Most small businesses struggle with keeping up with their larger counterparts. One area in particular is with the availability of front-line support for incoming calls. Yep, we’re talking about your receptionist: the person who has to take every phone call and treat it like the entire company’s success rides on how it is handled.
What is an eReceptionist?
Larger companies have receptionists to answer every call professionally and handle the inquiry immediately or route it accordingly. Larger companies may even have multiple numbers to accommodate regional area codes. This position is formally described by Careerexplorer.com as:
“A receptionist (sometimes referred to as an administrative assistant) is someone who performs various administrative tasks, including answering telephones and giving information to the public and customers. Receptionists are often the first employee that the public or customer has contact with. They are responsible for making a good first impression for the organization, which can affect the organization’s success.”
Savvy small business owners have recognized that an eReceptionist can fill that role at a much lower cost. As you can imagine, an eReceptionist is the virtual version of a receptionist and when utilized correctly, can even give your small business the image of a much larger one.
So, how do you evaluate a potential eReceptionist for your business? Here are the attributes you should be looking for to be successful.
Key Attributes of a Good eReceptionist:
- Professionally recorded greetings: you should be able to greet your callers with professional voice talent to set the tone that they are important to your business.
- Professional autoreply: you should be able to respond to missed callers instantly, and even customize specific responses to specific callers.
- Voice message routing: you should be able to forward voicemails to other email addresses for your convenience and rapid response.
- Professional call routing: you should be able to route calls automatically to at least 10 lines to satisfy all aspects of your business requirements.
- A 2nd phone line with a vanity number: you should also be able to separate business from personal calls in an effective manner.
As important as these requirements are, there are a few others that will mean the difference between a happy customer and less stress for you as a small business owner. Notably, you should also require your eReceptionist to:
- Block robocalls: you should be protected from the hundreds of robo, spam, scam and just plain annoying phone calls that waste your precious time.
- Provide visual cloud-based voicemail: you should have the ability to access all of your messages across all of your devices.
- Make conference calling easy: you should have the ability to have conference calls without the need for pins or long codes.
- Permanently store all messages: you shouldn’t have to worry about full inboxes or lost messages.
- Provide voicemail to text: you should have the option to read your voicemail when audio restrictions apply.
- And finally, unify cell, home and work voicemail: you should be able to look in just one inbox for all of your voicemails, just like your email.
What Should You Do Next?
Get an affordable eReceptionist!
Small businesses and tech-savvy consumers looking to start a home-based business rely on their mobile phones daily to mix work and pleasure like never before but robocalls have reached epidemic proportions causing billions of dollars in lost small business productivity, as well as frustrated consumers. You shouldn’t have to pay for services like blocking robocalls. You also shouldn’t be stuck with the limitations your phone carrier imposes on you.
Bottom line, your small business deserves an eReceptionist, and it’s easier than you think to get started! In fact, it’s free for many of the important requirements you should be evaluating from the list above.