Open-ended customer communication is a crucial cornerstone of success for businesses of all sizes. Whether you’re running a start-up, an established small business, or a multimillion-dollar corporation, you need to establish a good rapport with your customers from the get-go. One good way to accomplish strong customer relationships is by outsourcing professional appointment booking services. There are a lot of great benefits of using appointment scheduling services for your business. Whether they’re in person or virtual meetings, booking appointments is the first step to closing a deal or onboarding new customers.
Booking an appointment with a customer indicates that they’re interested enough in your business, product, or service to actually meet with you and discuss the topic in greater detail. And that’s all the confidence you need to secure their business.
Why Use An Appointment Booking Service For Your Business?
The answer is simple. Appointment booking benefits your entire business operation. It’s convenient and it helps you save time and money by not having to hire an in-house team of representatives. Rather than concentrating on menial tasks such as contacting customers, answering inquiries, and booking appointments on your behalf, your staff can focus on completing their own work-related tasks.
Your sales team is responsible for closing deals and getting customers to sign on the dotted line. Scheduling appointments is half the battle. Think of outsourced appointment setters as a support system for your sales team. Here are a few benefits of outsource appointment setting services for small businesses:
Saves Time And Valuable Workforce
Even if you already have a talented in-house sales department, the fact of the matter is that they could always use a little external support. Generating leads is the easy part, but qualifying them and testing the likelihood that they’ll convert into actual paying customers is the tricky part. This is time-consuming work that often requires a lot of back and forth communication from your sales team. Instead of wasting precious time trying to qualify or follow-up bad leads, they could be spending their time actually making sales.
Outsourcing appointment scheduling services is practically like handing your sales team pre-qualified leads on a silver platter. Appointment setters do all the grunt work so your sales team doesn’t have to.
Get Skilled Customer Service Personnel To Handle Calls
Handling high customer service call volumes is one of the biggest challenges small- and medium-sized businesses face these days. Many of them simply don’t have the resources or the manpower to answer each and every single call, email, or live chat inquiry in a timely manner. Experienced customer service agents can help mitigate all customer communications promptly and in a courteous manner to streamline your operations and help you stay on track.
Generate High-Quality Leads
The first step to qualifying leads is generating a large enough lead pool to ensure positive results for your sales team. This is where professional appointment setters shine. By engaging in customer interactions, professional appointment setters can quickly weed out the most unlikely leads and only send your sales team those that are most interested in your products or services.
Appointment setters will also verify all of the lead information that’s included in your database including name, address, preferred pronouns, phone number, and email to guarantee accuracy and efficiency. They’ll also update files, fill in missing information, and remove duplicates through a process called data scrubbing or cleansing.
Flexible Availability
If you’re running an international business or planning to expand your geographical reach at some point in the future, then your services need to reflect that. Accommodating different time zones ensures that customers all over the world can reach your business when it’s convenient for them. One of the perks of outsource appointment setting services is that it offers flexible hours of operation to expand availability to a much wider customer base than you originally had in mind.
Achieving this type of flexible customer outreach in-house is next to impossible. And even if you’re able to find staff members who are willing to work extremely long hours, the talent pool will be very limited and expensive. Outsourcing appointment setting services guarantees 24/7 high-quality service regardless of the customer’s geographical location.
What Tasks Does An Outsourced Team Perform?
No matter which way you slice it, there’s no denying that outsourcing your appointment setting services has a lot of amazing benefits. Appointment setters are highly trained sales and customer service associates that know the ins and outs of your business like the backs of their hands. Their job description entails so much more than simply inputting information into your online database.
Professional appointment setters have a plethora of highly desirable job-related skills that work in your favour, including:
Making Follow-Up Calls
As painstaking and time-consuming as they are, follow-up calls are vital to lead qualification and securing a sale. As part of the lead qualification process, appointment setters will take the time to follow-up with leads they haven’t heard from in a while to make sure they’re still interested.
Scheduling, Rescheduling, Or Cancelling Appointments
Life is busy and unpredictable. Sometimes things just don’t work out as planned and a customer may need to reschedule or cancel an appointment. Appointment setters make the necessary system updates to keep the flow of customers moving.
Cold Calling
Given the fact that many customers tend to contact businesses of their own volition, cold calling isn’t a commonly used tactic these days. However, some small businesses that are trying to generate new leads may still benefit from this sales technique. Appointment setting professionals will directly contact potential leads to inform them about new products, services, and promotions your organization is offering to generate interest.
Set Automated Appointment Reminders
A crucial part of scheduling appointments is setting automated appointment reminders for your sales team and customers alike. The appointment setter’s job is to find out the preferred notification settings of your customers and sales team (email, phone call, phone notifications, date, and time) to ensure that reminders are sent promptly.
Product Promotion And Answering Questions
Appointment setters are knowledgeable about all of your business’s products, services, and special promotions. Proper lead generation and qualification entails informing potential customers about new products and services and current promotions to spike their interest. Since they’re an extension of your sales team, they’re also empowered to answer any questions or concerns that your customers throw at them.
As one of the most renowned customer service agencies in North America, 3C Contact Services provides reliable and efficient outsource appointment setting services to help improve your customer flow and keep track of all appointments. Contact us today to learn more.
Also Read: The Impact Of An Effective Answering Service On Your Small Business’s Bottom Line
