Doctors are some of the busiest people on the planet, and keeping track of their patients’ needs all throughout the day and night is almost impossible. If you’re a medical professional as well, then you know you need to serve your patients as best as possible. In that case, you may need to consider outsourcing your after hours calls to a doctors answering service, which can provide your patients with vital information when you’re out of the office.

Medical centers can be one of the most difficult places to work in, and there’s often never time for a break during the day. When you finally do get to go home and relax, your patients will still need constant support, and they need to have a way to seek advice at all times.

The foundation of any successful business is great customer service, and that all begins with a ring of the telephone. No matter what anyone tells you or how advanced technology may get, there will never be a better way to interact with your customers than with an old-fashioned phone call.

It’s easy to make a case for contracting with an after hours phone answering service. Despite the proliferation of digital channels available, many of your customers or clients still want to call you on the phone.

It’s commonly assumed that businesses need a steady stream of new customers to survive — and if your business is like most, you’ve probably spent quite a bit of money on advertising trying to pull more customers in. But that assumption is, quite simply, not always correct.

Every time you answer a work call from a customer, you’re representing your business — whether you think of yourself as a customer service representative or not. But are you representing it well, or poorly? It’s all too easy to fall into bad habits when it comes to dealing with customers on the phone.

If you’re choosing a live telephone answering service for your average business, then your focus should probably be on making sure the operators of any service you’re considering are courteous and well trained in phone etiquette. You might want to ask prospective companies how long a phone may ring without being answered (three rings is considered the polite max),

Telephone customer service is tough. That’s one reason aside from reducing labor costs that having a contract with a live answering service is often a benefit for businesses; the operators for those live answering services are trained customer service agents who can handle tricky situations involving angry people. But whether your business uses telephone answering services or not, it can’t hurt to put a little thought into the best ways to respond to dissatisfied customers on the phone.

There’s so much advice out there on customer service that it can be difficult to boil it down to the few tips that can really make a difference when it comes to your customers’ perception of your business. To help you prioritize your efforts, here are six of the biggest dos and don’ts that will help you gain and retain customers.

Telephone etiquette is one of the most important aspects of business customer service strategy because, whether provided in house or by phone answering services, it increases customer satisfaction. But what, exactly, is good telephone etiquette? Some rules are quantified in minutes on hold and numbers of rings — most experts say a business phone should never ring more than three times — while others are extremely vague, such as the idea that tone is the most important vocal skill in great phone etiquette.