5 Stats on Telephone Answering Services for Houston SMBs
At Office Evolution® Houston, our team knows that phone management can be an issue for small business owners. Unwanted and unimportant calls can disrupt your workflow and distract you from high-priority work. Meanwhile, your other priorities inevitably lead to missed calls from potential and existing customers. Eventually, if call volumes get high enough, you’ll need to think about hiring a telephone answering service for your Houston area office.
But even if you’re not already overwhelmed by phone reception duties, it’s a good idea to research local telephone answering companies in the Houston area. Modern answering plans cost a fraction of what it costs to hire a receptionist, and come with a host of helpful features for small business owners and independent professionals. If you spend a significant amount of time on the phone each week, a telephone answering service in Houston can simplify your workflow and open up time in your schedule for tasks at the top of your to-do list.
How Telephone Answering Services Make a Difference
As telephone answering services have become most affordable — and, in turn, more popular — they’ve received attention from researchers, journalists, and businesses alike. That’s led to studies on where these services add value to small businesses in the Houston area, and how they compare to services like virtual reception.
To help small businesses in Houston decide whether telephone answering services are right for them, we’ve pulled together five of the most striking statistics from recent research.
- Consumers Want Live Agents, Not Virtual Receptionists. Many businesses underestimate how important live receptionists are to quality customer service. More than 90% of consumers expect business phone lines to be answered by live agents, and 47% consider it a negative experience when they don’t speak with a real receptionist.
- Spam Calls Cost US Small Businesses $500M a Year.Spam calls make up more than a third of US phone traffic, posing a major problem for small businesses. Unable to register on the Do Not Call list, and without systems in place to screen incoming calls, American small businesses lose half-a-billion in productivity every year to spam callers.
- Most Calls to Small Businesses Aren’t Picked Up. When customers call small businesses, there’s more than a 6 in 10 chance that their call with go unanswered. Small businesses only manage to pick up the phone for 38% of callers. Another 38% of calls go to voicemail, while 24% end without any kind of answer.
- Hold Times More Than Double on Automated Systems.Patience for hold times has drastically decreased in recent years — most callers now believe that any time on hold longer than a minute is too long. That’s bad news for businesses that use virtual receptionists, as hold times are roughly 2.2 times as long on virtual reception systems..
- Live Answering Clients Save 2+ Hours a Week. The less time you spend on telephone reception, the more time you can put toward growing your business. With telephone answering services from Office Evolution Houston, typical time savings are 2+ hours a week. Over the course of the year, that adds up to more than two and a half weeks’ worth of full-time work — longer than most vacations.
Telephone Reception Company in Houston, TX
In Houston, finding the right telephone answering service for your needs is simple. Just give Office Evolution Houston a call. Our live answering and remote receptionist plans offer all the functionality you need, at a price point perfectly tailored for Houston’s small business community. Located in the Houston Energy Corridor’s Memorial area, close to CityCentre and Westchase, we are proud to offer telephone answering services to businesses throughout the local area.
Call 346-561-0612 for detailed information on telephone answering services from Office Evolution Houston.