A company may outsource its call-taking to a virtual receptionist service that operates from an off-site location. These receptionists may also assist businesses with a variety of additional tasks, including:

• Providing basic details, such as addresses and hours of operation, as well as addressing frequent inquiries
• Taking and returning calls and messages
• Getting information about callers
• Scheduling appointments

How it Works

What is the difference between a remote receptionist and an in-house receptionist? The most significant distinction is that calls are answered differently.

With these services, incoming calls are transferred to the phone line of a online person. They answers the call with a personalized greeting designed for your company. When the receptionist determines that the caller requires assistance, he or she takes whatever action is necessary, whether it’s giving basic information, transferring a call, or leaving a message. Thus, solving and handling all your calls. 

7 Benefits of Remote Receptionist Services

1. Improve Customer Service Experience

What is the purpose of having a remote receptionist if not to assist your clients in having a better experience? Remote receptionists are experts in customer service who have been educated and trained. As a result, they know how to handle calls correctly, represent your company and brand effectively, and give outstanding service.

2. Provide Consistent Human Contact

You can rest assured that every time someone calls your customer service line, a real, live person will be there to take their call because you have a virtual receptionist on the other end of the phone. You have to worry about dropped calls or missed opportunities from callers hanging up when they hear a voicemail answer rather than a human being.

Meanwhile, chatbots on a company’s website are becoming increasingly ineffective as one Forbes article points out, with over half of Americans ruling out the use of a chatbot service when seeking customer assistance. When it comes to obtaining customer support, about 40% of respondents prefer to talk with a real person rather than using a chatbot.

With a live receptionist taking calls, following a precise script, understanding your company and performing tasks with professionalism and care, your firm can give clients the same high levels of customer service regardless of which representative answers the call.

3. Economize Operations

Receptionist services that work over the phone can help you get the most out of your company’s limited financial resources. You may have an entire remote receptionist team working for you for a fraction of the cost of an in-house employee.

Not only does this save you money in your customer service budget, but it also allows you to benefit from the efforts of an entire team rather than a single employee. Meanwhile, you may use those funds for other parts of your spending plan that are more essential.

4. Optimize Human Resources

A remote receptionist service may help you be more efficient both in terms of time and money. Instead of having to pause their activities to answer calls, your employees and managers can get personalized assistance from a third party who answers every call, freeing up your precious resources so they can focus on tasks that need their full attention and unique expertise.

An online receptionist will usually either pass calls onto the proper employee or take a message. If remote receptionists are able to tackle basic inquiries, they may be able to address clients’ issues without needing to involve a company employee.

5. Increase Availability

This service may assist you in extending your business’s customer service hours, allowing you to be more accessible to people who work regular schedules.

By having a representative of your firm accessible during the early hours, late nights, weekends, and holidays, you provide your consumers more options to contact you when it’s convenient for them or when they need you the most.

Veta virtual believe that knowing you have someone to call when they need assistance can make clients feel valued, acknowledged, and more likely to keep shopping with you if your competitors contact them.

Another advantage of using these services is that they offer a more consistent availability than in-house receptionists. In-house workers may call in sick, come late, go on vacation, or get sidetracked by other calls, outside issues, or in-your-face demands.

A remote receptionist service does not have any of the drawbacks or distractions that a physical one might face, and it can answer every call into your company with the same high level of quality, care, and attention.

6. Streamline Simple Tasks

A virtual assistant may spend a significant amount of time on common activities that the receptionist might devote to more complex and pressing concerns. A receptionist, in addition to taking your calls, can perform some of these simple, daily tasks, such as scheduling or confirming appointments.

You may guarantee that all relevant personnel are aware of all planned activities and schedule modifications in a timely manner by combining shared calendars and automatic notifications into the process. Your online receptionists may also help you reduce your proportion of last-minute cancellations and no-shows by providing scheduling alerts.

7. Bilingual Customer Support

According to Psychology Today, recent studies suggest that around one-quarter of all Americans are bilingual, speaking a language other than English either natively or fluently and in many instances substantially. It may be tough to locate an in-house receptionist who is bilingual, and when you do, he or she may be costly to employ.

