Nov 26 2011
Voicemail Service and Live Answering Service: The Perfect Combo
Category: Advice & Information, Voicemail
Time is of the essence for busy professionals, entrepreneurs, corporate offices, and answering calls, even important ones, can sometimes take a back seat to all the daily tasks they need to complete.
In this light, live answering services are a must for them to keep up with all their daily demands. However, a growing trend is starting to make its mark in the specialty telecommunications realm and this is the combination of voicemail service and live answering service.
What is Voicemail and Live Answering Service?
To better understand how voicemail service and live answering service work, we should first define what voicemail and live answering service are. Voicemail has been around since the 70s and has since been a part of people’s daily routine because it is one of the most widely used system for electronic messaging. Majority of people, whether at home, work, or their mobile phone, have a voicemail account, sometimes more than one.
There are plenty of voicemail service providers available for you to choose from and each use different types of equipment and approaches, but all have an ultimate goal. This goal is of course to provide a convenient and reliable messaging service for home use, mobile phones, and office environments.
On the other hand, since the advent of newer technologies used for electronic messaging, voicemail is now only one of various tools used to leave and retrieve electronic messages. With this in mind, voicemail service providers decided to up their ante by integrating it with other popular forms of telecommunication tools such as live answering services.
A live answering service on the other hand is a service where your phones are manned by live operators instead of automated answering machines. This is much better than having your phone answered by an answering machine especially if you are in the sales business since the first impression will be lasting.
Likewise, live answering services are available 24/7 even on holidays and weekends. It is also arguably more affordable than having to hire a receptionist since you will not have to shell out on other expenses and benefits. Answering services like this offer various vehicles for delivering messages which typically include the following:
- Through SMS text messages directly to your mobile phone
- Through a pager
- Through faxed message transcripts
- Through batched or instant email delivery
Providers of live answering services usually offer customers customizable account options in order to meet a client’s budget and personal requirements. They are likewise scalable. This means that you are afforded the option of upgrading your account at any time you see fit. In addition, live answering services also offer other services normally provided by call centers which includes:
- Patching of live calls
- Live appointment setting in real time
- Direct response support
- Live service for event RSVP
- Outbound telemarketing
As you can see in both services, the voicemail service and live answering service are good enough on their own but can be so much better when combined. With the powerful combination of voicemail service and live answering service, users are afforded the following benefits:
- To avail of voicemail service and live answering service, you simply have to sign up and you won’t have to purchase any software or hardware. Once you are done with signing up, you will be provided with a new number and the service will be instantly activated. You just have to give the provider your voicemail extension.
- Searching for voicemail messages will be a thing of the past since a voicemail service will send all messages in one place.
- Easy to use help menus are presented to your callers which make leaving messages a whole lot easier for them.
- A wide selection of available local numbers and toll-free numbers to choose from that will be directly routed to the voicemail service.
- Capability to transfer all callers to different extensions which include your very own live operator with the integrated live answering service.
- By making use of your toll-free number, all incoming communications will become localized. This also includes unified messaging of your voicemail and fax.
- You can easily receive your voicemail messages, messages from your live operator and faxes in your email inbox.
- Voicemail service with a long message limit which makes it easier for callers who want to leave long voicemail messages since they won’t have to leave multiple messages to get their point across.
- Because the voicemail service is integrated with a live answering service, callers who are not comfortable leaving voicemail messages can simply choose to speak to a live operator.
- Integrated caller ID that you can conveniently use to screen calls. You can even opt to send all non-urgent calls to your voicemail.
- Completely customizable greetings for your callers/clients. You can choose to give callers a summary of your business, along with options they can choose from to contact you such as through your voicemail service or your live answering service via a live operator.
- You can choose to receive notification about faxes or voicemail messages directly on your mobile phone through text messages, via mp3, or your email inbox.
- 24/7 live answering service as integrated with the voicemail service will make it easy for your clients to call you even if they reside in places with a different time zone.
- You can easily sign in to your account anytime for checking your faxes or voicemail messages.
- A virtual office environment that is easily accessible.
- You also have the option to add whatever music you desire for callers to listen to while on hold.
Additionally, in the event that you choose to go with voicemail service combined with live answering service, not only will your company be more productive, but you will also save more money in the long run.
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