- What is a Live Receptionist Service?
- Benefits of Live Receptionist Services for Small Business
- How to Choose the Right Live Receptionist Service
- Implementing Live Receptionist Services
Q: What is a Live Receptionist Service?
A: A live receptionist service involves using trained professionals to handle incoming business calls, providing personal and professional interaction that enhances customer service.
Consider this: why is “The customer is always right” one of the most popular phrases in discussions about businesses and consumers?
Why is it that despite numerous sources pointing out that Harry Selfridge really said, “The customer is always right, in matters of taste,” the full quote is taking forever to catch on?
It’s simple: the customer wants or prefers to be right in everything—not just in matters of taste. Invariably, the customer wants to be treated right in all interactions with a business.
With businesses, the customer prefers to be the king of the hill—and deservedly so. If, after research, there is no customer to purchase the kind of service or product you are offering, then there is simply no point in opening a business based on those products or services.
Remove your shoes of business ownership and wear those of the customer for a minute.
How do you feel when a business you patronize or intend to patronize takes forever to answer your calls? How do you feel when they do respond but treat you like you don’t matter in the grand scheme of things?
We could go on and on with the questions, but you already get the idea—you want to be king of the hill.
Many small businesses have tested these and similar questions across various scenarios and acknowledged that despite low funding, cash flow, and resources, they must not neglect their customer service operations.
Most of these businesses found their solution in a live receptionist for small businesses.
Essentially, a live receptionist is a customer care professional provided by virtual receptionist services at an incredibly low cost to help small businesses with their live answering service, business call handling, business communication improvement, and overall customer service improvement.
Instead of budgeting at least $35,000 per year to employ a receptionist as a small business owner, you can get a live receptionist for as little as $1,500 per year.
Unlike automated customer service systems, live receptionist services do not sacrifice quality and professionalism for cost-effectiveness.
Live receptionists provide a human touch, ensure operational efficiency, and leverage their training and professionalism to endow your business with excellent customer care, boosting your brand image and enhancing customer satisfaction.
More importantly, the live receptionist works on your terms.
At this point, most of what’s been said about live receptionist services probably sounds sweet to your ears, and you want to get a live receptionist right away.
Before you do so, you need to fully understand the benefits of live receptionist services and how to choose and implement live receptionist services in your business.
We’ll discuss all that in this article, but first, let’s examine the concept behind live receptionist services in more detail.
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What is a Live Receptionist Service?
Put simply, a live receptionist service typically involves remote receptionists who are professionally trained and certified to work as an extension of businesses’ customer service. They usually handle business calls and ensure that customers are always addressed professionally and with a personal touch.
It’s somewhat convenient to think of live receptionists merely in the context of business call handling. Sure, business call handling is their primary task, but that’s only one out of the many roles a live receptionist for small businesses can perform.
Besides ensuring that no customer call goes unattended, live receptionists take on the following tasks:
- Appointment scheduling: Your live receptionist works with your calendar to manage or arrange your meetings, appointments, and even client bookings at your convenience. Additionally, if you are not immediately available to attend to a critical inquiry, they will schedule a call-back with the client or lead.
- Message taking: Live receptionists can take notes on important interactions, transcribe your voicemails, and update you via email or any other convenient channel.
- Customer inquiries: As mentioned earlier, your live receptionist works on your terms. This means you can provide a script or guideline for your receptionist’s response to customer inquiries. Additionally, you can train the receptionist on basic information about your business, enabling them to help your customers sort out minor issues over the phone.
Other functionalities of live receptionist services include call screening, lead capturing, toll-free phone numbers, professional recording services, mobile VoIP, conferencing, and more.
More importantly, these services are flexible and often available around the clock, ensuring that you have someone attending to all your business calls, even beyond regular business hours!
If there’s anything we know about the modern customer’s demand for business services, it’s that providing avenues for customers to reach you most of the day or night is the “name of the game now,” according to Forbes.
Benefits of Live Receptionist Services for Small Businesses
How do the aforementioned functionalities translate to benefits for small businesses?
From a standpoint, live answering services lead to overall customer service improvement. However, the overall improvement is a blend of various benefits of live receptionist services across multiple fronts.
Enhanced Professionalism
If a business does not have a professional customer service system in place, it’d be difficult for anyone to take it seriously. It wouldn’t matter that you have the cheapest products and services on the market.
Generally, live receptionists are trained to handle customer interactions with the utmost professionalism.
They receive further training when they become part of your team, accounting for the preferences and subtleties that make your target customers/customer base unique.
As a result, their professionalism is complemented by the right contexts and mannerisms that boost your brand image as they attend to your customers courteously and promptly.
Operational Efficiency
Running a small business involves juggling many things, just as many large-scale businesses do, but on very limited human and financial resources. This often means that some business operations would not receive the attention and efforts needed for optimal performance.
No matter how you think of it, customer service is not an operation to neglect.
Outsourcing your receptionist duties allows you and your staff to focus on core tasks while prioritizing the customer across multiple departments, which improves overall productivity.
Cost-Effective Solution
Understandably, many small businesses do not have the financial capacity to employ a full-time front desk receptionist, especially since it would cost at least $35,000 per annum.
With virtual receptionist services, cost is not a major concern for small businesses.
For as low as $125 per month or $1,500 per annum, you can get a live receptionist with a VoIP number, a business calendar, and a fully online control panel that allows you to stay in charge from anywhere despite outsourcing.
For most small business owners, this degree of flexibility and cost-effectiveness are the major benefits of live receptionist services that motivate them to get one.
Scalability
“Start lean, stay lean” is a common counsel in the corridors of small business financial management.