When you hire a service to staff bilingual employees, you can be sure that anybody calling your company who speaks a language other than English will get the same high-quality customer service in the language they’re most comfortable with.

Congratulations! You’ve made it to the top, and now you’re looking for an answering service to keep up with the demand. Choosing top-rated answering services may be difficult, and there are a few things you’ll want to avoid if you want to be partnered with the best business possible.

Avoid These Errors When Hiring Answering Service

There are several advantages of employing a 24-hour answering service for any company like veta virtual. The goal is to choose the finest top-rated answering companies that will deliver exceptional service at a reasonable price depending on your sector. Here are some guidelines for conducting your research:

1. Unsure of business needs

Before you start your wide search, you’ll want to have a good sense of the types of services your company requires. The last thing you want to do is pick a service that isn’t appropriate for your business or doesn’t meet the requirements of your consumers.

One of the first things you’ll want to think about is what your 24-hour answering service should accomplish. Some services range from simple message taking to highly technical and specialized disaster recovery.

You may get caught with a service you don’t require or not retaining a service that is critical to your operations if you are unsure of your company requirements.

2. Lack of industry experience

When a 24-hour answering service lacks experience in your sector, they won’t have a good understanding of the calls they’ll need to handle and the issues they’ll need to respond to. Customers will sense that their demands are not being met or their concerns aren’t addressed, resulting in a bad impact on your firm.

In the end, this can damage your company’s reputation and annoy clients. Look for answering services that have worked with your sector before and have a thorough knowledge of what is required to grow your business and also have expert virtual receptionist.

3. No 24/7 answering service

One of the most costly blunders is to hire an answering service that does not provide 24-hour choices, or if they do, they charge extra. When you are not accessible, your company requires someone who can answer questions and solve difficulties at any time.

When business contact hours are restricted, customers get the impression that you aren’t committed to excellent customer service since schedules vary for everyone. To meet those with different schedules, the finest answering services have a virtual assistant on nights and weekends.

4. Hidden unexplained costs

When you hire an answering service, make sure it provides the basic fee as well as additional costs that weren’t mentioned, leave it. Before you sign a contract and ask any questions you might have, always get a clear breakdown of the fees connected with keeping the service.

Some answering services don’t/won’t provide the call data itself. They should, however, offer any information a customer needs.

5. No bilingual agents

Spanish is the second most spoken language in the United States, and you need to ensure that Spanish-speaking customers are helped. You don’t want to provide a 24 hour answering service that drives away your Spanish-speaking clients.

Every company owner in today’s economy places a high importance on efficiently operating his or her business. Business owners must balance ensuring that their consumers receive competent, high-quality service while also preserving their company’s earnings.

Another notable example of this contrast is the need for a pleasant, professional voice to answer every phone call. This may be accomplished in two ways: by hiring an in-house receptionist or a third-party live call answering virtual receptionist firm like veta virtual.

In this post, we’ll look at the average cost of hiring an in-house receptionist, as well as how much it costs to hire an answering service. We’ll also look at why it’s not necessarily a one-or-the other situation.

Average Cost of an Answering Service

The average client spends between 250 and 500 minutes on the phone each month, which costs between $249 and $449 on average. This equates to an average conversation duration of 1.5 minutes, with a total of 166 to 333 calls per month. Alternatively, consider that there are eight or seventeen calls every day.

The cost of an answering service for a small firm is usually limited to the amount of calls it receives on a daily basis. The price of an answering service also covers the cost of the service. If you hire virtual assistant, You’ll never have to worry about insurance, worker’s compensation, 401k contributions, payroll taxes, or anything else.

Average Cost of a Full-Time Receptionist

According to several sources, the median annual salary for a receptionist in the United States in 2021 is $37,850, before taxes, insurance, benefits, and overhead. This figure is going to be well above $20 per hour when all additional expenses are factored in. A company must also take on the risk of staff turnover in addition to covering the salary of an employee who is clearly qualified for different, more challenging work.

