There’s a lot to do when you run a business, and unfortunately, only so many hours in the day and things you can do at once. One main task is answering incoming calls from prospects and customers. This is harder than it sounds.
As much as you might want to, you can’t answer every call, especially if you’re a small business or working for yourself. But when a missed call could mean lost business or upsetting a paying customer, you need a solution.
Hiring a receptionist is an expensive option. Plus, you have additional costs and admin to consider when hiring staff. A better option could be investing in a virtual receptionist.
This works just like hiring an in-house receptionist in that you have a resource to answer the phone, forward calls and confirm meetings and bookings – just without much of the downside like wages, tax and admin.
Here are 5 ways a virtual receptionist benefits your business.
Answer All your Calls
The biggest benefit of hiring a virtual receptionist is you’ll never miss an incoming call. With a team of PAs behind you, every call is answered, and every customer dealt with by a real person.
You’ll either receive a detailed message from the call, and return it when you can, or have the caller transferred to the right person in your business.
Help with Basic Customer Enquiries
Every customer enquiry is important and needs to be dealt with professionally. But it’s a simple fact that many customers call looking for answers to the same, or similar, questions.
Answering all these questions takes a lot of time out of your day. Not to mention is repetitive. A virtual receptionist can answer all these basic enquiries, allowing you to carry on with other tasks.
Whether it’s callers looking for your opening hours or questioning a delivery, they’ll be helped by your PAs.
Help with Appointment Booking
Working with customers to confirm bookings can be a time consuming process. If you have a virtual receptionist, you have a dedicated resource who can help customers book appointments or meetings for you.
A virtual receptionist can confirm appointments and provide detailed notes so you can prepare for the meeting. You can continue working on value adding tasks and growing your business without looking through calendars and appointments.
Protect you from Nuisance Calls
Nuisance calls are a part of business. Whether it’s companies buying your information from lists, or others finding your information on business registers, it can be annoying and time consuming to deal with a barrage of unwarranted sales calls.
A virtual receptionist is a barrier between you and these calls, so you don’t have to deal with them.
Your PAs can take messages and pass the details on so you can return the call later if you want to. Or your PAs can request you be removed from sales lists altogether, so you’ll reduce the number of these calls coming into your business over time.
Qualify Leads
Lead qualification is one of the most time consuming and difficult jobs in sales. But you can’t risk wasting your sales team’s time by forwarding cold leads who called your office.
The time salespeople deal with cold leads is time lost that they could have spent talking to people more likely to buy from you. With a virtual receptionist, you can speed up the lead qualification process by having your PAs do the work for you.
By giving your PAs your lead qualification framework and questions, they can establish whether a lead is hot or cold, then forward the caller to the appropriate person. Having this resource ensures your sales team will spend more time dealing with leads who are closer to becoming buyers.
Improve your Business with a Dedicated, Outsourced Virtual Receptionist
Outsourcing part of your business, especially a customer-facing part, takes a lot of trust. But the payoff of freeing yourself from dealing with every inbound call can be huge.
With more time to focus on your business, you can accelerate your short and long term growth, safe in the knowledge that callers are being dealt with quickly, efficiently, and in a friendly manner that puts your business in the best light.
The alternative is watching yourself get bogged down in phone calls and having a business that never reaches its full potential.
