Learn How To Get The Most Out of SAS

At Specialty Answering Service, we’ve been committed to the success of small businesses for over 30 years. We’ve helped thousands of businesses grow with the help of our live operator answering service. We’ve learned what works for businesses, and where we can improve to help you build value through your relationship with us. We’re committed to your success and we want you to get the most out of our answering service and our software platform.

We’re committed to helping you reach your business goals, which is why we believe that learning about our system is essential. In this post, you’ll learn:

1. Where to turn when you need answers or help
2. How to make some basic adjustments on your script and where messages are delivered
3. What advanced features are available at no extra cost
4. What features you can add to your subscription

1. Where to turn when you need help

Whether you have questions, concerns, or need to make updates, our customer support warriors have always got your back. You can contact customer service via phone, email and live chat Monday through Friday, 8:30am-6pm EST. In an effort to maximize our availability, we also utilize an on-call system that allows our support team to be available via email after hours and on weekends. Depending on which service level you are on, there are others ways you can get assistance as well:

Per Minute

If you are on our Advanced, or per minute service level, you have complete access to your account via your online portal and mobile app, and can make changes any time. If you have questions, you can always access our online help desk which includes a lot of helpful information, including walk through tutorials. However, if you are unable to find what you are looking for, you can send our support team a message right from your portal or app, and our reps will get back to you as soon as possible. Our normal turn around time during business hours is 2 hours or less, and our normal turn around time during after hours is within 12 hours.

Per Call

If you are on our Essentials, or per call service level, you are able to call up your own forwarding line and ask the operators for assistance. They are able to relay messages to you and make on-call/scripting updates while you are on the phone. If you need further assistance or have questions they cannot answer, they will happily create a support ticket for our in-house customer service reps to reply to as soon as possible. Our normal turn around time during business hours is 2 hours or less, and our normal turn around time during after hours is within 12 hours.

2. Let’s do some simple stuff

While our support staff is great at helping make changes to your account, some updates are simple enough that you can save yourself some time by making them yourself. These include:

• Adding and Updating your FAQs
• Changing where your messages are sent
• Updating script steps
• Adding and removing script steps

3. Advanced features you can use, for free

At Specialty Answering Service, we want to arm our customers with as many tools to help their business as possible, which means most of our advanced features come complimentary with the service. So, even if you’re on our lowest plan, you still have access to app integrations, interactive portal features, and more! Here is a comprehensive list of the advanced features you can use, free of charge:

• Rating calls: Not only can you listen to all of your calls from your online portal, you can also rate your calls 1-5 stars, and leave feedback. The feedback that is left can then be used to coach operators if their performance was poor, make scripting changes, or as examples of how calls should be handled for less experienced reps.
• Generating reports: In our online portal, users can generate a total of 9 different types of reports which can be used to help monitor monthly usage, see where your marketing attempts are paying off and what needs more attention, and more. You can even schedule automatic reports that can be sent to you daily, weekly or monthly.
• Creating call surveys: Want to know what your customers are thinking? Let us ask them! With the SAS Survey App, you can have our agents email your customers after each call, and customize the questions that we ask them. Our call surveys are a great opportunity to gather feedback from your caller, and figure out what’s working and what’s not.
• 30+ app integrations: No matter what CRM or software platform you use to manage your customer data, we’ve got an app for that. Specialty’s portal includes over 30 app integrations, including a Custom Action app which would allow users to integrate with a platform that isn’t already listed. Some other apps include Salesforce, Zendesk, Google Calendar, Google Sheets and Google Maps.
• Mobile app: As long as you’ve got an iPhone or an Android, you can have complete access to our mobile app which will allow you to check messages, listen to calls, and respond to customers, all from the palm of your hand.
• Custom status labels: In an effort to help you and your staff members stay more organized, we included an option to create custom status labels that can be attached to your calls. That way you can determine who needs a call back ASAP and from who, what was already handled, and what can wait. Of course, they are completely customizable, so you can create any status labels that you want!
• Share call details: If you’d like to share call details with your employees without giving them access to the portal themselves, you can do that by sharing call details right from the portal. You can send an email with just the message details, or you can include the recording of the call, as well as a little note to the person you are sharing the call with.
• Create and edit on-call schedules: Not only can you add and edit your on-call schedule within your SAS portal, we also offer other cool features to go along with it. For example, you have the option of manually adding your schedule, or you can upload it via .CSV file. You can also create and add specific groups for easy implementation, and you can set expiration alerts so you are notified before and after any schedules expire.

4. Like add ons? We’ve got them!

In addition to our advanced features that come complimentary with your service, we have other features that can be added on for an extra monthly charge. Some of those add-on features include:

• Outbound Return Call Service: Sometimes our answering service experiences spikes in volume which results in hold times, and sometimes people don’t like waiting. If your callers are hanging up while in the queue, you can add an outbound return call service which would allow our operators to call back anyone who has disconnected before reaching a live voice.
• Outbound Calling: Are your employees too busy for cold calls? Need to up your telemarketing game? If you’re interested in having our agents contact potential leads, you can set up an outbound calling campaign where you are able to upload the leads you’d like our agents to call out to.
• Bilingual Support: Just because you may not be able to provide bilingual support in your office, doesn’t mean your Spanish speaking customers should be left hanging. Our answering service offers 24/7 bilingual support which can help bridge any communication gaps that may be affecting your business.
• Sub Accounts: Whether you have multiple companies, or multiple departments within your company that you want to keep separate, we offer sub accounts which are situated under  your main account. Sub accounts are separate from your main account in the sense that they come with their own script and forwarding number, but they all share the same billing, which means you don’t have to worry about dealing with multiple invoices each month.
• Automated IVR: Need help routing your calls to different departments or people? Setting up an auto attendant with Specialty Answering Service is easy with our call center technology. your IVR can be as simple as pressing 1 for English or 2 for Spanish, or it can be as complex as your business is.