How To Take Your Franchise to The Next Level With an Answering Service
Business owners know that every missed phone call is a missed opportunity. To ensure every call and customer is answered professionally, savvy franchisees may turn to an answering service. So which answering service is best? Answering Service Care, or ASC, stands out for its five-decade track record of providing 24/7 service via highly-trained, friendly U.S.-based agents.
Logan Shooster, ASC’s vice president of strategic growth, says live answers to phone calls are crucial to business success. “Four out of five callers prefer to speak with a human, not a chatbot or voice recording,” Shooster says. A Forbes article similarly faults interactive voice response systems as “a major frustration point for customers [and] 98% of customers try to skip the IVR.”
Shooster adds that small businesses miss an astounding 63% of their calls, and “30% of those calls, on average, would have resulted in a sale.” Long hold periods stifle business, too, he says, and “64% of callers hang up if they can’t speak to a person within five minutes of calling a business.”
What Do Answering Services Do?
An answering service provides franchisees and their managers with the priceless gift of time. “Business leadership teams spend more than three hours on the phone every day, which equals roughly two full days each week simply answering the phone,” Shooster says. “They’re not being lazy or neglectful – they’re just busy focusing on other critical areas of their business, such as product development and marketing. Those demands cause customer support to slip out of focus.”
Hiring a receptionist to field calls is costly – the average compensation may exceed $37,000 per year, Shooster points out, and that’s still not full coverage. A receptionist typically works eight hours a day and takes off for vacation, sick days, holidays, and weekends. “By comparison, ASC can handle calls and other customer contacts 24/7/365 – something a single receptionist can’t do – at a cost of only $2,028 a year on the Small Business Plan with 100 minutes of service each month.”
Why Answering Service Care
Answering Service Care agents use customized scripts and modern software to guide every conversation carefully and skillfully. “Our proprietary app allows us to load the client’s account information at the same time the phone rings. This is a primary reason why our agents can seamlessly support thousands of businesses so quickly and relay messages to clients so accurately. Our services reflect our commitment to professionalism. Our skilled agents leave a positive, lasting impression on every customer who calls in,” Shooster says.
In addition to answering the phone, ASC’s staff responds to texts, monitors emails, and engages in live chats on clients’ websites. Answering Service Care also schedules appointments, provides bilingual service in Spanish and English, records incoming calls, and blocks spam from inundating clients. It can set clients up with a toll-free number and answer it for marketing campaigns as well. ASC’s mobile app notifies clients when a customer has called, and clients also can access their on-call calendars and pay their ASC bills through the secure application.
“We have 50 years of experience, 200 U.S. employees, three offices to serve clients coast to coast, proprietary software and other technology to assure our clients of outstanding service to their existing and future customers,” Shooster says. Answering Service Care has a custom application programming interface (API) and Zapier app to ensure that franchises can continue to operate efficiently within the systems they already use, including Google Calendar, Housecall Pro, Jobber, HubSpot, Salesforce and Acuity. “With our advanced software and Messages API integrations, a caller’s information quickly transfers to whatever channel he or she prefers, whether that’s a cell phone text message, an email, or the franchisee’s CRM [customer relationship management] software.”
Shooster says family-owned and family-operated ASC – founded by his parents, Michael and Alizabeth Shooster – has satisfied more than 4,000 clients to date. Answering Service clients hail from a myriad of industries: home services, business services, beauty and wellness, legal services, insurance, real estate, financial services, and funeral homes. The company’s current portfolio includes franchises such as McDonald’s, Rooterman, Grout Doctor, RE/MAX and Sentry Self Storage.
By having real people answer every call and respond to every type of customer in real time, you can take your franchise to the next level.
Reaching That Next Level
“By having real people answer every call and respond to every type of customer contact in real time, you can take your franchise to the next level,” Shooster says. “Our monthly plans start at $35 per month, and clients can quickly adjust their levels of ASC coverage to meet fluctuations in demand. This means they can scale up or down depending on their business needs – something that’s especially important to seasonal franchises – without having to worry about staffing capacity and financial burden. Clients can easily contact ASC to ask questions or make changes in the services they need.“We answer every call as if it was for our own company,” Shooster says. “Our motto is, ‘We get it so you don’t have to,’ and we deliver on that 100%.”
ASC, which has offices in Florida, North Carolina, and New Jersey, is so confident of its service to franchisees that it offers a 21-day money-back guarantee. To find out more about Answering Service Care, visit https://answeringservicecare.com.
