3 Things to Consider When Picking a Virtual Phone Answering Service

On November 11, 2022
11:40 am
Filed under Learning, Live Receptionist

The continued success of any product or service company requires meeting (and exceeding) the expectations of current and prospective clients. As you reflect on how hard you’ve worked to establish your brand, take a moment also to consider the number of hours you spend each week answering phones, responding to contact forms, or redirecting calls. If your incoming calls are keeping you or your team from doing what they do best, you’ve likely considered investing in a telephone answering service. Although you’re on the right track, you’ll soon discover that most traditional providers charge premium prices for services that don’t

Is your small business spending too much time answering phone calls? Answering the phone can be costly and distract you and your employees from building your business. Small to medium-sized businesses, entrepreneurs, and startups are turning to efficient and inexpensive alternatives to answering their phones and serving callers. In the past, companies often hired a receptionist to work from the office and answer phone calls. Virtual answering services or virtual receptionists have increased in popularity as more businesses have shifted to virtual and hybrid office environments. A live receptionist provides exceptional customer service at a cost-efficient price. Determining if an

During product launches and peak seasons, your business may need extra help to keep up with the high volumes of callers. A virtual telephone receptionist can help you keep up with high volumes of calls without committing to hiring a full-time staff member. They are becoming an increasingly prevalent investment for businesses of all sizes, from freelancers to large corporations. A virtual receptionist is not an individual but an answering service that provides your business with a call center. Agents are ready to take calls, make appointments, and nurture leads with exceptional customer service. A virtual telephone receptionist ensures you

The prevalence of virtual and hybrid office environments has helped many businesses accept virtual work as an advantage rather than a detriment. In recent years, virtual receptionists have rapidly gained popularity. Entrepreneurs, freelancers, and business owners rely on virtual answering services to maintain high-quality customer service without diverting their attention from the business. Small businesses and freelancers without the resources to hire a full-time receptionist can save money and deliver exceptional customer service with a virtual answering service. If you are a business owner, you understand that your time is too valuable to spend it answering phone calls. A virtual

Do you run a small business? Chances are there’s a lot to do. From coming up with effective strategies to managing employees—you have a mountain of tasks. And with such a busy schedule, the phone ringing can seem like an unwanted distraction. But your callers should be attended to, or you’ll risk losing important customers and leads. Hiring a virtual receptionist for small business can be the answer. Doing this can help you offer personalized customer support to your callers as you focus on other tasks. With little commitment and no additional employees, you give your customers a way to

Picture this. You own or operate a small business. From hiring and training employees to coming up with budgets and sales forecasts, management, planning, and strategizing, there are a ton of things to do. You probably have a few employees, but you can’t afford to hire more for now. And then there are your customers. They keep calling for different issues, from shipping to billing and other inquiries. Answering these calls is taking up too much of the time that you need to spend on crucial business functions. That’s when you realize you need a receptionist. Someone to answer and

Communication is the backbone of a thriving business. A company’s lack of effective business communication services is a recipe for confusion, misunderstanding, and even conflict. 86% of employees, executives, and educators identify ineffective communication as one of the primary reasons for business failures. Ineffective communication could result in a frustrated workforce, cursing customers, and managers banging the desk because of unmet targets. To succeed, you’ll need agile business communication solutions. For your business to have a polished image essential for a top-rated brand, it cannot afford to fiddle and fumble with its communication strategy—or infrastructure. Yet, with technology continuing to

Virtual live receptionist services offer a plethora of benefits to small businesses. It might surprise you, but even in this day and age when so many forms of communication are available, 76 percent of customers still prefer to talk to a live receptionist when they call businesses. With a receptionist on call, you can be responsive to customers, appear more professional and established, and get calls reliably transferred when necessary. How do virtual live receptionist services work, and how do they benefit your business? Learn all about them here. What Are Virtual Live Receptionist Services? A virtual live receptionist

