Whether you’re short staffed or your staff is too busy, you may consider hiring virtual receptionists to help out.

In this business climate, you may be reluctant to hire a full-time employee and instead look for ways to help increase the productivity of your current staff. Let’s look at a few ways a live virtual receptionist can enable your staff to be more productive without the cost of adding another employee.

In this blog series, we’re exploring creating solutions that are customized around your specific business goals. In the last post, we reviewed the following goals and discussed, in detail, the third goal. Today, I’ll expand on Goal #4.

  1. Maximize every new client opportunity 24/7.
  2. Increase client loyalty and gain referrals.
  3. Reduce the cost of recruiting, hiring and training additional staff.
  4. Enable your staff to focus its time and attention on other core areas of your business.

Many business owners overlook the simplicity and practicality of transferring routine tasks to a virtual receptionist. A live answering service is one of the wisest investments a growing business can make, with a great ROI. Here are three duties that can easily be passed to personnel in a live answering service:

  • Phone Call and Lead Management – While it’s just about impossible to run a business and answer every incoming call in a day, those that do are not superhuman. Rather, they are savvy business owners who know a live answering service can efficiently answer incoming calls 24/7, greeting callers with a friendly introduction and offer of assistance rather than a frustrating voice mail. What’s more, live answering services can address general inquiries, transfer callers to the appropriate department, capture news leads, and escalate priority calls when needed.
  • Calendar Management – These tasks tend to be repetitive and systematic making them the ideal functions to be completed by a virtual receptionist. A virtual receptionist can manage your appointment calendar by scheduling, confirming, and following up on appointments, taking messages, distributing paperwork, and much more.
  • Call Screening and Urgent Response – A virtual receptionist is an invaluable team member who can help you manage your office when you’re out of town. Virtual receptionists allow prospective and current clients to reach your office even while you are gone. Depending on the urgency of the matter, a virtual receptionist can take a message, forward the caller to voice mail, deliver the message to you via text, or alert you in the method that you prefer. Virtual receptionists are also aware of personnel in your office who are the current on-call contacts in the event that you are unreachable.

Despite outsourcing sometimes carrying a negative connotation in business, it is one of the best things to do for your business. Using a U.S.-based live answering service not only alleviates the stress of handling a variety of office-related tasks, but better prepares you for the busy days ahead.