Powerful, Innovative Answering Service Solutions

Live Telephone Answering Service (TAS)

Where an operator answers calls and takes a basic message. The message is then delivered to the appropriate party via text message, alpha pager, e-mail, fax, or voice mail.

Order Entry

We become your callers’ fingers on the web to enter orders directly into your website. This is very effective and spares you from any need to re-key or transcribe orders. We can also provide other forms of customer service – order status inquiries, shipment tracking, and frequently asked questions are common examples.
For maximum efficiency, we advise a few simple web design considerations that will allow our operators to speed through the order process. Call us for advice about how to create a call-center friendly website.

Customer Service

By guiding your callers through specific step-by-step procedures or troubleshooting guides, we solve problems for your clients without burdening you for routine matters. Our staff has extensive experience with many CRM and case management applications.

Virtual Receptionist

We are your telephone screener, able to take messages and patch calls to you based on your direction. You have all the advantages of a live professional answer, combined with the efficiency of not being interrupted for non-urgent calls. If it’s not critical for the caller to speak with you immediately, or you’re not available, we take a message and send you a text message or e-mail so you can call back at your discretion. Your time is valuable! You want qualified calls when your phone rings. Our live representatives will act on your behalf, ask the appropriate questions and send you truly important or emergency calls.

Call Screening

Live operators do a better job at distinguishing true emergencies. Automated (voice mail) screening depends on callers to answer accurately, and tends to yield more “false emergencies” since some callers will choose the emergency option if they are impatient. A live, professional receptionist will answer your calls, project the image you want your callers to receive, and assist the caller as defined by your protocol. For example, after answering a call, we will help the caller by answering their questions (limited by information you provide to us), take a message, or patch calls to an appropriate member of your team.

Remote Receptionist

Ask us about custom solutions to solve specific issues you face. Facilitates messaging your way! Our automated system can play pre-recorded announcements, record messages, and respond to callers hitting numbers on their phone keypad. Messages taken this way can be e-mailed, delivered by an automated phone call to your phone(s), or picked up by a call from you.

Voice Mail

Voice mail can be used in more sophisticated ways, too. One common application, used by most of our medical accounts, is where calls are answered by a greeting that states routine information like office hours and holidays, and gives callers the option to “press 1 if this is an emergency”. Callers that press 1 are connected to a live operator.
Variations of this are possible, including more choices like options to leave a voice mail for non-emergencies. Multi-step question-and-answer surveys can record a set of answers from a caller in a single message. Voice mail is related to Auto Attendant, described below.

Auto Attendant

A typical auto-attendant function is to play a message like, “Thank you for calling XYZ company. The next available representative will be with you in a moment.”. However, more elaborate scenarios can include menu choices and opportunities for the caller to make choices to help route the call.
An Auto Attendant can provide a greeting (answer message) for clients who use a certain voice talent to be consistent with a their telephone image. Auto Attendant is related to Voice Mail, above.

Appointment Scheduling

We book appointments in real time using a web-based calendar that is shared between our staff and yours. This guarantees synchronization and virtually eliminates the risk of double-bookings. A follow-on service that some of our clients appreciate is our ability to place reminder calls to reduce no-shows.
In certain cases, we can interface with other appointment scheduling systems. This is based on a variety of considerations that we can discuss if you call us at 877-371-7151.

Reminder and Confirmation Calls

Calling the client or patient to remind them of an appointment, typically the day before which it is scheduled. When clients or patients are given a reminder, no-shows are reduced and utilization is higher. If reminder calls are taking a big bite out of your day, let us place them for you.

Call Overflow

Describes a situation where calls are handled by you or your staff primarily, and overflow (calls in excess of your staff’s capacity) are handled by us. This is very useful in scenarios where your call volume fluctuates beyond your ability to schedule staff. Let Answer Excellence handle the load when you can’t.
An example of call overflow is an insurance company client who employs Answer Excellence to help file insurance claims for flood damage. Flood claims surge dramatically with very little warning (no pun intended), beyond the insurer’s ability to staff. The call overflow arrangement enables them to handle peaks in claim filing activity while keeping their in-house staffing at a more “normal” level.
For clients with very high call volumes, such as national media campaigns, we offer a distributed call network service with operators in multiple time zones and locations. Good planning and coordination is critical to a successful campaign.

Inbound Telemarketing & Lead Generation

Stop re-keying information and avoid delays in getting your leads on file. Refers to the process of answering calls from prospective customers and gathering information from them so that your sales force can follow up. We can send the leads to you via normal message delivery (e-mail or fax), or enter them directly into your CRM system. This latter approach is the most efficient by far, since it spares you from having to re-key the information and avoids any delay in getting the leads on file.
Answer Excellence will pick up the pace when your inbound call volume exceeds your staff’s ability to handle calls, such as with peaks generated by advertising campaigns. Answer Excellence fields calls and schedules or enrolls participants for seminars and other events. We can handle this in a number of ways, ranging from simply taking messages to using a web-based scheduling tool (yours or ours).

Seminar Registration

This is especially useful in cases where your inbound call volume exceeds your staff’s ability to handle calls, such as with peaks generated by advertising campaigns. We provide a specialized referral system that makes it easy to manage a pool of resources, with multiple resource groups based on attributes such as Zip Code and Specialty.

Referral Services

Round-robin and other referral schemes are supported. Reporting features include CSV spreadsheet files that can facilitate tracking and billing.
This is especially useful in cases where your inbound call volume exceeds your staff’s ability to handle calls, such as with peaks generated by advertising campaigns.

Emergency Business Continuity Plan

We offer this service for clients who require the utmost in reliability. It entails setting up your account in multiple geographic locations so that no single failure or disaster will impair the availability of service. It is an optional feature available for additional cost.

On-Call Schedule Maintenance

We are very good at managing the complexities of on-call schedules. For many accounts, this is the most demanding part of the service. We diligently maintain a schedule based on information you provide to us, and route calls to the appropriate doctor or technician.
For many clients, our web-based scheduling tool streamlines the scheduling process.

E-mail Monitoring and Dispatching

We are capable of monitoring for messages sent to an e-mail account and handle them per your instructions. For example, one of our clients services automated equipment that sends alarm messages to a specific e-mail address. Our systems monitor the e-mail box and alert our operators to dispatch on-call technicians when alarms occur.
E-mail monitoring is a relatively simple case of systems integration, where computer systems and applications “talk” to each other. Many of our e-mail monitoring clients are service vendors for 7-Eleven Stores – the vendors who provide service to 7-11 stores for air conditioning, fuel systems, and electricians. We monitor for e-mails from Clarify, the 7-Eleven work tracking system.