A live virtual receptionist is a professional receptionist working remotely, usually as part of a team. We say live to make a distinction between voicemail systems, phone bots and a virtual receptionist. A live virtual receptionist is a real person, and in our case they are UK based.
The value of live virtual receptionists to your business is that they can answer telephone calls on behalf of your business, live, at any time you want your answering service to work. Don’t be confused by the term virtual it simply means they are not physically sitting in at an office reception desk when they answer calls for a business. They are working remotely.
What does a virtual receptionist say when answering the phone?
Virtual Reception services can work for a number of businesses at the same time. Each time a call comes in, the unique number immediately relates to a screen view of the business that the caller is calling, so your live virtual receptionist can see the profile of the business and its services, the instructions for prioritising and transferring calls, and the welcome script to callers that must be used to answer every call, such as “Hello, thank you for calling Suffolk Physiotherapists , how can we help you today? You can easily change the greeting script whenever you like using our specialist call management software, so you can change the script to make a special greeting for a festival holiday or to profile a special stock clearance. And you have the absolute certainty that every call will be answered in exactly the same manner, making a deep impression of professionalism to your regular callers.
What are the responsibilities of a virtual receptionist?
Your virtual receptionist can transfer calls you want to prioritise to you or your staff, provide details about your business such as opening hours and prices and location, and even schedule appointment bookings. A brief summary of every call will also be emailed to you throughout the day , so you have a record of the business day’s communications.
The virtual receptionist is essentially responsible for appearing to the caller as if they were actually working at the reception foyer in your physical office. They are highly experienced as professional receptionists and they are tasked with always creating a positive impression to every caller. They impress callers by promptly answering the phone and warmly welcoming callers with your greeting script and using just the right the right tone of voice to put the callers at ease. Your virtual receptionist service will never miss a call and that’s a huge relief for busy small and medium businesses.
How long does it take to set up a virtual receptionist?
We can have your virtual receptionist service set-up within a few minutes, but it is important that you think about the greeting you want your virtual reception team to use and take the time to help us understand your business and the type of calls your company usually receives. Taking just a few extra minutes outlining your products and services and how you’d like certain calls prioritised will be invaluable to the virtual reception team and we’ll be sure to document all your directions and share the knowledge across our teams.
Once it is in place, you can scale up your telephone answering service to cover after hours or weekends or festival holidays or you can scale it down and just utilise it for overflow calls at peak times. That’s the beauty of a virtual business service like a virtual reception, it’s so versatile – and with Virtual Receptionist London there are no set-up fees and we don’t expect you to enter a long term agreement, month to month is fine by us. Please contact us to commence your service today, we’ll answer promptly.