Phone Answering Service A Necessity to Handle Call Volume
American businesses are on communication overload, and screening calls, categorizing emails and text messages, and filtering communications is becoming a must for businesses trying to get things done. Perhaps it is time that a third party answering service becomes a business necessity.
The average number of phone calls in the US alone has steadily increased over the years, and this increase is reflected in an enormous volume of phone calls to businesses across the nation. For instance in 1980 there were 853 million calls placed per day, in 1990 there were 1272 million calls placed per day, in 1998 there were 1698 million calls placed per day according to Andrew Odlyzko, “Internet Pricing and the History of Communications,” AT&T Labs Research, http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/history.communications1b.pdf. These trends continue to increase in 2010 especially because there are actually more cell phones in service than there are people in the United States.
In 2009 2.5 billion text messages were sent each day in the USA and there was a 107% increase in text message use over 2008. The average person made 204 wireless phone calls and texts 357 times per month in 2008, and this number is steadily increasing, according to the text messaging blog.
What about emails? Companies also have been hit with increasing email communications each year as well. According to royal.pingdom.com, there were90 trillion emails sent on the Internet in 2009, for an average of 247 billion email messages per day, and unfortunately 81% of these emails that were spam.
Individuals and businesses are definitely on information overload in the US, and the trend is increasing. All these calls, texts and emails coming in at all hours of the day and night means that in order to be responsive to their clients, American businesses have to spend more and more time communicating information, relaying messages, and pointing customers in the right direction.
Smart businesses realize that certain corporate roles cost the company more money than others to when performing communication type activities with customers. Therefore they have created escalation procedures and protocols for answering customer questions and handling the increasing call volume. Perhaps the smartest solution of all is to outsource phone answering services to a call center, well equipped to handle the volume, screen calls, follow escalation protocols, and save companies money by ensuring that high-level people are not answering phones.
Bio: Sue McCrossin is internet consultant working for ACA on the subject of Phone Answering Services. The volume of calls and emails in the last five years has really necessitated the use of a call center to handle the massive amount of business communication now necessary.