Apart from the lost productivity, there are direct expenses such as sourcing, screening, and training someone new, as well as costs associated with hiring temporary workers and (usually) the new employee will make more money than the old one.

This is one area where the average small company may save money while still providing excellent customer service to its clients in today’s job market, with wages increasing and a continuous news barrage about price hikes and pay hikes.

Hidden Costs and Hidden Savings

Not only are short-term expenses reduced by hiring an answering service, but there are additional advantages as well. Hiring an answering service will not only save a firm money in the near term, but it will also help to boost earnings.

A full-time receptionist will cost a business money by: 

• being unable to answer the phone  
• require up to two weeks of training 
• Paid vacation of up to two weeks a year where they will not be returning your calls
• Clients might not always have pleasant interactions with you.

An answering service may help a company save money by:

• being ready on your very first day to answer your calls in a polite, professional manner 
• being available after-hours, on weekends, and during holidays 
• are experienced customer service professionals who receive extensive and ongoing training

The ability to delegate work and free up your schedule is one of the most enjoyable aspects of working with a virtual assistant. This appears easy enough: you hand over any chores you don’t have the time, skills, or willpower to complete yourself. In fact, delegating tasks to a VA is an art in itself.

To begin, you must first determine which tasks are best suited for delegating. Then you must give the VA with enough direction to be able to complete the tasks to your satisfaction. Finally, you must develop the attitude of relinquishing control of a portion of your firm.

Tasks to Consider Delegating to a VA

Consider your own skills and shortcomings, as well as what consumes the majority of your time and what you dislike doing. Most small business owners will want to outsource certain responsibilities to a VA.

Calendar Management

Keeping track of your time might appear straightforward, but as your company expands, you’ll be responsible for more duties. Moving things around on your calendar and rescheduling appointments while also staying on top of deadlines may be difficult.

Even sending you reminders before a meeting or telling you when you must complete an important to-do might require a lot of your attention. Your VA can help you manage this time-consuming task.

Email Management

Communication as we know it is slowly becoming obsolete. Email, for example, has a way of consuming all of our time even though we still forget to respond to emergency communications.

Your virtual receptionist may clean your inbox for you: spam is filtered out, urgent messages are notified of, and other items that can wait are kept. Some of the emails you receive are also of the newsletters, alerts, or news type. These may be categorized by your assistant so you can read them at your leisure.

Research

It’s very typical for startup founders to conduct a lot of research. You could need to find out what your rivals are doing, learn more about potential clients and investors, and explore new possibilities, among other things.

You might not realize it, but you may lose hours every day while looking up information online. Each day, we spend far more time online than we think. This can lead to a lot of wasted time if you’re unsure where to look or get sidetracked by other things on the internet. A Virtual manager who is familiar with research will know the best resources to use.

Data Analysis

A company’s data can be quite beneficial to it — but if you know how to make use of it. From website and social media analytics to raw data like contact information, a VA may transform numbers into useful reports or insights.

Project Management

Whether you have a team of virtual employees or are working with another firm, you’ll need someone in charge. You may require to be constantly monitoring progress, communicating with team members, establishing deadlines for each new activity, and ensuring that everyone is hitting their targets when there are a lot of moving pieces.

It’s probably better to outsource all of this to a VA with prior project management experience rather than attempting it yourself.

Financial Tasks

There are so many figures to deal with that they may give anyone a migraine. Your accounts might be kept up to date by an assistant. Invoicing, accounting, payroll, and other bookkeeping activities are some of the things you may delegate.

Social Media

You need to be on social media in order to improve your awareness and stay connected with clients. The issue is that producing content, reacting to feedback, and planning take a lot of time.

You may obtain value from social media without sacrificing other employment by outsourcing some (or even all) of your social media activities to a online assistant.

Delegating Best Practices

To get the most out of your VA you’ll need to understand some delegation basics from the start.

Decide in Advance What You Want to Delegate

It makes no sense to figure out what tasks you should delegate as you go along; before hiring a virtual assistant, you must first know. This will ensure that you pick someone with the necessary skills and experience. You may always add more work to the list either assigning it to the same person or recruiting another VA.

