Much like a “real” receptionist employed by businesses to process incoming phone calls and to direct clients to the relevant members of your team, a virtual receptionist is able to do all of this without being directly employed by your business.

What is a virtual receptionist? A virtual receptionist is an outsourced personal assistant (PA) at a telephone answering service provider that can answer your business phone line and much more, without needing to be physically present in your office.

What does a Virtual Receptionist do?

A great PA does much more than handling incoming calls. These agents are trained rigorously to ensure that they handle telephone calls in a professional manner. Industry knowledge and an understanding of your business and its personalised needs allow PAs to answer business-related enquiries from customers and to represent your business to both prospective customers and recurring clients alike.

Additional Features

While a virtual receptionist service primarily addresses the needs of business owners by answering incoming calls, PAs from reputable providers can do a lot more than that. Some telephone answering services can schedule appointments on your behalf to ensure you don’t miss out on bookings or important client meetings.

Qualifications and Training

PAs must meet high standards of quality whereby they’re able to confidently come across to customers as a member of your staff. Moreover, quality answering service providers will have quality assurance departments as well as ongoing staff training and performance measurement standards to ensure that your business is providing customers with a greater level of care.

Better Quality is Better Business

If you’ve decided to outsource your telephone answering tasks to an answering service, keep a keen eye on the quality of service through reviews and the provider’s reputation with other businesses. Hiring the services of a company with unqualified PAs is a recipe for disaster, so don’t hesitate to spend a little more for a reputable answering service.

Think of it this way; if one provider is able to provide phone answering services for substantially lower prices than a competitor, perhaps their knowledge of your industry and business isn’t a part of the PA’s training. At best, you’ll have an overpriced telephone triage system, and at worst, you’ll end up with frustrated customers and consequently lost business.

Conversely, by spending a little more for a better service, you’ll have reliable PAs that can not only provide customers with a knowledgeable human being to address their enquiries, but you’ll also have PAs that understand the industry within which you work in order to provide greater value and information to customers.