Ruby

If there’s a box in the corner offering live customer support, you can be confident the business is experiencing better than average customer service, conversion, retention, and satisfaction. While the advantages of all of the above are obvious—who wouldn’t want capable sales and service agents meeting customers’ needs on-demand, around the clock?—many business owners opt not to use live chat. Beyond staying up to date with customer preferences, however, live chat can also help you differentiate your business, increase conversion rates, boost customer loyalty, better identify and address customer pain points, and improve your margins. Some chat solutions (including ours) can even connect chat customers live to the business’s sales team within seconds using connect-to-call features, or via real-time email, text, or phone call notification.

Imagine how much more likely a customer will be to want to do business with you again if they’ve received fast, friendly, helpful service when reaching out. Increasing your customers’ satisfaction leads to long-lasting relationships, which are the best for your bottom line, since acquiring a new customer costs five times as much as retaining a customer that you already have. Give a customer excellent and helpful service, and you have just created a brand new advocate, ready to spread the word about their experience with your business. A word of mouth (WOM) referral is more meaningful than any exposure to new customers you could buy, as 92% of consumers trust recommendations from people they know over any other form of advertising.

Around the same time, my customers and fellow small business owners urged me to join the Entrepreneur’s Organization. With 2008’s recession on our heels, this book set Ruby’s success in motion. Ruby had a set of core values before the impact of Mastering the Rockefeller Habits could be felt within our company, but they were lackluster and, frankly, borrowed. With a clear purpose, a struggle, and a couple of wins under our belts, we set to work in writing, as Verne puts it, a constitution for our company.

Keep reading to learn what kinds of answering services exist, how those services work, the pros and cons of using an answering service, and how to choose the ideal answering service for your business. Unlike the traditional answering service in the form of large call centers, Ruby’s virtual receptionist service is rooted in the small business experience. Given the premium customers place on personal connections, as well as the ways in which excellent customer service is a key differentiator, a good answering service has plenty to offer in terms of caller engagement and satisfaction. If there’s an influx of calls coming into your business, and your answering service provider isn’t capable of managing them, expect your callers to experience delays.