You may remember the old movies that show banks of switchboard operators taking calls and placing them to the appropriate parties. More or less, that’s what the basic answering service has been ever since we started getting more complex routing options for inbound callers. And, with the exception of fewer crowded, smoked-filled rooms of gossipy operators, a disappointingly low amount has changed. That is, of course, only for answering services that still rely on a physical switchboard to operate. For the majority of agile businesses that rely on a cloud based communications system, however, a Virtual Answering Service is a wholly different and more efficient variety.
Alternatively, if you are looking for help staffing a call center or are looking to hire a remote receptionist, check out our Professional Answering Service options!
A Virtual Answering Service is, at first glance, rather straightforward. In effect, modern telephony and cloud-based business telephone systems have enabled companies to replicate many of the functions of a full time dedicated receptionist. Even a dedicated team of receptionists at a switchboard can’t scale to the volume of calls that a virtual answering service can. A virtual receptionist can then greet, direct, and manage all inbound call traffic for a business, plus this receptionist doesn’t even need to take a bathroom break! But to truly make a virtual receptionist into a virtual answering service requires added functionality that eclipses the typical needs of a voice on the other end of the line.
Automated Directories, Hunt Groups or Ring Groups, ACD Queues Pro, and a host of other advanced business telephone features all play a role in completing a total virtual answering service. The strategy behind which features to use and how to implement them, though, depends on the size and type of the company that uses them along with the call volume they anticipate receiving.
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ACD Queues Pro are the benchmark for any enterprise level Virtual Answering Service. They have the ability to streamline a massive amount of inbound calls through a series of sophisticated grouping, call overflow, routing, and escalation pathways. If there are new team members who need to throttle their workload during training, if you want to prescribe wrap-up time for agents to annotate previous calls, or if you want to manage and monitor all of the total call activity with insightful data visualizations in real time, you can do all of that and more with ACD Queues Pro. There exist a multitude of possible answering service configurations that leverage ACD Queues Pro, but even that great number of arrangements is dwarfed by the virtually limitless possibilities on exactly how an ACD Queue is designed for any particular company.
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