5 Ways an AI Answering Service Can Boost Business Productivity

While many factors play central roles in a business’s success or lack thereof, productivity is one of the most critical. The level of productivity across your teams can affect everything from efficiency to profitability, and even how competitive you are within your industry or niche. It bears on customer satisfaction, operational costs, communications, and employee retention.

The state of productivity

While you might think that the range of tools available to today’s workers would mean we’re more productive than ever before, that’s not the case. Distractions abound and they have a direct and immediate impact on your team. Let’s take a closer look at the situation.

• A single distraction can waste almost 5% of an employee’s workday.

• Out of the average 10-hour day, an employee usually only spends 7.5 hours working.

• Almost half of all employees report being productive less than 75% of their day.

• Three of the biggest distractions in the workplace are 1) other people, 2) digital notifications, and 3) phone calls. 

Of the three distractions we listed, phone calls are perhaps the most insidious, because of their very nature. Phone calls are always a priority and must be answered as soon as possible. That can force employees to juggle their priorities. Should they finish the task they’re working on or answer the phone? Who is more important, the customer the employee is chatting with via text or the inbound phone call? How do you separate calls by order of priority or quality without someone having to physically interrupt their other duties? How much time do your people waste fielding marketing and spam calls?

By this point, you can probably guess at some of the ways an AI answering service can boost productivity. But we’re going to spell them out for you anyway.

No more dropped tasks

According to a study by UC Berkeley, it can take between eight and 25 minutes to get back on track with a task after being interrupted. That means a single phone call could have a major impact on an employee’s ability to make progress on a task or complete it in a reasonable time. Too many interruptions could lead to overtime to complete the task or the task not being completed on time at all, which has a knock-on effect across your entire organization. An AI answering service helps ensure that employees aren’t needlessly interrupted by phone calls that could have been avoided.

No more marketing and spam calls

Marketing and spam calls have grown all too common today. Fielding these calls not only interrupts an employee but wastes their time. An AI answering service can help differentiate between spam or marketing calls and genuine phone calls, blocking unwanted calls and ensuring that genuine phone calls are answered promptly and routed where they need to go. 

At Smith.ai, our AI answering service is capable of recognizing and blocking over 20 million known spammers. We can also put the brakes on robocalls. How much more productive could your team be if your inbound call volume dropped by 20%? (Hint: that’s the percentage of daily calls that are spam or marketing related).

Hit the ground running

How much time do your people waste with each call gathering information that has probably already been collected? It’s not just the impact on your employees’ time, either. Customers loathe having to give their name and other details time after time, often during the same phone call. 

An AI answering service can change this paradigm in several ways. Your customers will only need to provide their details once, and then that information will be forwarded to the correct person to answer the phone. That allows the employee to hit the ground running, not just with the customer’s name and current situation, but also their history with your company, previous support issues, and more. It’s all about providing a seamless, cohesive experience with every call.

Increased speed to lead

Speed to lead is the time it takes you to respond to a qualified prospect from the point they become an inbound lead. For instance, someone might land on your website and then request a consultation. That’s the point when an individual becomes a lead. This metric applies to any response method, whether that’s by email, online chat, phone, social media, or another channel.

An AI answering service can increase your speed to lead by providing a warm phone transfer when the lead is ready to take the next step. This saves your team the time required to answer questions and qualify a lead in the first place and ensures that they’re focused on mission-critical, productive steps.

Booking appointments and consultations

One of your most important business goals is probably to get leads to book an appointment or consultation. However, the actual booking process can be time-consuming and disruptive for your employees. It’s a better option to have them focused on high-value tasks that require human creativity and expertise.

An AI answering service can take the appointment/consultation booking process off your hands, eliminate the pain of playing phone tag, and then book qualified leads into the calendar you already use. You’ll also benefit from automated appointment reminders, which means that your people don’t have to waste their time calling or texting to ensure that leads remember the date.

Smith.ai is your AI answering service of choice

As you can see, an AI answering service can help your team dramatically improve their productivity. Between automating time-consuming, low-value tasks, eliminating disruptions that cost your team members time, and streamlining processes so that you can get leads in the door faster, it’s a no-brainer. At Smith.ai, we fuse cutting-edge AI technology with the human touch that your customers want and deserve. Our live virtual agents and industry-leading AI technology can help your team perform better than ever. 

To learn more, schedule a consultation or reach out to hello@smith.ai.

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