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Do you offer a free trial?
We sure do! If you would like a free trial just ask. We'll give you a trial of 7 days, or up to 50 minutes, whichever comes first.
Are your services contract based?
Our services are offered on a month-by-month basis, we will have you sign a standard service agreement that explains our terms of service, pricing, etc. If you need to cancel, no problem! You can cancel at any time penalty-free.
Do you offer price matching?
We sure do! If you find another answering service with a better price per minute or price per call, we will do our best to match or beat their rates.
Is your service expensive?
Not at all! You only pay for the amount of time that our operators spend on the phone with your callers, nothing else. We have no holiday fees, no HIPAA fees, no service fees, or any other fees of any kind! A lot of our clients are small business owners that pay us less than $110 per month. That's a pretty good value for a team of agents covering your phones around the clock.
Are your agents overseas?
No they are not, we do not outsource any of our agents. All of our staff is employed by our company directly, and answer calls in our call center in Washington State.
How do I route my calls to your service?
We will provide you with an individual forwarding telephone number that only your business will use to forward calls to us. After we provide you the forwarding number, it is your responsibility to make sure your calls are forwarded to us correctly. We do not have the ability to forward your lines for you, it is done through your current telephone service provider. See here for more info: Telephone Forwarding Instructions
Will my callers wait on hold for a long time before your agents answer?
Not at all, our average time to answer time is less than 25 seconds. We are a smaller call center that isn't bogged down by massive call volumes. This frees us up to provide excellent service for our clients. When your callers speak to our agents, they won't hear the loud background noises of larger call centers, it's almost like having your own off-site employee answering calls 24/7. However, there can be times when we have a higher-than-normal call volume resulting in all of our operators taking calls at the same time. During these times we adopt a first come first serve policy, so some callers may have to wait on hold until it's their turn for an operator to help them. This is standard practice for most answering services.
What information will you gather from my callers?
Whatever you need! We can add unlimited questions to the message script that is added to your account. For example; in addition to name, number, reason for the call - we can add things like, email, physical address, how they heard about you, etc. The sky is the limit.
How will I recieve my messages?
We can send messages a few different ways. Text, Fax, Email, or you can view messages by using our online portal. We can also send each message to multiple destinations simultaneously. For example, you could receive your messages via text on two different cell phones, 3 email addresses, AND 1 fax number, if you wanted to. We can also messages to a specific person or department, depending on the type of call.
Can you transfer calls to external phone numbers?
Yes. We can transfer or "patch" calls to any external phone number, including any cell phone or landline. We can do what we call "blind" transfering, which means we will transfer the call directly to an external phone number. Or we can do a "warm" transfer, which means our operator would call you first to see if you are available to accept the call, and then patch the call through to you.
How do your agents know what business each call is for?
Every client is assigned a unique forwarding telephone number that is linked to their account with us. So only your business will be forwarding calls to that specific phone number. That way our system can determine which account each call belongs to based on the phone number that your calls are forwarded to.
Does your service offer outbound telemarketing?
This is something that we do NOT do. Our operators are not trained to do outbound sales calls or cold calls. In addition, offering a service like this would have an adverse affect on the service of our other clients by tying up our operators with lengthy outbound sales calls.
What payment methods do you accept?
Most of our clients are set up with autopay using a credit/debit card or ACH, and are billed once a month. We understand that some businesses must be invoiced vs. paying via autopay, like medical practices and government entities. In this case, we would make an exception and send you an invoice that can be paid by check, ACH, or payable online within 30 days of receiving the invoice.
Are answering service accounts set up with hold music or recorded greetings?
You can actually hear exactly how our calls are answered by listening to a sample call. By default, we set up each account with a standard recorded greeting that goes something like this "Thank you for calling Bob's Plumbing, we will be right with you", and then the call is sent to one of our operators to answer. They will hear hold music while the phone is ringing. Both the recorded greeting and hold music can be changed, OR removed. We have a few customers that prefer the standard ringing sound, but we have found that people tend to hang up A LOT quicker if they aren't listening to hold music... But, it's totally up to you!
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We can also upload a custom jingle for hold music if you have one!
I get alot of spam calls, how does that work with billing and message taking?
We are happy to help businesses that get a large amount of spam or marketing calls. Most of these spam/marketing calls end up being recordings, and our operators will immediately hang up whenever that occurs. If the call only lasted a few seconds, the cost for that call will be literal pennies since we bill for straight time down to the second. However, if you would like us to take messages for any suspected spam or marketing call that involves a live person calling, we're happy to send a message to you if that's what you would like.