5 Reasons Social Media Can’t Replace a Live Telephone Support Receptionist

As we get settled into 2015, e-commerce and social marketing have become the favorite buzz words for business owners worldwide. If you run your own business, you understand the importance of providing social media profiles and pages to showcase your product or service. Our telephone answering service doesn’t dispute the various benefits social media brings to your business, we just believe we do some things better. Here we list 5 reasons why social media cannot replace live telephone support from highly trained virtual receptionists.

Why Live Telephone Support Outweighs Social Media

1. Brand reputation and management are always on the defense.

Since consumers are on-line 24 hours a day, they also have the ability to tarnish your brand reputation and image by posting negative comments and reviews all day and night. By not giving them the option of a real live person to speak to about their complaint, your company is losing out on the ability to make an unhappy customer feel satisfied. With no open communication available to them, the disgruntled customer will have their voice heard on your social profile.

Let our telephone answering service humanize your business by providing a customer feedback telephone option. This will give you the opportunity to intercept unhappy customers before they reach your social sites and taint your company image.

2. Relying on digital communications can increase confusion.

Yes, social media is a great tool to help you in marketing your business brand and providing a platform for old, existing and new customers to reach out to you and vice versa. Social media can also be a confusing form of communication.

Think about all the text messages, quick email responses and auto-corrected comments that are misinterpreted on a daily basis. Sometimes, you need to cut the middle man out and go straight to the source to clear up any misinformation or consumer confusion.

Our virtual receptionists are able to provide clarification and correct information to your callers with a human touch and smiling voice. You’d be surprised how a one-minute telephone conversation can help a customer feel more informed about your product or service.

3. Your customers are on-line 24/7 but you technically aren’t.

Either you manage your social media accounts or you have hired an employee to post on your pages and interact with your followers. Either way, someone is watching the social media activity for your business. The human-need to sleep, shower and even sit down to dinner without being connected prohibits you from being available every minute of every day.

Technically, our virtual receptionists that answer your lines don’t sleep; they don’t take bathroom breaks or leave their workstations… ever. Yes, we are real people, but we work differently than a lot of industries. One of the differences is we include flextime shift schedules that allow our team to always be standing by, ready to assist your customers.

When you hire a live telephone support team, you can rest assured that all communications to your company are handled in real-time, 24 hours a day.

4. They can follow you but you cannot follow them.

With your social voice, you can post a message to all of your followers at once. If you don’t have a campaign focused on getting those followers to give you their contact information, you cannot keep that conversation going.

Having a telephone messaging service can enable you to have a more personal relationship with your consumers. When handling your business lines, we can ask each of your callers for their email addresses and other contact information. Our telephone messaging service will provide you this information for storing.

Our team can give you peace of mind that all of your marketing efforts are not lost. If social media sites like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn were ever to wipe off the earth, you would still have access to your past, current and future customers.

5. Social Media has a privacy flaw.

There are some things that your customers and followers want to keep private and so, they will not reach out to your business. Think about certain things that you like to keep confidential. If you interacted and communicated with a business on your social media account, all of your family, friends and followers are made aware of an issue you may want to keep private.

Don’t force your customers to be silent if they long for discretion. Allow a telephone answering service like A Courteous to handle the customer service that calls for privacy and confidentiality.

Having a team of virtual receptionists is affordable.

Let us help your business grow with our Live Telephone Support!

We hope that you agree with these 5 reasons why a live telephone support representative will never be replaced by social media communication platforms. With prices as cheap as $10 per month, what does your business have to lose by providing 24 hour telephone support to your customers? Click here to request a free consultation to discuss custom services and rates.