What Are The Advantages of Having a Virtual Receptionist?

What Are The Advantages of Having a Virtual Receptionist?

The business climate today is vastly different from what it was a decade ago. These days customers expect to be serviced across multiple channels, on a 24×7 basis. Companies need to accommodate these requests while also being cost-effective. Whether you are a startup or a small business, you may not be able to hire new employees. However, taking endless calls from your customers is also not a viable option. This is where a virtual receptionist can really prove helpful to your business, while you focus on tasks that generate more revenue.

The cost-effective option of a virtual receptionist

A virtual receptionist service is basically a person who answers customers on a phone line in another location across the globe. Many of these virtual receptionists end up working from home. It is also a good option to work with a call center that is located outside your country, to take care of these calls. When it comes to business strategy, a virtual service for receptionists can be a very good option to save on costs. Hiring a receptionist on a full-time basis can prove to be very expensive, running into thousands of dollars a year. Apart from this, you have to provide benefits as well as time off with payment. When you hire a virtual receptionist you end up paying much less for all their services, compared to the salary, cost, benefits, and taxes associated with a full-time receptionist.

Much more availability

In the scenario of a virtual service for receptionist, you are easily able to tailor the frequency, days and hours you want the virtual receptionist to answer the phone calls, to cater to your business requirements. In case you wish for the phone calls to be answered after business hours, a virtual receptionist can do this for you. When you are worried about the calls getting answered when you are on a holiday or vacation, you can ensure with the virtual service, that no call from your customers ever goes without answering.

Help many more customers

The tremendous advantage of a virtual receptionist service is that they can take calls during the off hours as well. This way, virtual receptionists are able to manage many more calls than a full-time receptionist that was physically located at your office. By working and hiring services of a call center, you can be assured that the agents speak several languages, thereby catering to a wider demographic and geographical location. This helps you cater to clients from different countries, which also helps grow your business and demographic. 

Negligible training and full coverage

When you hire a virtual receptionist you do not need to spend money or time in training these agents as they are already well trained in taking calls from customers. Your agreement or contract with the agency will include costs for training as well. So you do not need to spend extra. The other aspect is that if you were to keep a full-time receptionist in house, they would be able to attend only one call at a single time. This can result in hold times for customers, which is not a good thing. With a virtual receptionist they can take several calls at once due to the different agents available at a single time. Thus, every customer that calls your business is attended to, resulting in more customer satisfaction and better business for you.

Vacations are worry-free

Most in house employees will need to go on vacation at least once a year. This means that when your receptionist goes on holiday, you will need to handle these calls from your customers. However, with a virtual receptionist service you can be worry-free as there is always an agent or receptionist available to take customers’ calls. 

Possibly the biggest advantage of a virtual receptionist is that you get to outsource this task to an external agency, while you get to focus on what’s really important – tasks that generate more revenue.