Our Services

 

As the Pacific Northwest's premier answering service, Cascade Answering Solutions can answer your phones when you can't. We are happy to help with overflow calls during business hours, all calls after-hours, full-time service, or a mix of service types. Whether you represent a large medical group that is in need of a contact center to help connect patients with providers, or you are a small business owner who gets more calls than they can handle and are worried about missing that next big sale or potential new client, you came to the right place. Our virtual receptionists are taking calls right now on behalf of other businesses taking messages, paging their on-call staff members, processing orders, scheduling customer appointments, and performing general customer service duties. We want to be an extension of your business. As such, we strive to represent ourselves and the businesses that we answer calls for with professionalism and integrity.

Our call center services can be tailored to fit your needs. You only pay for the time our staff spends on the phones, nothing else. Some of our customers only use us strictly for overflow services, while others have 100% of their calls coming to us. Here are some of the things we can do:

• General Message Taking - If you would like to have all of the caller’s details sent to you so that you can call them back at a later time, this option is for you. You decide what information you would like us to collect; name, phone number, email, the reason for the call, etc. These are just a few examples of the standard questions we normally ask callers over the phone. This information would be sent over to you in a message via email, text (SMS), fax, voicemail, or viewable using our online portal. You can even choose to have multiple delivery methods used simultaneously. This option is ideal for smaller businesses who need us to answer their overflow calls or ALL calls.

• Overflow Services - As mentioned above, overflow services are a type of service that is ideal for smaller businesses that don’t have enough in-house staff to answer the number of calls coming in, or for owner/operator businesses that cannot take more than one call at a time. And the last thing you would want is to miss an important call or potential new client that may move on to the next company. Most of these services are combined with after-hour answering for 24/7 coverage.

• Virtual Offices - If you are an independent contractor or one-person business that needs help with the administrative side of things (answering calls, scheduling appointments, etc.), or if you are just wanting your business to have the professional appearance and capability of having a full staff and office at your disposal, then a virtual office might be right for you. We can answer all your calls as if we were actually in your office, while you can be free to assist your clients and grow your business. In addition to message taking, we also have the ability to transfer important calls directly to your cell phone or any phone number based in the United States or Canada.

• Dispatch Service - What is the difference between an answering service and a dispatch center? The basic principles of both are the same, as they both handle inbound calls and handle them accordingly. Many answering services only perform basic message-taking tasks and are not trained in all of the different facets involved in 24/7 dispatching. You have to know who is on-call, what that person is on-call FOR, what qualifies as an emergent situation (and what doesn’t), what the service area is, are there any applicable fees, etc. All of our call center agents at Cascade Answering Solutions are cross-trained in both general answering and dispatch services and are capable of dispatching tow truck drivers, plumbers, HVAC technicians, security guards, and medical couriers just to name a few.

• Medical Answering Service - Medical answering is another specialized area of telephone answering services that differs from general answering services because it involves patient care. Call center agents that are handling calls pertaining to patient care must be fully trained in HIPAA compliance, proper after-hours and overflow protocols, and must possess limited medical terminology skills as it relates to composing messages to the clinic and/or on-call provider after-hours.

• Appointment Scheduling - In addition to answering your calls, taking messages, and dispatching your staff members... We can schedule your client’s appointments with you! This is a free service that can be included with any existing answering service account. You only pay for the time spent on the phone. The only thing required for us to handle your scheduling calls is an online-based scheduler. We can use your existing scheduling software or we can recommend one that is easy to use and that our staff is already trained on.

 

• Call Transferring / Call Patching - Call transferring/patching is usually only performed on specific calls, like doctors connecting with patients after hours or if someone from your company is on-call for sales calls or something similar. Also, we have had clients that utilize us for our switchboard capability, where we accept all incoming calls and transfer them to the appropriate destination based on the nature of the call. In some cases, if there is no answer at a particular extension, we can then take a message for the caller so they don’t just end up hanging up. All of this is customizable to our client’s needs.

• Help Desk - This type of answering is great for IT firms, or large companies who need a help desk to work in tandem with their IT department so their employees have a place to call to have IT tickets placed, or technical type calls routed to on-call technicians.

• Order & Reservation Processing - That’s right! We can take orders and book reservations for you. As long as the booking or sales processes can be done using an online-based program or website, we can handle it. Similar to our scheduling services, this is a free feature that can be added to any existing answering service account as you simply pay for the time we spend on the phone with your callers.