A telephone answering service is a monthly service that provides phone answering support (among other services) for both large and small businesses. For the most part, a business will forward their telephone line (or lines) to a designated number at the answering service. Whens someone calls your businesses phone number, a receptionist at the answering service receives the call, greets the caller, and follows the script, or call flow, provided by the client. For example, the receptionist may answer the phone with something like ‘Thank you for calling Evergreen Apartments. This is Lucy. How can I help you today?’. The caller may state they are locked out of their apartment, at which point the virtual receptionist will follow the procedures put into place for apartment lockouts – like transferring the call to the rotating maintenance staff.

A good script is the platform that the entire virtual receptionist experience is built on. The script is the key to a successful interaction – or a terrible one. If the script is too complicated, or not robust enough, the interaction is bound to fail. To help small businesses get the most out of outsourcing their calls to an answering service, we’ve created this infographic which breaks down how to create a perfect script into 5 parts: Start with a clear question, keep responses simple, use all message delivery methods available, review your calls, and check in with your service every month.

Source: specialty answering service