Customer engagement and answering their calls and queries on time are crucial for the growth and revenue of any business. But as the call volume starts to grow with the growth of the business.

Nowadays, businesses use Auto Attendant as a tool to increase customer engagement and responses. An Auto Attendant also called an Automated Attendant is a pre-scripted message that customers hear when they make a call. It provides keypad prompts to reach the right agent in your business with a click of a button.

What are the benefits of an Auto Attendant?

The principal benefit of a call attendant system is that it handles customer calls efficiently. But the benefits of Auto Attendant are not limited to handling customer calls. It offers a lot more benefits than that. Let us discuss some important features of Auto Attendant below.

  • Effective Call Management
  • Enhanced Productivity
  • Cost-effective
  • 24*7 availability
  • Enhanced Customer Experience
  • Reliability
  • Professional Impression
  • Fewer Spam Calls

Let us discuss all of them in detail.

Effective Call Management: An organization has a lot of work to focus on, and having effective call management can help your business handle customers effectively. Sometimes, businesses can miss customers’ calls. And it is not a good practice to leave the calls unanswered, as it can affect your business in many ways. But auto-attendant can save you and your business from such situations and help you manage your calls effectively. It politely and quickly answers calls and routes calls to the right person.

Enhanced Productivity: Answering the same query again and again can be a time-consuming process. So, businesses can set up a custom message that answers all FAQs related to offers, discounts, or new-launched features. 

Also, sometimes the calls are routed to the wrong department, and that can be a waste of time. But, Auto-Attendant prevents such misdirects and ensures that the calls go to the right department, hence increasing efficiency.

Cost-effective: Many companies do not want to spend expenses on a full-time receptionist or someone who can handle all calls. But all companies need someone who can handle the calls effectively. So, to complete the requirement, companies are using an Auto-Attendant as a tool to attend to and transfer the calls to the right department. It not only saves money but also saves time. 

24*7 Availability: One of the biggest advantages of Auto-Attendant is its availability. It remains available round the clock and can answer calls anytime, even after business calls. It gives customers a positive experience and can sometimes help you enhance your reputation because of the punctuality that it shows. 

Enhanced Customer Experience: Customer experience is vital to any business. The business revenue or profit is directly proportional to its customer’s experience. A good customer experience can get you the deal. Whereas a bad experience can have a bad impact on the deals. An Auto-Attendant can help you avoid bad communication situations. It automatically routes the calls to the right department on the first go. And customers get the required support and assistance on time. Also, it helps the customer understand the situation and saves them from passing the wrong judgments and reviews.

Reliability: These are highly reliable solutions that offer customer service in the most polite and professional ways possible. It acts as an automatic receptionist and conveys the right messages, and routes the calls as programmed. Businesses do not have to bother about miss-transferred calls, eliminating human error.

Professional Impression: Maintaining a professional image is crucial to every business, and an Auto-Attendant does this job efficiently and perfectly. It has an auto-recorded professional voice that poses a professional impression of your organization and helps you maintain your reputation. 

Fewer Spam Calls: Spam calls are one of the biggest challenges companies face these days. It is sometimes hard to tell if the caller is a real person or a bot. A bot can not press 1 or 2 to get routed to departments. In such scenarios, Auto-Attendant has a feature to identify and block spam calls.

A few Auto Attendant best practices

Auto-Attendant is a need of every business. Your callers must get the clearest understanding of the options. Let us learn about some basic best practices for getting an Auto-Attendant right. They are as follows.

  • Plan the entire call flow
  • Maintain professionalism
  • On-hold messaging features

Let us explain the above points in detail.

Plan the entire call flow: Planning your entire workflow from the beginning to the end help businesses write auto-generated messages without any issues. Not only that, you need to know who your actual customers are and what languages they speak. And business should write and record messages in all the languages their customer speak. Designing and organizing your Auto-Attendant based on your customer's needs and issues can help you get their call transferred to the exact department. 

Also, once the planning and setup are done, checking the call flow help businesses catch menu mistakes and can help you avoid small mistakes.

Maintain professionalism: Ensure that the voice that you are using for the recording is polite, clear, and good to the ears. Business can interview their employees to check whose voice fits the system well. It can help you save money and time without any complications. Also, ensure that you use one voice for all recordings, as using different voices at different times can confuse callers. It is a good practice to keep the message professional and never use works unprofessional words e.g. “you know”, “ah”, or “like”, “actually”, “just”, and so on. And businesses can use tools like Audacity, to edit the noise that comes while recording.

