Hi there! It’s Paula from Beyond the Maze, and today’s topic is about what is Virtual Reception and how does it work.

As a Virtual Assistant business, we also provide Virtual Reception services. What is this?

Obviously, Receptionists are answering the phone. If we think of somebody sitting in your front office answering the phone, taking messages, making appointments, answering queries, all that sort of thing. That is what a Virtual Reception can also do.

We’re just not in your office we’re working virtually for you.

This is great if you are, say, out on the road or in a workshop or in sessions and seeing clients all the time where you just don’t have time to answer your phone. If you’re in a session with a client, that session might be an hour or 50 minutes and who’s answering your phone where you’re in session?

Chances are no one is answering calls and it just goes to Message Bank. This means at the end of the day you’re chasing up all these messages that you’ve got to return by the end of the day, and it just makes your day even longer.

What if you could have somebody on the other end of that phone taking those messages or implementing what the client wants? They can be making those appointments on the spot there and then, answering those queries right away and doing as much as possible on that phone call while the clients there.

This is not only great for you, but also for your client or your potential client.

In today’s society, as you know, there’s a lot of instant gratification. What I mean by this is that somebody might be ringing around. So, if you’re a tradesman, for example, and you have got clients calling in and wanting a quote or wanting to know your availability or something like that, chances are they’re probably ringing a few different people.

If your phone isn’t answered and it just goes to message bank and the person that they ring next has the call answered – it’s not going to message bank and they can get them in tomorrow, let’s say, then that’s what’s going to happen.

You’re going to lose that potential business just because you didn’t answer your phone or you couldn’t answer your phone because you’re with another client, which is fair enough.

However, having somebody in place to answer that phone for you – and yes, it does take a little while to get up to speed, depending on what your business is. We specialise in working with Allied Health clients, so generally we can step in and do most things almost right away, but we do have other clients in other areas, so it’s worth chatting to us as well.

In the long run, Virtual Reception is a better system for you because your phone is being answered.

So how does it work?

You keep the same number that you’ve got, and that’s one big thing that people are very, very worried about as you’ve got it on all your promotional materials. You’ve got it on your website. Everything’s got your phone number on it. If you use an external virtual reception business, you might have to change that number.

Not here.

Here we set up our system so that we have an internal number which we give to you that is not used externally, and you keep your number. All you simply have to do is call your provider or if it’s a mobile, you can do this on most mobiles too, call your provider and redirect that phone number to the phone number that we give you.

The reason why we don’t take your phone number over is because if you ever leave us, to put that number back to you is very messy. It’s time consuming, and it could result in downtime of that actual number, which means a loss in business. I’m not in the game for you to lose business.

I’m in the game to help you grow your business and get the business that you need.

That’s why we give you the internal number, because then if you do leave us, then it’s just simple. Take your redirection off and it’s done as quickly as that.

We have an onboarding session with you, and we would get a list of all your things like pricing and cancellation policies and just general information that your clients might be asking at the time. We then put this information into an internal system so our team can refer back to that. You then get a dedicated person who looks after your number.

You get your Client Services Manager who looks after you, and primarily looks after your clients incoming calls. You generally get the same person answering the phone all the time. We also provide you with a backup person. If your Client Services Manager is on the phone or they’re on lunch or they’re on leave, then that backup person is also trained across your work so they can answer calls too.

If they happen to both be on the phone at the same time, which can happen, then we also have other members of our team that can answer the call and take a message. The message is then given to your Client Services Manager, and they will return that call as soon as they’re off the phone to take care of it. With this system, nothing goes through to you unless it’s absolutely necessary.

We have a few different systems that we can use to communicate with you.

If there is an urgent message to get to you, we can get a message to you, and that’s all discussed in the onboarding session as well. And then if you ever leave us, again as I said, it was just as simple as turning the redirection off.

We can also help with the handover to your new people because a lot of the time we do have clients that want to start off with us and then their business grows so much they can afford a full-time person in the office, which is great. You know, our work is done if we get to that point, we’re happy to work with the person and do the handover for you so you’re not having to train that person as well.

In addition, internally, we also set up our own procedures. This makes it easier for us to train any new people coming on to our team, which means again, we’re happy to hand our procedures over to you if you ever do leave us. But hopefully you stay for a while! In the end, so it’s as simple as that.

It’s really easy.

At the time of recording this in January, 2023 are packages start at just under $200 a month to have someone on your phone’s 8 30 to 5 Monday to Friday. We do also offer a Saturday service, and we also offer before hours and after hours to allow for daylight saving.

So, please, if you are interested in the Virtual Reception Services, contact us and we can have a chat: https://calendly.com/bossladycoach/15min?month=2023-03

Bye for now.