Sometimes, a call can challenge even our best call handlers. September's Call Handling Hero^® is Eric, offering compassion, patience and calm during an extremely trying call with a patient.

Our Fall Family Festival is always a great time for A Better Answer staff, our friends and our families but we do our best to turn our yearly good time into something special for others too. This year, we were so honored to present $5,290, collected from our Plano, Hurst and Houston locations, to Bikers Against Child Abuse!

Your employees’ psychological well-being can be affected by their personal lives and also their time at work. Work relationships can either hinder the quality of life for those that work for/with you or bring value to them. Believe it or not, the quality of a person’s workplace can contribute to overall happiness or illness in an employee.

How can you make the workplace bring value to a person’s life?

Phone calls are an important part of running a successful and growing business so every call should be answered. When call handling becomes too time-consuming for business owners, however, they will begin to look for alternatives to assist them so that other business functions don’t fall to the wayside. The alternatives are typically an automated answering system or hiring an answering service. Let’s look at the pros and cons of each.

When you hear the words “call center,” does it immediately bring to mind endless rows of people chattering away on headsets? Then you have a pretty accurate idea of what a call center is like. Did you know that many call centers experience an extremely high turnover rate? As a matter of fact, the average time a U.S. call center representative remains at one job is about 3 years.

Hiring employees is quite the endeavor. Initially there is the cost of advertising or recruiting the candidate. Then add in the cost to human resources to read over resumes, interview, check references, screen candidates and make an offer. The reason that organizations spend so much time, money and effort in the hiring process is because they want a quality employee.

Humility is a great virtue but as a business owner, sometimes you have to shout from the rooftops. At A Better Answer, we’re proud of our history, our team, and the level of customer service we provide our clients. Every month we highlight calls where our call handling heroes went above and beyond what was expected. Our trophy wall continues to line up with awards in customer service. Testimonials come in monthly from our awesome clients.

But can A Better Answer handle your business? Let us elaborate on what we can do for you.

If you’ve ever experienced a frustrating call to customer service, you may already understand how empathy is a preferred customer service trait. Generally, when making a call to a business, a caller is looking for assistance and hopes someone will listen to them. An empathetic ear can make a difference in how the call is handled and whether the caller continues to do business with your company.

Empathy, however, is a skill that must be practiced and honed. Here are some tips on how and why empathy is good for your business.

Every industry has its own jargon and answering services are no different. If you are considering an answering service for your business, you will be asked a series of questions to help define your needs and develop a plan. In order to make the selection and sales process smoother, there are a number of answering service terms that you should know.

Here’s a short list to get you started.

Not every answering service is the same. There are, however, certain things that a customer should look for, at a minimum, when hiring an answering service. This post will be a guide to questions and answers to consider.