- The impact of your business phone
- Why choosing the right receptionist service matters
- The best receptionist service
Q: Does my business phone matter? Should I hire a receptionist or use a Virtual Receptionist service for a small business instead?
A: Your business phone helps establish your company as prestigious and can help build legitimacy and retain a healthy work-life balance. Hiring a virtual receptionist service rather than hiring a new employee for a full-time position saves you money while providing the same results, so it’s typically a good idea.
Years ago, when competition wasn’t as fierce and starting a business wasn’t so streamlined, customer service wasn’t as large of a focus.
As 35% of the workers who can work from home do so and the number of hybrid workers continues to increase, this focus may be a result of customers feeling entitled to better interactions if they’re sacrificing an in-person experience.
Alternatively, the sheer number of businesses started each year may provide potential customers with so many choices that they know they can find good customer service elsewhere.
This can present some difficulties for newer businesses and companies without a high employee count. You have many daily operational and logistic tasks that constant phone calls may distract from.
According to Forbes, bad customer service experiences can have aquick and disastrous effecton a company’s reputation. For companies without ample employees, this can present problems.
If you ignore the phone, your business suffers, but if you answer the phone, you’re risking upsetting your customers due to attempted multitasking or perceived inattention. Not to mention, hiring employees is expensive, and a new full-time or part-time receptionist requires valuable time, effort, and capital.
Thankfully, you have options. With a receptionist service for small business, you no longer have to worry about your business phones.
Today, we’ll discuss the impact of your business phone, why it’s important to find the best automated answering service for your small business, and what the best live answering service is in Canada, the UK, the US, or anywhere else.
If you hope to find an after-hours answering service for small business, you’re in the right place. Keep reading for more!
- The impact of your business phone
- Why choosing the right receptionist service matters
- The best receptionist service
- Alliance’s receptionist service for small business and our other services
The impact of your business phone
As a small business owner, your phones play a key role in your growth.
You want to save money but don’t want a cheap answering service for small businesses that constantly drops calls and messes up easy scheduling.
Similarly, the more you grow, the more you’ll realize that hiring a receptionist, or better yet, using a receptionist service, is the best way to ensure that you aren’t spending valuable time answering the phones when you could be helping your business scale.
Read more: 10 Signs You Need a Live Receptionist
According to HubSpot’s 2022 Annual State of Service report, customer service is more important than ever.
89% of consumers are likely to make another purchase from the same company after having a positive customer service experience. Considering that customer acquisition is between 5-25 times more expensive than retaining existing customers, the answering service for small business cost is well worth the expense.
As a small business owner, your phones play a key role in your company’s growth and scalability.
Your phones are one of the best ways to connect with customers. Calling is a personal experience for people, and how they’re treated on these phone calls is a big determining factor in their buying decision.
Not to mention, your phones can impact your workflow.
If you’re constantly bombarded by incoming calls, you can get distracted. This slows your productivity and makes growth much slower in the long run.
Additionally, distractions can quickly lead to a poor customer service experience.
If you’re trying to do too many things at once, there’s an excellent chance you aren’t giving the customer on the other end of the phone your full attention.
It might seem trivial to you, but customers call with genuine concerns and feedback, and when you give off an air of “I can’t be bothered right now,” the customers can sense it.
This can lead to situations where the customer feels frustrated by a lack of attention and can even revert to a wholly bad experience if handled poorly enough. Also, because you’re splitting your attention, there’s a great chance you’ll make mistakes on the other issues you were trying to tend to.
Regardless of how annoyed or busy you may feel, your business must treat its customers with the utmost respect. After all, they pay your bills.
When you’re not utilizing a receptionist service for small business, there’s a great chance you’ll inadvertently upset some potential customers, or even clients and investors, if you’re actively trying to multitask while using the phone.
Your attention shouldn’t be split. You can have more than one thing that you need to focus on, but you should give each issue its own slot of time and its own focus to prevent situations where you’ve accidentally messed up two separate tasks.
The same goes for your customer service experience. There’s no reason to risk alienating an existing customer or scaring off a potential customer because you’re unable to focus on one thing at a time.
Finally, your phones play a critical role in your ability to maintain a healthy work-life balance.
Being the only one responsible for your business’s phones or having a poor callback schedule can make it hard to unwind at the end of the day.
For a small business owner, this can quickly lead to burnout.
