Maintain Quality Customer Relationship with a Virtual Receptionist

19 Mar 2022

A virtual receptionist is just like having a regular receptionist when it comes to handling responsibilities. They typically perform administrative & customer service tasks remotely, mostly from the comfort of their home or in a contact center, and they can work on behalf of multiple companies at a time. Their only KRA is to take care of the customer; this implies they keep customers happy & loyal to the brand.

Financially, employing a virtual receptionist makes a lot of sense, especially for a small business, as you get the perks of employing a professional agent for handling your basic inquiries. This helps you cut down the cost of hiring a full-time receptionist & their onboarding expenses, given that a virtual receptionist comes pre-trained on how to handle basic customer queries, call forwarding procedures & scheduling appointments. For these virtual services, you only need to pay for the hours of support you require, where hours can be added or subtracted hours at short notice.

In addition to taking over the basic tasks and enabling you to organize your time better and focus on the critical aspects of your business, a virtual receptionist can actually help with your business growth by nurturing leads throughout the purchasing journey & maintaining a healthy relationship with the customers. Read on to see how a virtual receptionist helps a business maintain a quality relationship with its customers.

They help you Grow your Customer Base

A virtual receptionist helps you to nurture leads into fully-fledged customers by providing support & guidance along the journey. If required, they can even log in the hours for full-time (or the time when they're actually talking) and act as a single point of contact for your customers & build a rapport with them, which makes them more likely to convert. During your virtual receptionist's off hours, you have the option of hiring an equally-skilled receptionist from the same or another company almost immediately. This flexibility doesn't come with a full-time employee.

Establishing a relationship with prospective clients from the beginning is very important – ongoing conversations with them will help your business better understand your customer's needs.

They Foster Loyalty & Increases Customer Retention

According to a Harvard Business Review, investing in new customers is about five to 25 times more expensive than retaining the existing ones. A virtual receptionist helps to maintain contact with existing ones & encourages brand loyalty. Additionally, consumers really appreciate getting their queries solved by an actual human rather than automated messages that are not reliable & can end up frustrating customers.

A Virtual Receptionist is a Valuable Team Asset

A virtual receptionist's job is to compliment your business brand & convey its values to everyone they communicate with on your behalf. Though you are most likely to hire them through a third-party service provider, they will still be an intrinsic part of your workforce. Virtual receptionists typically pass on the important messages/queries to the appropriate teams & deal with straightforward tasks. This helps to save time for other workforce members, making the virtual receptionist a team player.

All you need to do is simply give them constructive feedback & keep them updated with any changes in the protocol or approach so that they can continue to deliver an on-brand experience to your customers.

Conclusion

Maintaining quality customer relationship is one of the primary reasons why businesses opt for virtual receptionist services. Busy business owners usually don't have time to do it themselves. Of course, in the initial days' entrepreneur may answer their phone calls on their own, but as their company grows, it makes sense to outsource at least a portion of this aspect of the business.