A full-time, in-house receptionist would find it very difficult to keep up with increased call volumes as your business grows. Consequently, hiring more receptionists would seem like the next best thing to do in such scenarios, and that will burden your business budget.
That’s not the case with small business receptionist services. These services can scale with business growth, providing more support as call volumes increase without the need for additional hiring.
Interestingly, scaling comes at a lower cost when you consider the margins. Suppose that with a live receptionist for your small business, you were paying $125 per month for 50 live answering minutes when you had fewer customers. Later, you opt for 300 minutes at $375 per month as your customer base and consequent call volumes increase.
Running the calculations, you’ll see that you are now saving $375/month or $4,500/year. This consideration makes it easy for small businesses to scale without cutting corners on their customer service delivery.
Improved Customer Experience
Overall customer service improvement is the result of the aforementioned benefits. It is undeniably one of the most outstanding benefits of having a live receptionist for small businesses.
No degree of customer service automation can provide as much human touch as professional reception services do.
In addressing the importance of customer service, HubSpot customer service experts point out that customers trust real-life humans more than brand ideas and values, and that serves as a basis for trust-backed customer loyalty.
Besides boosting your brand’s professionalism, image, and credibility, professional remote receptionists also provide the human touch that endears customers to your business. Additionally, live receptionists can recognize your repeat callers/customers and offer them an even more personalized experience as they interact with your business.
This, to an extent, gives customers a sense of belonging that breeds loyalty and compels them to advocate for your brand where it matters.
Help Scout perfectly summarizes the power of a personal touch in improving customer experience with Paul Greenberg’s quote:
“If a customer likes you — and continues to like you — they will continue to do business with you. If they don’t, they won’t.”
How to Choose the Right Live Receptionist Service
Now that you know what live receptionist services are all about and the benefits attached, let’s discuss how to choose the right live receptionist service.
At a glance, you will find tens of live receptionist services in the U.S. and hundreds more when you consider those operating from outside the U.S.
The pointers below will help you sift through the husks and find reliable, professional live receptionist services.
Also, compare costs alongside functionalities to determine where you will be getting the most value for money.
More importantly, you should also assess their customer support to determine whether they are truly reliable and professional. A virtual receptionist service provider with poor customer support is unlikely to be the one to provide you with reliable remote receptionists.
Lastly, check their customer reviews and ratings to get insights into their services from other business owners who have patronized them.
Implementing Live Receptionist Services
Once you have selected a suitable live receptionist for your small business to help you handle your customer service, you should set measures in place to integrate their service seamlessly into your business operations.
Below are some measures you can take to ensure successful implementation:
- Set clear guidelines: Recall that before taking up your business call handling duties, a live receptionist should undergo additional training to fit well with your brand image and needs. At this point, you should address the scenarios that the receptionist might encounter while interacting with your customers. Essentially, you should provide FAQs that help them navigate the scenarios with ease, ensuring business communication improvement and overall customer service improvement. Also, set out an escalation protocol, addressing what the receptionist should do when they encounter serious inquiries or when you are not immediately available to handle such matters.
- Regular communication: Although outsourced, the live receptionist is still a member of your team. Hence, you should maintain regular communication with them, providing relevant information on any changes or new services as they happen. This helps them address your leads and customers with the most recent, accurate, and current information. Giving customers outdated information will only worsen whatever problem they are trying to solve.
- Feedback Loop: Still on maintaining regular communication and acknowledging that the remote receptionist is also a member of your team, you should establish a feedback loop between the live receptionist and you and/or various team leads. Having a feedback look will help beam the focus on issues as they arise—whether from your end or theirs—and also facilitate two-way insight-sharing. This loop creates room for continuous improvements.
- Monitor and analyze: Continuous monitoring and performance assessments are primary ways to determine whether your receptionist service is meeting your business needs. Set up measures for monitoring call metrics and analyzing performance, particularly accounting for their ability to efficiently answer 100% of your calls—especially during business hours.
Finally, the global business landscape is dynamic. Your business and its operations, including customer service, should also be dynamic. Regularly review and update the service to adapt to new trends and business requirements, ensuring you have the latest working strategies to continuously enhance your customers’ experience.
Conclusion
The customer is always right, and it’s not just in matters of taste but also their demand for excellent customer service. And that’s simply not a demand you can afford to ignore.
Like the thousands of small businesses using our virtual office services across the globe, you can easily meet this demand with a professionally trained live receptionist for small businesses without emptying your account.
It’s important to note that live receptionist services do not start and end with only business call handling. Numerous functionalities and benefits are attached to these services, and it is well within your right to enjoy all of them, from message taking, appointment scheduling, and customer inquiries response to business toll-free numbers and virtual phone systems, among others.
All of these should steer your business towards enhanced professionalism, scalability, operational efficiency, and improvement of customer service.
That said, you can only reap these benefits when you choose the right live receptionist service after carefully evaluating the services they offer, their receptionist’s professionalism and training, the customizability of the service, their flexibility and scalability, and ease of seamlessly integrating the service with existing business technologies.
Additionally, put necessary measures in place to facilitate the smooth implementation of the service into your operations.
Further Reading:
- Technologies Powering Virtual Office Spaces
- Empowering Independence: A Guide for the Modern Independent Business Owner
- Maximizing Customer Value: A Guide to Customer Retention Analysis
- Green Marketing Definition: What It Is and How It Works
Lastly, you should cut costs without cutting corners. Go for a virtual receptionist service that reliably offers premium remote receptionist services with flexible and customizable plans at an affordable rate. Put simply, go for Alliance Virtual Offices’ live receptionist services.
Contact us today to learn more about how Alliance Virtual Offices virtual receptionist services can help you elevate your customer service and deliver enhanced customer experience.