On-hold messaging features:

Auto-Attendant has an on-hold feature that can help businesses route the customer’s calls to departments they need to connect. The on-hold feature involves adding messages to the hold, keeping callers on the line, and forwarding important messages. It also prompts them to be ready with special paperwork/information they may need for the call and many more.

Why do businesses need an Auto-Attendant?

Research says that 75% of callers have reported that it takes too long before reaching human operators. And 91% of customers leave a business without any warning. Such scenarios can give your business a bad reputation.

Auto-Attendant takes care of such issues and acts as the first point of interaction to avoid missed calls. And it ensures seamless communication between businesses and customers and streamlines the entire communication.

Here are some reasons why your business needs an Auto-Attendant.

  • Customization Options
  • Seamless Work Flow
  • Great Customer Experience
  • Enhanced Trust
  • Scalability

Let us dive deep into all the points in detail.

Customization Options: The most crucial feature of Auto-Attendant is the customization option. You can customize the Auto-Attendant as per your requirements, change the message or route the menu on a timely basis. With that, you can also inform your customers about new offers, products, or services through it. And you can also inform about the changes occurring in the new departments e.g. addition or removal of a service or shifting of a department. All this can be done easily by incorporating such changes in your voice menu without an issue.

Seamless Work Flow: Auto-Attendant help you set up a voice message that can answer frequently asked questions related to business such as business hours, office address, and more. It eliminates customers’ dependence on the agents to get the answers to their questions or issues. Also, it helps an organization remove team workload and is a great time-saving tool for agents as they can utilize this time on other critical tasks.

Great Customer Experience: Customers can talk directly to the right person only by clicking the button. It saves a lot of time, as the callers can talk about their queries directly to the right person and it gives them a seamless experience and make them feel valued. 

Enhanced Trust: The way an individual communicates says a lot about their professionalism. A courteous and welcoming message sets a great first impression on your caller. And if the call is followed by a good service delivery, it can help you gain the customer's trust in no time. This not only improves the brand reputation but can help you get more deals.

Scalability: Auto-Attendant is an option for businesses of all sizes. It is highly scalable and can handle a large number of multiple calls at once. Not only handle, but they route the calls to the right person and help customers solve their queries as fast as possible.  

How should a business choose the right automated phone answering service?

Choosing a great Auto-Attendant service is crucial for any business. Here is how a business should choose the right automated phone answering service:

Robust customer service: Ensure that Auto-Attendant service comes with full customer support. If any case, you run into an issue related to Auto-Attendant it will affect your wait times, call volumes, and customer satisfaction. It can affect your brand reputation, so it is important o choose robust customer service. 

24*7 call support: Customers can work from different timezones, and your automated phone answering services must provide 24*7 support. Ensure that the Auto-Attendant service you are considering allows your customer to get in touch with you on time. 

Security and Compliance: When you are opting for an Auto-Attendant service, ensure that you check the security and compliance standards. This is important to keep your data safe. The best Auto-Attendant service provider will be completely upfront about how they manage clients. And will tell you clearly about the security protocols that they follow. Ensure that you check their encryption, message authentication, integrity, and replay protection policies properly.

Flexibility and Scalability – up and down: Scalability is vital for any Organization. With the advancement in technology, businesses can go through vast changes. And all enterprises should opt for Auto-Attendant services that are highly scalable. The services should make it possible to add and remove features as per business requirements and more. 

What should you record for better Auto-Attendant scripts?

Now that you know about Auto-Attendant, let us discuss what you should record as a script. After you configure call routing as per your business requirements, you need to record the greeting for your callers. Next, create a good script for your callers. The script should be professional, polite, simple, and easy to understand. Different customer queries may need different scripts. As different customers have different queries such as basic information, product related queries, and the scripts should be according to the needs.

For recording, businesses hire professionals to record their auto attendant menu. But this can lead to additional investment. So you must understand the market and the check costs with different professionals before hiring them. As an alternative, you can take the help of your employees for recording. If you take the help of employees, ensure that you use only one voice for all the scripts. The voice used should be professional, polite, and clear.

To Summarize

Auto-Attendants are one of the telephony features that can be used by any size of business in any industry. They connect with sales, support, operations, and other departments. Whether you want a basic Auto-Attendant or something that can help you handle complex tasks, make sure that it comes with the package that offers the most reliable and seamless communication. Auto-Attendant systems are normally compatible with all minds of phone systems from cloud-based solutions to more traditional hardware-based PBX systems.

If you are looking for the most trusted and reliable Auto-Attendants services, jiPBX is here for you. Our developers ensure that you get the Auto-Attendant services that meet your requirements and help you achieve seamless communication, and give your customer's the best user experience.

To know more about our services, visit here.