With so much choice available, today’s customers often base their final purchase decision on customer service, especially if they’re choosing a business they’ll be working with over a longer period of time.

This means being easily contactable can often be the difference between winning and retaining business, or losing out to the competition.

Hiring a remote receptionist is a good answer to this problem, making your business available to new and existing customers 24/7.

But when you’re investing money in your business, you always want to know you’re getting benefits or, “a good ROI”.

Some think that working out the ROI of a remote or virtual receptionist is difficult, but it’s much easier than you think when you know what to judge it against.

Here’s how you work out the ROI from your remote receptionist service.

Working out the ROI of your remote receptionist

Let’s say for example you’re selling enterprise B2B SaaS on a subscription model of around £2,500 a month.

That means for every missed call you’re potentially losing £30,000 in annual revenue.

Just losing three sales a year from missed calls could be costing you close to £100,000 a year.

It’s not just the ‘big ticket items’ where the costs can mount up quickly.

In the aesthetic treatment industry, missing a couple of calls can quickly result in hundreds, if not thousands of pounds in losses.

Just a single botox treatment can be charged at around £200.

So let’s say you miss a single call everyday while you’re already doing a treatment with a client – in reality you’ll likely miss more.

Missing that one call results in £200 lost revenue a day.

Based on working 20 days a month, and not taking into account any missed days due to holidays or illness, you’re potentially leaving £48,000 of additional revenue on the table.

That’s nearly £50,000 a year just from missing one call every day.

Now imagine you’ve invested in a telephone answering service or virtual receptionist to handle all your incoming calls.

You’re paying £79 a month for 50 minutes of additional call handling to help with the overflow of calls you can’t deal with.

Over the course of a year, that’s £948 to ensure you’re answering every call that comes in.

If you picked up those three missed calls for your B2B subscription service, substituting the costs you’ve spent on call answering, you’ve made an extra £99,052 in revenue.

That’s a huge ROI from simply investing in answering all your incoming calls.

How many calls is your remote receptionist taking when you’re too busy to answer?

If you’re busy you can’t always be on hand to answer the phone.

But missing a call is always potentially a lost customer or an annoyed existing customer.

The easiest way to judge the ROI from your virtual receptionist, is to evaluate the number of new customers you bring in from the calls being taken when you’re too busy to answer the phone.

Simply work out the customer value from the call and compare those values to the investment you make in your virtual receptionist service.

How many meetings are booked for you by your virtual receptionist?

Booking meetings, coordinating calendars, or trying to work out when you can get out to a customer to quote for a job can take a lot of time from your day.

Especially when you have to deal with multiple calendars on the customer side, or you’re dealing with third party suppliers or contractors on your side.

All the time you spend looking through calendars or trying to book meetings is less time you’re spending on work, getting paid and moving on to the next job.

Your remote receptionist will be able to deal with all this for you.

Think about how much time you’d spend booking meetings in the day.

Then think about how much you make on average per hour in your business, and you’ll be able to work out how much your remote receptionist is saving you in lost time and money.

How satisfied are your customers with your level of service?

Because customers have so much choice over what products or services to buy, and who to buy them from, many have started to look for new ways to differentiate companies apart from the usual product and price.

Today, many choose a company based on the level of customer service they get.

In fact, according to research by PwC, customers are willing to pay more money for an item if they get better customer service.

An easy way to provide better customer service is to have an actual person on the end of the phone when a customer calls you – rather than having them greeted by an automated voice telling them to leave a message at the tone.

If you want to prove the business value of this, simply conduct a customer survey or regular Net Promoter Score surveys with your customers during the year asking them to rank your customer service and how important it is to them.

If they consistently answer that your customer service is a reason they stay with you, you know your remote receptionist is working.

Link your remote receptionist number to your CRM

If you have a customer relationship management (CRM) system you can sync your business’ number to the CRM, and monitor how many calls are coming through your virtual receptionist and converting into customers.

If your remote receptionist is bringing customers into your CRM that would otherwise be lost, then you can use your CRM data to figure out how many customers are being gained or retained through your remote receptionist.

Win and retain business with the help of a remote receptionist

As important as customer service is to your business, you can’t always guarantee you’ll be able to pick up the phone when it rings – whether you’re a sole trader or a small or medium business.

And with every missed call potentially being lost business, you want the reassurance that even when you’re busy you always have the safety net that your phone is being answered and customers being dealt with professionally.

A remote receptionist service guarantees that your business’ calls are always answered and that new and existing customers can always contact your business when they need to.

By treating your customers like people, and having another person on the end of the phone, you can retain trust and improve your customer service scores while freeing you up to complete the work you’re being paid for, so you can move onto the next job.

Plus, by taking much of the admin and meeting booking out of your hands, you’ll have more time to focus on the parts of your business that make money so you can grow quickly, knowing all your communications are being handled for you.

Want to know more about what a remote receptionist can do for your business?

Get in touch with us today.