Knowing what you are being billed is only a part of understanding
the cost of an answering service to your business. The real key is understanding how you are being billed.
An important question you must ask your answering service is
what is their billing periods. Is it a
month to month billing cycle or is it every 28 days. There can be a huge difference over the
course of a year between the two. A 28
day billing period accounts for a partial billing period for every month. In a typical non leap year, six months of the
year have 30 days and 6 months of the year has 31 days. In a 28 day billing cycle you will have 6
months of the year with 2 days unaccounted for and you will have 6 months of
the year with 3 days unaccounted for.
The total of all the days unaccounted for is 30 days. Those extra days will be billed as an extra
invoice during the course of a year which also means you will receive an
additional base rate during the course of the year. All City does it differently. We bill you on a month to month basis with 12
invoices in a 12 month period. There are
no hidden costs with us.
Another question you must ask your answering service is what
their rounding rate is. The rounding
rate is the fraction that the call is rounded to. An example is a call that lasts 34
minutes. Is it rounded for billing purposes
to 40 seconds or is rounded to the next full minute which would be 1
minute. Some services do the next full
minute of rounding. This would greatly
affect your usage rate so you wouldn’t be comparing apples to apples when
deciding on an answering service. At All
City Communications we only round to the 1/10th of a minute, so a 6
second call will only be rounded to 10 seconds.
This can be a great savings for your company.
Finally, review any additional line items for services that
you currently use. Examples of
additional line items may be texting charges, patching charges, and any term a
specific answering service may use for an additional surprise service
charge. All City Communications is
upfront with pricing and offers an extremely competitive rate. We have many customized packages that will
fit your needs so you will not be paying for additional minutes you may never
use.
