The Skills Needed To Be A Virtual Receptionist

A good virtual receptionist can make all the difference to a small business or business owner, by reducing stress, saving time and offering a quality service to help transform your work life and take your business to the next level.

Particularly when they’re first starting out, lots of business owners assume that answering incoming calls is simply another part of their role, but over time many come to realise that it’s much more of a burden than they’d initially thought! Answering the phone to potential or existing customers politely, efficiently and effectively is so important to so many small businesses, but it’s something that can be really difficult to do well if you’re in the middle of other tasks or have a heavy workload that day, for example. It’s simply so difficult for small business owners to balance everything all at once!

Communication and writing skills

Communication skills go further than just having a polite telephone manner (though of course, this is vitally important!) Communication skills also refer to your ability to quickly interpret and understand the needs of your customers or callers, and to be able to relay information accurately between parties – in the case of your virtual receptionist, that’ll be relaying messages to business owners from their callers. These messages need to be timely, clear, concise and comprehensive, giving you the best chance of success when it comes to calling your customers back. In order to make this happen, your virtual receptionist or PA needs to be able to ask the right questions and provide the right information to your customers.

A virtual receptionist also needs to be able to communicate through a variety of channels, not just on the phone. In today’s world, enquiries don’t always come through the phone, but that doesn’t mean they’re any less important. Your virtual receptionist should be able to answer and manage enquiries from a variety of live chat providers, social media sources and email enquiries as well as phone calls. The way you communicate over live chat and social media is very important, and can be very different from the way you might communicate over the phone. 

Live chat is very accessible to customers, and is becoming increasingly popular with companies as it is cheaper to run than a phone line, and allows receptionists and agents to manage multiple enquiries at the same time, speeding up the pace of a customer service department and ultimately improving the customer experience, as they spend less time waiting in queues or on hold, for example. However, it is much more difficult to get the all-important “personal touch” that customers appreciate over text, which is why having someone answering your client’s messages over live chat who has excellent communication skills is so important. A friendly, helpful manner is just as important over live chat, if not even more, than over the phone. Our PA’s are highly experienced in both their telephone manner and in helping to solve problems and answer queries over live chat, email and social media too.

How to choose a skilled Virtual Receptionist for your business

If you need help with your business communications of any kind, a virtual receptionist might be a great option for you. A virtual receptionist offers you telephone, social media and live chat support when you need it, but also allows you and your team to quickly and easily take over when you have the time and ability to do so. However, choosing the right virtual assistant services isn’t always easy. You need to be confident that your client correspondence will be carried out professionally and just as well as you would do it yourself, if not better! There are some things that you should always look for when hiring a virtual receptionist company, and a few things to avoid if you can too.

While you might not think that your industry needs 24-hour availability, there are far more sectors than you think that can benefit from extensive out of hours support. When you hire a 24/7 virtual receptionist or call answering service, you don’t have to worry about missing a call again, and it gives your customers peace of mind that there is always someone there who will be able to listen to their query, particularly in an emergency situation. The point of a virtual receptionist solution is to make life easier for you, project a professional image, and make life easier for your customers too, which is where a 24/7 service can come in handy. At alldayPA, we offer 24/7 service as standard, and your package price will be determined by your call volumes and hours calls, so you don’t need to worry about any additional hidden charges or extortionate fees.

When you choose a virtual receptionist service for your business, you need to be confident that their process for getting your messages to you is watertight! We’ve been working with small businesses and sole traders for more than 20 years, and have honed our processes over the years to deliver brilliant service and our reputation for excellence to our customers, meaning you never lose a message. Our technology also allows us to pass your messages over to you in real time, the moment your caller has hung up. These can be delivered to you by text, email, or the Virtual Office app (our online portal) – whichever works best for you. You can be certain that you’re getting smooth communication instead of causing hassles for your workers and wasting time chasing down critical communications when you have a professional virtual receptionist on your side. After all, there’s nothing more frustrating than discovering that a customer’s message was not delivered to the intended destination or that a call was directed to the incorrect individual, but it can also have a real financial impact on your organisation’s bottom line too.

When you choose a virtual secretary or PA, you may want them to be able to schedule appointments for your existing or new customers. However, you want to be sure that the company you’ve chosen to handle your business communications can seamlessly interface with your chosen scheduling tool. At alldayPA, we train every one of our call handlers to work expertly with a range of CRM, payment and scheduling tools, such as Worldpay, Paypal, Responsetap, Zendesk, Zoho, Google suite and many more.

What is a virtual receptionist?

Our Virtual Receptionist package is a step up from our Telephone Answering service, but it isn’t as comprehensive, and therefore expensive, as our Outsourced Call Centre package. It’s a great solution for businesses that want to free up some of their time by outsourcing everyday tasks, such as call handling and diary management. 

Because they’re referred to as ‘virtual receptionists’ or ‘virtual assistants’, many people think that our online assistants are bots or automated answering machines that you have to deal with before you get through to a real person. This is certainly not the case here at alldayPA! All of our virtual receptionists are humans to ensure that your customers get a personalised service every time they call your company! Answering machines and robots might seem like the answer if you’re trying to cut costs, but it could drive business away in the long run. People appreciate human-to-human interaction, so that’s exactly what we give them.