Working from home doesn’t have to be so burnout-inducing, but when you’re trying to use one phone that happens to be a personal cellphone to handle all your business calls, you’re setting yourself up for failure.
If you’re working from home, you’re already spending an inordinate amount of time in the same place you relax, eat, and sleep, so when you neglect to separate personal phones from business phones, it just makes it harder to separate the time you have to yourself.
Even if you’re using a Virtual Office, you’re likely spending a lot of time in your home office or working from home in general.
Read more: Get a Virtual Address for LLC Registration
Remember, you didn’t start a business so that you could spend 100% of your waking hours working. Realistically, you likely started a business to do the opposite.
Fortunately, with the right receptionist service for small business, you can alleviate some of this pressure and can start creating healthy boundaries to improve your work-life balance.
Why choosing the right receptionist service matters
When looking at the various receptionist services for small businesses you can choose from, it’s important to make the right choice.
Not only are the receptionists themselves important, but the provider you deal with also needs to be professional, available, and ready to help you with various technical issues should they arise.
Read more: How to Set Up Your Live Receptionist Service with Alliance
Below, we’ve put together a small list of what you should look for when you’re hunting for the right receptionist service for small business.
Use this list to ensure you’re dealing exclusively with providers and receptionists who understand your business and want to help you grow.
- Professional
- Understands your business
- Efficient
- Bolsters remote operations
- Affordable
- Customizable
- Technology integration
Professional
First and foremost, you need to ensure that you’re using a live receptionist service for small business that employs friendly and professional receptionists.
Your receptionist is a representative of your business, so having a professional and friendly receptionist is an extremely important aspect of making the right impression and winning business.
Your receptionist gives potential consumers, investors, and customers their first impression and sets the tone for how they’ll view your company months into the future. A bad first impression can take years to undo, but a good first impression quickly pays dividends.
From the same HubSpot report, 93% of consumers are likely to continue using the same companies that offer excellent customer service.
If you’re using receptionists who don’t understand this, you’ll spend more time and effort than you’re saving trying to fix their mistakes and bring existing customers back to your business.
Understanding
A competent receptionist that understands your specific business is important in helping your callers find what they need quickly.
If your receptionist doesn’t know what kind of business you’re running, they’ll spend more time figuring out how to deal with each call rather than simply dealing with them.
Your receptionist doesn’t have to be an expert by any means, but if they’re not able to understand what you’re doing and how your company works, that’s a good sign that you should move on and find someone else a bit more capable.
Efficient
You want a receptionist who knows when to schedule callbacks and is efficient and on top of forwarding messages.
These logistical tasks are what you’re hoping to avoid by using a receptionist service for small business. If the receptionist isn’t able to handle these logistic tasks, you’ll spend more time fixing their mistakes than enjoying the lighter workload.
Efficiency is key to any successful business, and you want your company to function like a well-oiled machine. If your receptionist is inefficient and spends too much time on each call, it will negatively affect your entire operations.
Bolsters remote work
In the modern age, you need a receptionist service that allows you to embrace a remote workstyle.
You shouldn’t have to be in the office every day, and you shouldn’t have to worry that your receptionist is missing calls and doing a lackluster job of ensuring you’ve been given the right information or alerts.
If you’re using a receptionist service for small business that’s forcing you to spend more time in-office or in your Virtual Office’s physical space, you should start thinking about other options.
Affordable
The best receptionist service should be affordable.
There are too many competitors and too many options for you to concern yourself with exorbitantly expensive receptionist providers. The more affordable your receptionist is, the more you can reinvest in your business.
Remember, the point of any of these remote work tools is to provide streamlined avenues your company can use to scale. The funds you save from using these tools and services should be reinvested in your business to help build a robust business infrastructure that can weather any economic downturn.
Customizable
The best receptionist services will offer customizable options tailored to your specific needs. If a provider charges one flat rate, they’re probably not for you.
Instead, you need providers that understand that not all businesses are in the same spot and are willing to offer different tiers depending on how many minutes your specific company needs.
Integrates with existing technology
Finally, you need a receptionist service for small business that integrates with modern communication tools and technology.
If you’re spending all your time trying to ensure that your receptionist is working properly with other aspects of your Virtual Office, you’re wasting valuable time that could be better spent pushing your company forward.
The best receptionist service
So, what is the best receptionist service for small business?
How can you find a receptionist that could possibly give you a small 5% increase in retention rates that could lead to a profit increase of 25-95%?