Summer is right around the corner; after over a year of uncertainty, stress, and government mandated lockdowns, you’re probably looking forward to taking a long vacation, ideally somewhere that allows you to disconnect from work to some degree. But if you own or run a small business, you can’t drop completely off the grid, right? Wrong. While that may have been the case a few years ago, today there are many business resources that you can use to ensure that things continue to run smoothly, even if you’re out of town and out of reach. There’s project management software you can use to make sure everybody

What Is An Answering Service For Small Businesses? In a nutshell, an outsourced answering service for small businesses consists of a person who takes incoming calls and makes decisions around them to improve your company’s communication. You may also hear the terms virtual receptionist or live receptionist as synonyms. They are not your employee but a paid service, so you can avoid adding headcount. According to the portal Business.com, “Virtual receptionist companies offer a variety of services that can improve your business’s ability to manage incoming calls from customers, adding a layer of professionalism to your consumer-facing communications.” One study

Making a favorable first impression remains a key factor to succeed in the business world. And now with the numerous communication channels open to customers, partners, and vendors, this task has become massive for any business. Additionally, people have come to expect quick and efficient service in all their interactions, this is especially true when they are contacting companies. Although there are many ways to contact a company, many times people still prefer to pick up the phone and call them directly. Even with all the advances in online customer service, live chats, chatbots, and more, it seems that most issues are more

The end of the year is traditionally the perfect time to make plans for the coming year. The most popular New Year’s resolutions are health and fitness related, such as working out more, quitting smoking, eating healthier meals, taking up meditation, etc. Then there are some who have a different approach to New Year’s resolutions, making them not only about improving themselves, but their families (“being a better father”), their communities (“volunteering once a month”), or their work (“being a better manager”). Deciding to improve your performance at work can actually help you with all your other resolutions because any

Now that 2020 is heading into its final months, you may be thinking about taking some well deserved time off to regroup and regain your energy. This is always a great idea but after such a wild and eventful year, it is a vital measure to help your physical, emotional, mental, and even spiritual well being. And as the world is still coping with the covid-19 pandemic, you will have to get creative with your vacation plans. Some countries are completely off limits for tourists, others require you to bring along a negative covid-19 test, and those that are totally

Having a distributed workforce was a reality for some companies prior to the Covid-19, but the pandemic and the accompanying work from home orders have made this a reality for almost every company out there. This sudden, massive shift towards remote work was an effective measure at the beginning of the pandemic, but for most organizations, it was always supposed to be a temporary one. Now, as companies are coming to terms with the idea that they will be dealing with a distributed workforce for the foreseeable future, they are realizing that they need to implement the tools necessary to

Managing a law firm successfully requires a heavy focus on building, nurturing, and maintaining excellent relationships with every client. This goes way beyond guiding them through the legal system and providing them with top-rate legal counsel. A great law firm makes its clients a top priority and takes all the necessary steps, including seamless communications, to make them feel important. This client-centric approach guides almost all the choices you make about your law firm like where you locate your offices, how you market your firm, what kind of environment you want your clients to find when they come

You can have a great product, a fantastic sales process, a wonderful marketing campaign, but the real key to success in business is keeping your customers satisfied and feeling valued. One of the easiest and most effective ways to ensure that your customer satisfaction rate stays high is to hire a person who is available to answer all calls instead of having them wait a long time to get through to someone or having an automated call answering service. This person is not only able to answer common questions, but also sets up and confirms appointments, redirects calls efficiently,

Hiring a live receptionist service means that your customer’s calls will be answered by a live person, instead of one of those automatic answering machines that cause more harm than good. But a live receptionist with Phone.com can do so much more for your business, such as handling event registration, processing and tracking orders, as well as scheduling appointments. Live receptionist services often get dismissed by managers and business owners because of the perception that the cost is too high and is simply too much to justify. Yet a live receptionist service is a fantastic investment that pays for itself

Working from home has gained a lot of acceptance in the last decade, and that acceptance has recently accelerated due to the coronavirus outbreak. What started as a very rare option that was available to only a select few workers is now something that is mandatory for most knowledge-workers as cities go on lockdown and organizations implement social distancing protocols. While working from home offers a variety of benefits, it can be challenging at first as people figure out how to juggle home distractions with getting work done. Something that is even more challenging now as entire families are staying