract. It will also be more difficult for you to put the service costs in your budget.

3. Security

The operators at your chosen service should know your business. This will help them get your customers all of the answers that they need. But they should never let company secrets go beyond the building.

Operators may also need to keep their interactions with customers confidential. This is especially the case if you run a medical business. Make sure that the operators you hire are trained in the nondisclosure of confidential information.

Your customers will trust you with their secrets. Make your business worthy of that trust. This should help you retain their business.

Try Our Telephone Answering Services

Once you’ve got a great telephone answering service, customers should come flying through your door. It may take some time for you to find the right service. But with all that you’ll get, the search will be well worth it.

Of course, your may already be over. Consider hiring our telephone answering services. We’ll give your customers the fast and professional answers they deserve.

Learn more about our services on this page.

As a business, you have a variety of choices when it comes to finding an outsourcing partner to handle your customer care needs. But, how do you know which company to choose? You don’t want to just choose the first one you find or the one who throws you the lowest bid. Of course, you want to make sure you choose a partner that fits your budget needs, but you also need to research what the company offers. You need to choose a partner who can represent your brand with excellence and provide the services you require. This is where XACT comes in. Keep reading to find out what sets us apart from the competition.

Customer tailored solutions

One thing that we do at XACT is offer custom tailored solutions. We don’t try to fit companies into a box. We are flexible with our offerings and work to fit what the business requires.

A variety of services

We offer a variety of services. These include chat and web support, a customer help desk, service and support dispatch, outbound survey/response and telephone answering services.

Quality assurance

You can trust that your calls will be handled with proficiency since we offer quality assurance. This is the process of observing an agent’s call and analyzing the quality of the call with respect to your requirements and expectations. Quality monitoring is one of the tools we use to ensure that we’re providing effective and efficient approaches to continually improve the services we provide to our clients. Effective call center quality monitoring allows account managers to easily spot and discover problems within teams by proactively monitoring the interactions between agents and callers.

Training and knowledge development

We also offer training and knowledge development. Knowledge development is the creation of client specific content that both educates and enriches our contact centers agents in the who, where, what, how and why of our clients’ organizations and their business’s processes. Training is the engagement of the content created and delivered in the knowledge development process.

We believe at XACT that the best call center training is hands-on, interactive and paced to the individual. Our agents learn best when they have a chance to participate and practice activities instead of listening to a teacher lecture or just watching a video. Soft skill training is also essential for excellent customer service. Our training programs are wide-reaching and don’t just stop with the initial training.

Resource management

Resource management is also referred to as coordinated services. It is an independent team that watches and monitors contact transactions and provides a level of triage and support to call center agents. It’s affectionally known as “traffic control.” These people help ensure that live contacts are being answered, agents are adhering to their schedules and that they can receive assistance when they need it.

Between our services and the extra steps we take to ensure that brands are represented well, XACT stands out when compared to the competition. Learn more about us by visiting our website today.

Loyalty programs aren’t just good for customers, they’re good for business. Why? Well, they help you retain customers, and customer retention is more affordable than customer acquisition. Plus, “members of customer loyalty programs are 75% more likely to make another purchase after receiving an incentive.” When businesses invest in loyalty programs they invest not just in their customers, but their own success.

Beyond the above-mentioned benefits, businesses can actually increase customer acquisition via word of mouth as well, since loyal customers will be more likely to tell others about the business. You can take this further by using a referral and/or review incentive as part of your loyalty program. For example, you can reward customers when they refer others to your business and those people make a purchase. A significant discount can be a nice reward for referrals. You can also provide a reward when customers give you a review. Here’s an example, say you have a reward system that racks up points for different actions and you reward a set number of points when a customer leaves you a review.

When you start a loyalty system, you’ll want to think carefully about what you’ll name it, what steps need to be taken to get a reward and what the rewards will be. Some examples include offering a discount for every purchase if they become a member (this is a popular loyalty program that grocery stores offer), a cashback rewards system, a punch card or a point system (as mentioned above). One real-life example is what Kohl’s offers. They have a few ways they reward customers. For one, if you sign up for their rewards program, you can earn cashback when you shop, at special times of the year they’ll even offer $10 Kohls cash for every $50 spent. They also offer special percentage discounts periodically, often providing an even better discount to those who have a Kohls’ charge card.

Another thing that companies can do to reward loyal customers is to offer a special appreciation event. This could come in various forms. One example of this is what Ollies’ does. They have an Ollies’ Army Night where anyone who has an Ollies’ card gets a certain discount on all their purchases on that specific date. It rewards the customer for being a member while also encouraging them to spend more with the business.