Onboard Your Assistant

You can apply some of the same techniques you would use to bring remote workers on board. The amount of onboarding required will be determined by how much work the VA will be performing for you.

Prepare Instructions

Put yourself in your virtual assistant’s position. What kinds of instructions would you need to complete each activity? Simple activities may be completed with a single sentence, but more complex tasks may require background knowledge or even training using a specific tool. Consider how you could best convey the information; sometimes a video depicting a process is more effective than written directions.

Consider carefully how much information your remote assistant needs for every activity you allocate. Going into too much detail at times (particularly if the VA has more expertise performing the job than you) is superfluous or even confusing. However, oversimplified instructions might result in errors and confusions on other occasions.

Set Deadlines

If you don’t provide clear deadlines for your tasks, it’s hard for an assistant to decide what to focus on. If you tell your VA to complete work “as soon as possible,” you run the danger of alienating different people with varying interpretations of this phrase. If your remote assistant is already swamped with other clients’ jobs, your tasks might not get done.

If a deadline is malleable, create a provisional due date and let the VA know that it can deliver the work a few days late. However, if you have an ironclad deadline, inform them as well.

Create a Project

Create a project to keep track of your VA’s performance and add new activities as they arise by using Asana. Creating a folder on Google Drive is the most basic option. If you have many people working for you (perhaps several VAs performing different duties), project management software like Asana may be useful.

Be Available

It’s critical for your VA to be able to come to you with any questions or concerns and to clear up anything when instructions are not clear-cut. If video chatting is more convenient, stay connected on your favorite software at all times. Slack is a fantastic alternative if sending brief notes is more practical. It’s far preferable than emailing back and forth about simple matters.

Using Time-Tracking Software

Timekeeping is critical to understanding how your assistant spends his or her time. Most tools allow you to view how much time the individual is spending on each app and website.

It’s also a good idea to take screenshots. All of this is helpful in determining whether or not it’s worthwhile to outsource the work. You may realize that you can complete the task faster than before, or maybe you just need an extra experienced assistant.

Realize You Don’t Need to Control Everything

One way to demonstrate that not everything needs your personal touch is to start cutting back on the activities that bore you. Consider what other elements of your company might benefit after you’ve seen how much easier it is.

Accept That Your Business Is Bigger Than You

You had the vision, but your company has already develop much more than your initial concept. You’ve come to the realization that you can’t manage everything on your own.

Even if you don’t know everything there is to know about your specialty, and all of the elements necessary to start a company. Staying in control will only do you harm in the long term.

Embrace the Opportunity for New Viewpoints

Ideas are one of the ways that you’re limited if you try to do it all yourself. When several individuals are involved in the creative process, it’s more innovative. Bringing in VAs from various backgrounds to help your firm solve problems, speed things up, and provide fresh ideas to develop its services is a fantastic way to improve problem solving, streamline your business, and offer the best service possible.

Trust Your Assistant

If you want any of the above tasks to get done, you’ll need to trust your remote assistant to pay attention to the details, deliver high-quality services, and be trustworthy.

This may imply that you have to pay more than the minimum fee for certain skilled work. Using an outsourcing platform with a long list of positive reviews or working with a trusted agency might be worth it if you’re not sure about your VA.

When it comes to getting your car fixed, you may find that some services are more expensive than others. It’s always appealing to select the most affordable option for any service. When you’re on a tight budget, it appears to make sense to look for any way possible to save money for your company.

Startups and small business owners might even believe that the less they spend on hiring a virtual assistant, the more money they’ll save. As it turns out, this isn’t always the case. The truth is that cheap VA services can end up costing you a great deal more in time and productivity.

The business of virtual assistants has grown dramatically in recent years. There are now a large number of VAs, from all over the world, charging a wide range of prices.

This means finding low-cost assistants is simpler than ever before. Cheap VA’ s, on the other hand, might come bundled with hidden fees and difficulties.

