With the advent of technology, it has become convenient for most call centres to shift to phone answering service providers for a suitable range to regulate productivity. The small and mid-sized businesses who cannot afford the costly expenses of incorporating highly qualified call centre services are turning toward virtuous phone answering service providers. In order to help start-up businesses, answering service providers are providing facilities on pay-per call basis. However, there are other companies that argue that pay-per call strategy does not actually work out due to its payment procedures on fluctuating call volumes.
The answering services functioning on two varied rates of payment mode has its advantages and disadvantages. While one of the billing modes mug up a wholesome amount of money from their clients beforehand to cater services, the later only charges for the calls received. One of these services basically works considerably better for customers as it is more cost-effective. Let’s have a look on both of them.
This blog will bring to light a few advantages of flat rates payment procedures versus pay-per call rate.
- Efficiency
Apparently when a consumer tries to purchase something, he/she will always caress the facility of a cost-efficient item that has the same quality of a costlier item. This is the reason why many organisations prefer the amenities of a pay-per call phone answering service in order to decrease the expenditure of the organisation’s funds. It is regarded to be a very convenient process for small and mid-sized industries. The call flow for these kinds of industries raises and falls according to their seasonal functions. Therefore, flat rates on call answering services do not effectually help these organisations.
On the other hand goliath organisations that functions 365 of the day on average calls prefer to consider service provider that offers answering services on flat rates because they know neither is their call rates going to fall nor rise in the course of time.
- Flat billing approach
The chief advantage of flat billing is that suppose if the call sustains a bit longer than the average period of time, it actually favors your organisations. Simply saying, a fixed amount of billing system will qualify the satisfactory approach of pay the same amount of cash even during high calls. The monthly billing procedure plainly generates only the required amount of money even if their agents have to receive high call volumes during seasonal period.
But of course! It has a few nooks. In case of flat billing sometimes you might end up paying for missed calls, wrong numbers or other short calls.
There are no specialised call centre that can stop the flow of wrong incoming calls. Organisations employing flat rate phone answering amenities billing system is likely to suffer the consequences of paying full amount for a call that is not even anticipated or required by the company.
- The more you buy, the less expensive
Most call plans are sold in “blocks of calls” or “packages”. In such cases the more you intend to buy calls the lesser is the rate of all calls. Most importantly, you have to pull out a strategical plan to figure out how many calls you are likely to receive in a month and how long will the call sustain. Customer data and other information help organisation figure out this dilemma and thus back up the size of the package and pay accordingly. Selecting the package of 100 calls every minute and attending only 30 out of 100 is apparently not a desirable approach because the call and the money do not roll back. Seasonal businesses have a tough time generating these types of rates.
Therefore, the risk of choosing the right package for the right time is very significant for pay per call rates. A wrong decision could end you up paying far more amount of money than needed.
Concisely speaking, a pre-paying mode for your customer calls does not deliver impulsive to the contact centre to answer your calls adeptly. Therefore, paying beforehand of services that are not yet received is somewhat inconsequential. However, the service providers offering flat rate phone answering services are still getting paid whether they receive your calls or not. Technically, the most reliable approach for organisation incorporating phone answering service must initiate the process on pay-per call basis.
