Being in sales I talk with people all day about the cost of live answering service. Mostly I get feedback that our pricing is about the same or better than our competitors’ but every so often I’m told, “It’s just too expensive”, or, “I can get it cheaper somewhere else”. I’ve even had someone tell me they can hire someone in house and pay less, although they admitted they would be paying that employee less than minimum wage and under the table.
Here’s where that age old saying comes in: “You get what you pay for”.
Live answering can be a great asset to a company but it can also be detrimental to a company if the only deciding factor for a service is who has the lowest price. So, what’s normal and what’s too cheap? Let’s compare price:
So, why are these companies so different when it comes to price? Why can provider C offer such low pricing compared to their competitors?
It all has to do with staffing, training and quality. An answering service who charges rates much lower than industry leaders probably don’t have many operators available to answer your calls. That means your callers can expect an average wait of 1 – 5 minutes before their call is handled. That could also mean they have limited resources and technology to provide you with the industry standard features like call patching, dispatching, message delivery to multiple text addresses and emails, webform completion, order processing and more. You could even find yourself paying an extra premium fee for features that others include in their monthly price.
It’s a great thing to save money, but don’t pay to cut out the quality.
