How does a virtual receptionist help to reduce operating expenses and grow your business?

Communication is a crucial component of any business, whether big or small, and more importantly, a seamless, personalized communication experience is paramount to the success of brands. 

Poor calling experience is fatal to businesses since it is human nature to seek better opportunities, products, and services in life, which creates a path for them to abandon such poor experiences and search for better alternatives. 

No caller wants to stay on hold for long periods, stand by unanswered calls, and wait for hours to get their queries answered. Basically, nobody likes to go through a flawed and poor customer experience. 

So (as a business), how can you improve your customers’ calling experience? It may seem like a hefty task, but using the best virtual receptionist software can simplify your job and, at the same time, reduce operating expenses and grow your business. 

Everything has a solution if you look for it. 

Stick till the end to know everything about virtual receptionist software and how it helps to reduce operating expenses and grow your business. 

Let us begin with:

What is virtual receptionist software?

Virtual receptionist software is a solution that automates the job of a human receptionist as much as possible with better efficiency and diligence. 

Its task is to attend every inbound call and route them to specified destinations so that the callers can have their queries answered in real-time and with greater effectiveness. 

The virtual receptionist helps businesses automate their inbound calls and manage them to make every call personalized, quick, and to the point so that no call goes unanswered. 

Not only calls but also emails and text messages from the customers will get addressed accordingly in real-time.

This solution helps businesses with customer retention, enhancing user experience, generating greater sales funnel, and eventually, improving ROI. 

What are the benefits of virtual receptionist software?

There are several benefits of virtual receptionist software. Some major ones are as follows:

1. Enhanced customer experience
2. Scalability
3. Flexibility
4. Improved employee productivity

1. Enhanced customer experience

A virtual receptionist attends every inbound call, email, text message, and inquiry. No customer (caller) returns disappointed 😥 since you can manage to address every customer’s needs and queries effectively and efficiently. 

It is the base of a seamless customer experience. Satisfied customers mean greater retention, bigger sales funnels, enhanced brand reputation, and higher revenues. 

2. Scalability

A virtual receptionist solution comes with a huge feature, scalability. It benefits your business by matching the resources according to your needs. Subscribe only to what you need.

The solution allows you to scale your subscription in both ways to adjust your business needs. Scale up when you require greater resources and scale down when you don’t need them anymore.

You do not need an upfront payment for scaling your subscriptions; the best thing a VR has to offer for enticing customer experience. 

3. Flexibility

Flexibility is another feature of a VR solution, which allows businesses to address their customer requirements and queries on time ⌚ and every time. 

Businesses can offer exceptional customer service 24/7, which helps to enhance customer experience, gain customer loyalty, and efficient customer engagement. 

It helps keep your customers satisfied at all times, even during the off-hours and 365 days a year. 

4. Improved employee productivity

Since the virtual receptionist handles all tedious tasks of managing incoming requests, your employees can focus on other aspects of business operations that help your establishment grow faster and easier.

A VR solution engages only the selected personnel with the customers and keeps records streamlined so that the interacting personal can personalize the communication as much as possible.

Every customer prefers personalized communication, with (an end) result of solved problems and answered queries.

And from employees’ POV, they can effectively address customer problems and be more productive within a confined time and space. 

Which businesses can use and benefit from a virtual receptionist?

Whether small or big, every business that needs to communicate with its customers can use and benefit from a virtual receptionist. And no business triumphs without exceptional communication experience. 

Businesses from all domains and territories can benefit by incorporating a virtual receptionist in their business operations. Below are some business sectors that can benefit from using a virtual receptionist.

1. Marketing
2. Real Estate.
3. E-commerce
4. Healthcare
5. Finance and Banking
6. Education
7. Government

How does a virtual receptionist help to reduce operating expenses and grow your business?

Let us start with the fact that the average annual salary of a receptionist in the US is $45,223. And how much would it cost you for a virtual receptionist solution? The most expensive one will cost you $10,000 per year for its premium services. 

Many virtual receptionists are extremely cheap, and you can start getting the most affordable solution for $9.26/month/user but has limited services. A well-performing solution will not cost you more than $40/month. 

*Note: Pricing varies from one service provider to another. Always a good idea to scour for the best solution to meet your business needs.

Here (you can see that), an on-premise human receptionist costs you several times more than a virtual receptionist software. So it is a good start indeed. 

Now let’s dive into the factors contributing to reducing operating expenses and growing your business.  

