Virtual Receptionists and Answering Services
In the internet age one can create a website and make it look and feel any way you like. It can look like a small mom and pop operation or a giant tech company on the heels of overrunning Google. There are pros and cons to both approaches and at the end of the day it comes down to customers and whether your product or service is moving or stagnating.
Virtual receptionists and answering services are services that were available pre-internet but have really boomed in current times. The most expensive part of any business are labor costs. People are pricey, no doubt about it. They are great in their ability to expand and grow a business but come at a cost. Many business owners want to reduce labor costs up to the point of profitability. Go too low and the bottom line suffers. Maintain that cost too high and the bottom line suffers. One of the areas of the labor force of the past that has been successfully outsourced from an automation perspective are receptionist services.
Taking calls, directing information, providing front-line information that does not require intense interaction between the caller and the business can be achieved with these services. Back in the 1970s these services took shape in the form of switchboards. Operators would write down messages and then place them in a customer file. The customer would call in and receive said messages at their leisure. By the 1980s pagers and beepers became more mainstream which provided clients a real-time alert when a message came through, and a way to codify if said message was an emergency or not.
Nowadays all of this is automized and many virtual receptionists are robots. But some, believe it or not, are still human. Take for the example the “start-up” culture. Start-ups are small business, typically tech in nature, that have less than 5 employees and to cut costs many work in co-work environments where spaces are rented to the company for a fixed price and the company shares space with other companies, all in the same boat. These companies cannot afford nor need a receptionist for their specific company. Rather, they will pool their resources and contract one person who can work in a virtual fashion to field calls for their company and represent the company “on the phone or email” for them.
If your company receives on average 1 call per hour and said call lasts less than 5 minutes, then a virtual receptionist can take care not only of your company, but also 5 or even 7 other companies. If that person costs (over an annual salary) $40,000, then split 5 or 7 ways you are paying little money for a full-time receptionist (full-time for your needs that is). An answering service works in a similar manner, but it is less dynamic and more of a holding place for messages.
With artificial intelligence speeding along this is the wave of the future. People need work, that’s true. But people also want to work smarter, and this is just one of many examples of just that.
Virtual Receptionist and Answering Companies are a blessing for the small firms like mine is. I have been using services of a virtual receptionist for 3 years now for my law firm and they are very efficiently performing their job. They answer calls for me and get the right information from clients. They also help by blocking the unnecessary calls and a fixed bill is like cherry on top. We have developed a call structured together that suits my firm best according to my clientele needs.