In today’s business world, virtual receptionists provide many advantages to small to mid-sized companies, including: Reduce operating expenses. Provide on-call help to assist with inventory and bookkeeping. It provides assistance to marketing and sales personnel. For many small companies, this help desk is seen as an outsourcing alternative where the company doesn’t have the need to have a physical receptionist in place.
Using a virtual receptionist service is more cost effective than maintaining two fulltime employees in an in-house call answering service, which requires maintaining two phones and two telephones. Virtual receptionists can be scheduled to call when they are available or to call during business hours. The service can also be scheduled to call around the clock, if a business owner chooses. Using a virtual receptionist service eliminates many of the hassles that come along with running and maintaining a full-time employee. This helps to cut costs for many businesses that might not otherwise be able to afford a phone answering service.
Most companies that use a telephone answering service find that their call volume is very high when compared to the volume of calls made by the in-house phone answering service. Using a virtual receptionist helps to cut down on overhead costs since the service is not required to provide physical space. Many services do not even require a fax machine or a voicemail account. They can provide a live person to handle each call.
A virtual receptionist is also able to perform more than one function. With a regular full-time telephone answering service, a customer may call to speak to a live agent, ask questions, make reservations, or request services. With a virtual receptionist service, a business owner can offer all these services to a single customer. The customer does not have to repeatedly call each place asking for different information. The information that is provided to them is always right there in front of them.