One more option to consider is partnerships. These can be another thing you can include in your loyalty program. Look for companies that you can partner with to provide this type of offer. Verizon and its Disney+ bundle is a great example of this type of program. If you sign up for a certain phone plan you get the added benefit of the Disney+ bundle being included in the package.

You can see how different companies offer loyalty programs that can help encourage more customers to shop with them. When it comes to creating a great loyalty program, the sky really is the limit, because there are so many options when it comes to building a program that customers will love and that will help your business thrive.

If you need help managing your loyalty program, please reach out to us at (877) 922-8877. We’re happy to help keep your customers satisfied.

Before 2020, there were people working from home, but it wasn’t as common as it is nowadays. The pandemic changed work for a lot of people. While many went to working virtually during 2020, several continued to do so as the years went by and are continuing to do so. Some companies have even adopted hybrid work environments.

It’s no surprise that there are some benefits for businesses to have less people in their buildings. Many businesses have the option to rent a smaller facility if they have less people coming in daily. They require less business supplies, and the utility bills are bound to be reduced. And, these are just a few of the perks. But, we’re not here to talk about the perks for remote work; we’re here to give you tips on how to engage your team when they do work this way.

1. Stay in touch. This is one of the main ways to keep remote team members engaged. The last thing you want is for them to feel like they’re on an island. Keep in touch with your employees. Check-in periodically to see how they’re doing, respond to any outreach on their part and keep them informed about what’s happening in the company. You can also use chatting software to allow teams to chat with each other with ease.

2. Schedule regular meetings. Beyond communicating via email, text and phone, also consider virtual or in-person meetings (if hybrid). Pick a time that you’ll have these, whether they’re a couple times a week, once a week or every other week. For example, maybe you’ll meet every Wednesday at 11 a.m., Tuesday and Thursday at 1 p.m. or every other Tuesday at 10 a.m. Choose a day and time that seems the most convenient for your team.

3. Acknowledge great work. Give your employees thanks for their hard work. You can highlight employees in meetings or companywide emails, or simply send an email directly to the staff member to thank them. A gift card is always a nice treat too!

4. Have fun. Consider ways you can have some fun with your virtual employees. Can you have a social meetup (in person or virtually)? How about an engaging challenge/contest that employees can optionally take part in? These are just a few ways to create a more social and fun workplace.

If you have a virtual team, we hope this helps you keep your team more engaged. Another way to keep employees more engaged is to free them up to focus on their core responsibilities. When you outsource some of your work, you allow your employees more time on those duties, prompting more motivation and productivity. If you’d like to learn more about this, please reach out to us at XACT.

When employees are overworked, it can hurt office morale. Employees are likely to feel unsatisfied in their job, and they may also be less productive if burnt out. This isn’t good for anyone! So, it’s important to know what signs to watch for to ensure your employees aren’t taking on more than they should.

Ask yourself these questions to assess your work culture.

1. Does your staff seem tired?

There are several reasons that employees could be tired. It could be completely unrelated to work. However, it’s important to look for various signs and see if they add up to work stress to avoid losing employees to burnout. Pay attention if your employees seem tired regularly and what their workload looks like. How many hours are they putting in? Are they taking breaks? This can help you determine if the exhaustion is work-related.

2. Are employees acting less engaged at work?

If employees are withdrawing and seem less interested in things overall, they may have reached the point of burnout. If you notice this, don’t make any assumptions. Instead, try to have an open conversation with your employee without asking any illegal questions. You could see how they’re feeling about their workload and if there is a way to make the workday go smoother for them. Are there things that would help them get excited about their job again? Let them know that if they’re feeling overworked, to confide in you so you can help spread out the work more fairly.

3. Do employees seem less productive?

This can be a sign that they’re taking on too much. They may be struggling to keep up with all of the plates they’re juggling because we all know that too much multitasking can often hurt productivity.

Overall, pay attention to how employees behave at work. Do they seem happy or disinterested? Do they work long hours on a daily basis? Do they ever take vacations? How is their overall performance when they’re at work? Do they seem stressed? These are all things you can ask yourself as you determine if any of your employees are either burned out or in danger of burning out.

If you find a potential problem at work, look for ways to ease the load for your employees. When employees are happier and have a healthier work-life balance, they’ll be more apt to get the job done well and in a timely fashion. They’re also more likely to be loyal to your company.

Are you looking for projects you can take off your employees’ workload? Reach out to us for your customer service solutions. We’d be happy to help your employees get back to their core responsibilities.