It’s simple, a Live Receptionist from Alliance Virtual Offices is the best receptionist service for small businesses.
Here is another list that shows several of the benefits you can expect from Alliance’s Live Receptionists.
- Flexible
- Uninterrupted work
- Customizable
- Improved scheduling for callbacks
- Cost-efficient plans
- Perfect companion to Virtual Offices
Flexible
Our Live Receptionists are flexible and allow you to work from wherever without compromising your customer service.
Flexibility is key to any modern company’s success. It allows you to react to shifts in the market and helps you keep a healthy work-life balance by giving you more than one area you can work in.
There’s nothing more isolating than spending years on end working in the same place you eat and sleep, and with other receptionist providers, you might be forced to do so to ensure you aren’t missing important correspondences.
With Alliance, your Live Receptionists allow you to take your business wherever you want.
Uninterrupted work
Our Live Receptionists allow you to work uninterrupted, which helps you get more done and better supports your work-life balance.
Remember, the point of a Live Receptionist is to allow you to stop worrying about logistic and administrative tasks like forwarding calls, handling scheduling, and more. Through Alliance, you have a fully capable receptionist that can handle these tasks without supervision while you focus on effectively scaling your company.
Customizable
Our Live Receptionist service includes customizable call answering to make your business phone a reflection of your business.
Other providers force you to keep generic answers that prevent you from standing out. Alliance allows you to craft interesting and unique answers for your Live Receptionists that help you to make an immediate impression on callers.
Improved scheduling for callbacks
We don’t just let you customize your receptionist’s answers either.
At Alliance, we include customizable callback scheduling to prevent you from getting interrupted.
You can draft a schedule that works for you while your Live Receptionist fills up the slots. This allows you to keep the same schedule regardless of who is or isn’t calling your company.
Cost-efficient plans
Alliance’s Live Receptionists are cost-efficient, especially when compared to other leading receptionist services.
Our plans start as low as $95 per month, and we offer two additional tiers that your business can use as you grow.
Other providers will attempt to charge you a flat rate for their receptionist services while charging you for additional minutes any time you exceed the predetermined amount.
The more money you save on your receptionist services, the more you can reinvest into your business. The more you reinvest in your business, the better prepared you are for any kind of downturn or economic strife.
Perfect companion to Virtual Offices
Alliance’s Virtual Offices are built to assist established entrepreneurs, brand-new business owners, and everyone in between.
Not only are our Virtual Offices safe from scammers and bad actors, but with centers in every state and almost every city, our Virtual Offices are built to help improve your company’s legitimacy and professionality.
Read more: Scammers Hate Us: Only Legitimate Businesses Use Our Virtual Offices
By using a Live Receptionist in conjunction with a Virtual Office, you’re ensuring that your business looks as professional and legitimate as possible.
Your address is legitimate and inspires confidence, your phone number is a dedicated business number, and your receptionist service continues this trend by providing callers with friendly and professional assistance while you focus on the operational tasks necessary to help your business scale.
Alliance’s receptionist service for small business and our other services
Your business deserves the best receptionist service.
Alliance Virtual Offices‘ Live Receptionists give you world-class customer service while empowering you to work flexibly.
When you secure one of Alliance’s Virtual Offices, you’re provided with a professional and well-known business address that bolsters your company’s legitimacy and helps you establish yourself as a serious business owner.
Alliance’s Live Receptionists offer your company a designated business phone and a call-answering service that helps you to stand out from your competition.
Using these two tools together allows your business to hold its own against even the most formidable competitors.
Further reading:
- 10 Signs You Need a Live Receptionist
- Get a Virtual Address for LLC Registration
- How to Set Up Your Live Receptionist Service with Alliance
- Scammers Hate Us: Only Legitimate Businesses Use Our Virtual Offices
Alliance Virtual Offices offers Virtual Office and Live Receptionist services for entrepreneurs, business owners, and anyone else who wants to take their remote businesses to the next level.
Our Virtual Offices help you set the tone while helping convince potential customers, clients, and investors that you’re serious about your operations. Our Live Receptionists further convince these individuals by providing excellent first impressions and a great customer service experience that speaks volumes about your company’s professionality.
Don’t settle for a receptionist service for small business that doesn’t help your company grow.
Instead, contact us today to see how Alliance’s Live Receptionist service for small businesses is built to help you and your business scale effectively and efficiently.
