When your business is expanding, you have to start looking elsewhere for assistance you can focus on your job. While you’re busy doing the work and it made you successful, you might start to realize how distracting it is to answer the phone and do a lot of other menial tasks that keep you from getting your work done.
If you’re always answering phones, you’re missing out on work. But if you’re always doing work, you really miss out on the opportunity to build relationships with the consumers who call you wanting to buy or looking for more information. This predicament is costing you money. So instead of hiring somebody in house for $30,000 a year, you have two choices.
You can hire an answering service or you can hire a virtual receptionist. Both will be extremely helpful in adding extra presence to your business without spending an arm and a leg. In this article, we’ll look at both options so you can decide which one is the best one for you. It really comes down to what your priority is as a business owner.
Answering Services
An answering service is probably one of the most popular options out there. Odds are, if you’ve ever done business and had to call someone, like the customer service department, your call did not go directly to the company, but to answering service. Answering services are essentially call centers somewhere in the world.
Usually call centers are huge office spaces crammed packed full of people answering phones. If you get a phone call, someone in the service will answer the phone and read the introduction and the script from the computer screen. They leave and then take a message or transfer the call to you or another team member.
And that’s essentially it. These call centers get thousands of calls per day pertaining to a variety of different businesses. You can call them a hundred times a day and get a different person each time. This might seem like a good option for a lot of people, but if you’re looking to build relationships, and provide customers with good information, the call center probably isn’t the option for you.
Virtual Receptionist
It can be easy to confuse a virtual receptionist with an answering service. You might think that they do the same job, but a virtual receptionist gives you more options. That means it’s your job requires you to chase leads and isn’t just for customer service representation, then you might get better service going with a virtual receptionist.
Unlike having one of 1000 different people answer the phone, you’d be assigned a small team of receptionists (maybe around 5 or so) whose job it is to handle your account. They know the ins and outs of your business, or read from a script that you write, will chase leads, and help you convert traffic.
This is a big difference from someone is reading a script for a monitor to someone who knows your company and lives by your mission statement. Using virtual receptionist’s our full support team that handle all kinds of different tasks. They can make calls for you, fax papers, take care of personal business, send emails, and really is a one-size-fits-all approach.
Only you know what your needs are. A virtual receptionist is the next best thing to hiring somebody in-house. An answering service is having somebody there to answer the phone. Either way, your business will not be a girl the next level unless you find help and a support system that allows you to focus on your job.
