It goes without saying that, for any business, good customer service is absolutely essential for growing your customer base and being the best business in your industry. Otherwise, you might lose out on customers to competitors.
And, naturally, one core part of good customer service is ensuring you have people in place to answer any incoming phone calls promptly and in a professional manner, typically through a live answering service or call center.
But when examining both answering services vs call center services, you could be forgiven for thinking that both options sound pretty much similar. After all, they’re both defined as temporary answering services that handle incoming calls for your businesses.
However, when it comes to picking an answering service vs call center, you’ll quickly find that the two services are very different in a number of keyways, which in turn will help to decide whether one or the other is better suited for your business needs.
To find out what the difference between answering services vs call center services are, take a look at our guide below.
What is the difference between a call center and answering service?
To begin with, let’s start by examining the difference between a call center and an answering service to give you a better idea of what separates the two options:
What is a call center?
While call centers and answering services both deal primarily with talking to people on the phone, call centers focus much more heavily on delivering a mix of incoming and outgoing calls, depending on who they are working for.
In many cases, these outgoing calls are primarily focused on subscription renewal programs and telemarketing, while incoming calls are often related to customer service, billing, and tech support.
Since most of the work they do is scripted, the work call centers do is largely done by overseas representatives between a strict set of hours that usually match the regular business hours of the company they’re working with.
What is a live answering service?
In comparison to a call center, when looking at the question ‘What is a live answering service’, you’ll quickly note that it’s a far more tailored customer service experience, one where the individuals answering your phones are trained to operate as a seamless extension of your business.
As the name implies, a live answering service has a focus on answering calls rather than making them, with the operator being trained by you to provide industry-specific questions, such as basic health questions for doctors and hospitals, pet health care for veterinarians, and general legal basics for lawyers.
The goal of a live answering service and their virtual receptionist team is to help current and future clients make appointments, provide answers to questions related to their needs, and give them more information about your business – all in a way that reflects well on you.
What are the pros and cons of a call center?
Now that we’ve broken down the difference between a call center and an answering service, let’s now look at the pros and cons of each – starting with call centers.
A hub of trained workers ready to answer your calls, there are several advantages to using a call center, such as:
- Lower costs – hiring a call center is often much cheaper than investing in a full customer service team.
- Direct support – a call center provides your customers with direct support around your business, enabling them to get in touch and find a solution to their problem thanks to the sheer volume of people who can answer their call.
- Experts on demand – in many cases, you may be able to find a call center who can provide experts specialized in your industry, ensuring customers are put in touch with someone who can actually help them.
However, call centers also come with some serious drawbacks, including:
- Loss of control – as you’ve outsourced your call to a center directly, you will have a lack of control over how your calls are handled by the operating team.
- Limited hours – assuming you want your customers’ calls to be handled by a local team, customers will only be able to get in touch for support during a limited window of time each day.
- Minimal feedback – unless specified as a service, call centers do not typically provide you with customer feedback that could be used to improve your business, often leading to more complaints down the line.
What are the pros and cons of an answering service?
As you can see, there are both good and bad sides to using a call center, but what about a live answering service? Below, we’ve highlighted the key advantages this sort of call-answering service has over call centers and in-house teams:
- Huge savings – one of the key advantages live answering services have is how minimal their costs are. Not only do you not need to employ any in-house staff, but you also don’t have to pay for the use of an entire call center.
- Expanded hours – the best live answering services provide local operators to handle customer calls at any time of the day, ensuring your customers can always get in touch with your business.
- Consistent quality – with a live answering service, you can monitor and track every call, allowing you to tweak the service to deliver consistently good customer service.
- Direct feedback – many live answering services will record and send a transcript of all calls, letting you see what was discussed and take on board any feedback given by a customer.
Of course, there are still a few disadvantages that come with using a live answering service:
- It’s entirely virtual – unless you plan on never having customers come into your place of work, you may still need an in-person receptionist to handle face-to-face customer interactions, negating some of the cost savings associated with live answering.
- Business training – although many live answering services can meet the needs of your business, there may be a period of training required for their receptionists to fully understand your business and the industry you work in.
Answering service vs call center: which should you choose
With the main differences out of the way, all that’s left now is for you to decide which model of answering is better suited for your business. And for that, we’ve outlined our recommendations below.
First and foremost, if you’re a big company looking for a large amount of customer service representatives or people to help do technical customer support for your products, a call center might be a better option.
They can field the majority of your customer service issues or product issues by following a script or series of basic questions to get to the root of the problem so the callers get off the phone feeling better about their issue than they had when they initially called.
Alternatively, if you’re a newer, more specialized business that can’t afford a full-time in-house receptionist, but you know you need somebody to answer your phones to make appointments or help field questions so they don’t go straight to voicemail, then a live answering service might be the right option for you.
Not only that but if cost savings are something that really interests you, as well as letting your customers reach you outside of standard business hours with 24/7 answering, then, again, a live answering service is the model for you.
Choose VoiceNation as your live answering service
If you’ve looked at our article and decided that a live answering service is the right option for your business, then you probably want to know where to find one. And the good news is that VoiceNation is right here to meet your needs!
Our team of professionally trained virtual receptionists are on hand to meet all of your customers’ demands, as well as providing live chat operators for a smoother online experience.
Get in touch to learn more about what we can offer your business!