1. Mostly Basic Admin Tasks

VA’s can perform a wide range of activities. There are specialized VAs who provide services like business management, graphic design, and sales.

The cheapest virtual worker, on the other hand, provide only fundamental administrative services such as data entry, correspondence, online transactions, and scheduling. This may be a good place to start; however, if you want to make a significant impact on your workload, you’ll need to be able to delegate additional responsibilities.

Plus, a VA who only helps with basic administrative tasks won’t be able to provide you with support for any activities that fall outside your area of expertise. If you still need to outsource these tasks to an expert, the cost savings from your VA will be minimal.

2. Low-Quality Work

The greatest risk with utilizing low-cost VA is the work they will deliver. Those that provide high-quality services are in high demand and charge more. Only VAs who lack experience charge inexpensive fees.

3. Slow Delivery

There’s always the chance of finding a remote assistant that charges a cheap rate but provides high-quality services. The issue is that the VA will be in heavy demand, forcing you to wait a long time for your work. When it comes to waiting several weeks for some chores, it might not be an issue; however, you won’t be able to wait long when you need to complete crucial projects in a short time frame.

4. Communication Difficulties

On major job platforms, one of the most popular locations to discover low-cost VA’s is. These businesses function as a middleman for the customer and virtual employees.

The issue is that you are frequently denied direct contact with your VA, which may lead to misunderstandings. You’ll be able to tell if you’re on one of these sites since they prefer to hide the identities of remote assistants.

Working with low-cost online assistant in other countries might also contribute to communication difficulties. There are many outstanding remote assistants who live abroad, but they aren’t cheap. Those that charge a very low price usually have limited English abilities, making communication difficult.

5. Poor Image

Mistakes and ineffective communication might completely ruin your reputation if your VA is in charge of any contact between you and your coworkers, clients, or suppliers. The last thing you want is to appear unprofessional to those who matter most. This becomes even more essential if you utilize low-cost remote workers from other countries.

It also applies to projects that prospects or consumers will see, such as social media posts or advertisements. A bad job could have a negative impact on your brand. If the material does not speak to your target audience, people may believe you are addressing someone other than them. Prospects may come to unfavorable quick judgments about your company if the content fails to connect with them.

6. Frequent Turnover

You could choose that a smart move would be to go through inexpensive VA until you locate someone who’s a good match for you.

After all, when you consider all of the people working on various platforms and organizations, there are likely hundreds of them charging low fees. You may believe that one of them must be a suitable fit.

The problem with this strategy is that it’s impossible to tell whether a low-cost VA will live up until after you’ve already employed him or her. This involves communicating with several VA’s, perhaps vetting them, and onboarding your top pick every time it doesn’t work out (and this will happen frequently).

You’ll have to restart the process all over again each time, and you will never discover the person who’s right for you.

7. Low Rates for a Limited Time

The fee of a VA will not likely stay low for long once you’ve found one you like working with. VAs with little expertise tend to start out charging a minimal rate merely to get their foot in the door. They begin charging more as soon as they have a small portfolio or acquire positive client feedback.

8. Wasted Time

When working with low-cost VA, you must constantly be on the lookout for errors. You’ll also need to check the job for mistakes if you keep hiring new VAs. If you have many modifications to make, using a VA is simply not much better than doing the task yourself. In other situations, though, you’ll have to send the project to the VA, then let them do it all over again after they make significant mistakes.

9. Frustrations

You’ll be frustrated and dejected after dealing with low-cost employee. It’s time to let go of your fears and embrace the company of a VA.

You should be able to focus on more important tasks and establish a work–life balance rather than being compelled to micromanage, which is impossible if you try to deal with the cheapest ones available.

An affordable alternative to a low-cost virtual receptionist is one that’s better. This implies getting a good price for services, which isn’t something you’ll find with inexperienced VAs with a restricted skill set.

It may be tempting to try out low-cost assistant charging $5 (or less!) because they’re cheap, but it’s important to remember that you get what you pay for.

We offer high-quality virtual assistant services at a reasonable price at veta virtual. To discuss your requirements, please contact us.