When you are running a business, you need to be able to create the goods or services you provide as well as respond to your customers. In the 21st century, most businesses also conduct their work on the Internet, and therefore have international clientele. Therefore, you need to be able to respond to clients from different countries throughout the world. Depending on what you sell, you might have predominant customers in certain parts of the world. These customers will be living on different time zone schedules. When it is the middle of the work day in Los Angeles, it can be nighttime in London. That means that you’ll have to answer phone calls from clients in the middle of the night. Alternately, you can hire a virtual receptionist to answer your phone calls for you.
What Is a Virtual Receptionist?
A virtual receptionist is an employee for a message-taking service such as Message Direct. The virtual receptionist answers phones for your business and takes a message. They will have a decent amount of knowledge about the basics of your business so they can give customers quality information and help. Essentially, a virtual receptionist is someone to whom you forward your business phone calls. That person then answers the phone, dispenses information if possible, and takes a message. They will not be able to provide nuanced answers to business inquiries, but they’ll be able to give out your address, phone number, and other basic information. A virtual receptionist is useful because they work 24/7.
You never have to be out of touch with your customers. If you are running an international business, that can be absolutely invaluable.
How it Works
The process of a virtual receptionist is fairly simple. The message-taking service is open 24/7. They will employ receptionists who answer phones. You will sign up for a certain package that covers a certain amount of calls each month and how the messages are to be delivered to you. You can simply forward your phone calls to the virtual receptionist whenever you need to do so. You can forward the phone calls if you go on holiday for weeks at a time, or you might just forward them while you’re unavailable for a few hours. The flexibility is one of the reasons why such a service is so great for online businesses. You can forward your phone calls when you go to sleep and turn it off when you wake up.
That will give you flexibility to always be in touch with your customers. Also, it is rapidly scalable. A business needs to be easily scaled up or down, especially in the 21st century. If business picks up, you can start forwarding your calls to your virtual receptionist. As soon as business slows down, you can take over your phone calls again. Since you won’t have to invest in long-term contracts, you won’t have to waste money on services you don’t need, which is a great way to run a flexible business.