5 ways a virtual receptionist helps you to reduce operating expenses and grow your business

1. Cut the Cost of Local Office Space and Infrastructures
2. Reduce daily operational expenses & internal resources
3. Enhance customer experience to reduce Customer drop-off
4. Reduce Marketing expenses to some extent
5. Dwindle payroll by a significant margin

1. Cut the Cost of Local Office Space and Infrastructures

Setting up physical infrastructures in an office space requires a lot of investment capital. First, you need to buy or rent the office space to house your infrastructures and on-premise employees (receptionists). 

Second, you must install the tools and devices for the employees (receptionists), racking up the investment sum.

On-premise receptionists must have dedicated devices, meaning more receptionist equals more devices equals more investment. 

Simply incorporating a virtual receptionist will save you from all these investments. You will free yourself from renting office spaces, buying infrastructures, and maintaining and upgrading them. 

You reduce many operating expenses, which you can use to subscribe to the best solution to run your business communications without worrying about maintenance and upgrades. 

2. Reduce daily operational expenses & internal resources

On-premise employees require office spaces and allotted physical devices, which we discussed in the previous section. Only devices and office space aren’t the requisites for receptionists to operate their tasks.

They utilize various internal resources like electricity, internet services, food supplies, water, and many such resources to go through a shift in business communications.

All these resources do not seem to cost much initially, but when you add them up in the long run, you will pay huge amounts for these supplies. 

A virtual receptionist doesn’t require all these internal resources besides an internet connection. Since the solution is cloud-based, you do not require investment in on-premise resources. Reducing operating expenses in every way possible is crucial to the triumph of business operations.

3. Enhance customer experience to reduce Customer drop-off

We have already talked about how a virtual receptionist helps you enhance your customer experience. It is guaranteed that a virtual receptionist can help you manage your customers in every way possible. 

It helps you streamline the communications, which simplifies the process of customer addressing and the whole communication approach. No solution seeker will go unattended, skyrocketing the user experience. 

An exceptional customer experience means greater customer retention and almost no customer drop-off. Reducing customer drop-off (automatically) increases the sales funnel and results in a bigger ROI. 

A virtual receptionist is a perfect tool (you can use) to acquire customer loyalty toward your brand. Loyal customers contribute about 70% of a company’s sales. Hence, reduce your customer drop-off as much as possible through the virtual receptionist. 

4. Reduce Marketing expenses to some extent 

It is a fact that a company spends 10% of its budget on marketing on average. Some of these expenses are spilled on (already) existing customers, which is important but a wise idea since they can be reached using a virtual receptionist. 

As mentioned earlier, a VR solution doesn’t limit its services to phone calls but also handles (every type of) incoming inquiry, SMS, emails, etc.

Businesses can reach loyal customers easily through SMS, emails, and application (notifications & alerts). 

Smart IVRs and AIs can play prerecorded messages or marketing materials to every inbound caller. You can conduct marketing campaigns for your existing customers through your brand’s applications using notifications and alerts. 

You can create pools of rewards for customers who help you advertise your products and services to new audiences, encouraging customers to get involved with your business operations. A virtual receptionist software can make this possible through its advanced features.

Hence, we can reduce marketing expenses (to some extent) through the advanced features of a VR solution.

5. Dwindle payroll by a significant margin

In the beginning, we learned that a human receptionist earns about $45,000 yearly in the US. We also found that you have to pay several times less for a VR solution with better effectiveness and diligence. 

If you incorporate a VR solution within your organization, you will almost eliminate the demand for human receptionists. You might need a few of them for manual tasks that you cannot conquer through a VR solution.

Generally, using a VR solution reduces the number of human receptionists, meaning you invest significantly less on the payroll. Your company’s payroll reduces accordingly, which helps you increase business operations in other sectors. 

A company’s 25-50% of the budget is spent on employees, as stated by Fundera, which is a huge amount.

A VR solution helps you reduce this percentage by a considerable rate since you significantly reduce the number of employees. 

Bottom line: Optimize customer communications and reduce operating expenses.

A virtual receptionist helps to reduce your business operating expenses by a considerable rate and, at the same time, enhances your customer experience to the next level, helping you retain customers and cultivate customer loyalty towards your brand. 

A 24/7, seamless customer communication experience is all customers need from businesses. It is achievable by using a virtual receptionist for a small investment compared to on-premise human receptionists. 

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