5 Ways Virtual Receptionists Can Improve Your Customer Service Relationships

Your front desk serves as the frontline of your business. Most of the time, your customer interactions start and end with your front desk. Thus, your receptionists are the key to building and maintaining customer relationships. That’s why it’s impossible to separate “receptionist” and “customer service” because they’re intertwined concepts.

If you really want to bring your customer relationships to the next level with your front desk, look no further than virtual receptionists. It may sound counterintuitive, but they can be more effective in improving your customer relationships than they could if they work in person.

Here are five ways how virtual receptionists can improve customer service:

1. Always available

The foundation of strong customer relationships is always being there to entertain your customer’s concerns. Typically, receptionists answer the queries or direct them to the business department that can answer them best. However, your receptionists can be unavailable due to being sick or being too busy with other tasks.

You can easily solve this with a virtual front desk using a live-streaming receptionist platform like WelcomeWare. This allows your receptionists to work remotely and cover each other when necessary. With the implementation of the right workflow policies in agreement with your receptionists, you can achieve a practically 24/7 working front desk that ensures your clients will always arrive at a receptionist and never at the answering machine.

2. Sets a welcoming environment

It’s important for your receptionists to be able to keep up a positive attitude and aura, as it sets the mood for your customers while interacting with your business. However, this may be difficult to achieve consistently depending on the energy level of your receptionists. The daily wear and tear of traveling to and from the office can make it challenging to even smile. Emotions are contagious – a sour face on your receptionist can ruin a customer’s day.

On the other hand, virtual receptionists are generally far more able to exude positivity because they work from home. You can observe this in how they handle customer interactions as well as in their performance. They:

• Are more energetic. They have a lot more energy to perform their tasks, allowing them to serve each customer more effectively.
• Can decide better. Having more energy means they can manage their tasks better. On the other hand, being tired can greatly affect their decision-making skills.
• Feel less stressed. In the short run, they’ll take fewer breaks and be more available to work the front desk. Long-term, they will stay with your company longer.

Keeping your front desk happy is important to improve customer relationships because their mood at the time they interact with your customer sets the opening tone for how your customer feels about working with you

3. Speeds up customer intake

Virtual receptionists typically work on computers that contain all the programs and tools they need to do their tasks. This means that they can perform their work much more efficiently than if they work in person, both individually and as a team.

With a virtual front desk platform like WelcomeWare, they can efficiently do the following for each of your customers:

• Receive notifications about screen/kiosk interactions from every location in your business.
• Easily cover each other when some receptionists are unavailable or too busy.
• Scan customer documents, and let customers sign intake forms on the screen.
• Process payments seamlessly and improve the cash flow.

Administrative tasks are also much more manageable for virtual receptionists, as they’ll use the provided software to perform all of these tasks from a single computer. Ideally, you should conduct regular training with your virtual receptionists to hone their skills in various tasks like data entry.

4. Finds opportunities in customer interactions

For both virtual receptionists and in-person receptionists, the three common ways they interact with customers are through:

1. Greeting customers for checking in/out
2. Answering phone calls
3. Responding to emails

Unlike in-person receptionists, however, virtual receptionists are more likely to detect opportunities in customer interactions. This is due to the fact that they generally have a lot more energy that, instead of only immediately moving customers through the typical process, they’ll be more attentive to the specific concerns of the customers. As a result, they can make the customers feel welcome by giving special care to those concerns.

Plus, virtual receptionists can relay their observations to you for your perusal. You can use this information to come up with strategies to further strengthen the customer relationship and bring more profit to your business.

5. Trained for complex interactions

Whether working on-site or remotely, receptionists are capable of dealing with complex customer interactions. It’s easy to think that such interactions are far more challenging for virtual receptionists, assuming a remote staff to be less effective to deal with customer needs than if the receptionists were there in person.

On the contrary, virtual receptionists can be highly flexible in those situations. They’re trained to be on their feet when there’s a customer who is disgruntled, confused, or frustrated. Besides calming down the customer, they relay the concern to the relevant department who can address the situation and come up with the best solution.

Your virtual receptionists can do these multiple tasks simultaneously because their remote setup enables them to manage tasks with ease, especially when using a dedicated virtual receptionist platform like WelcomeWare. When they arrive at a solution efficiently, your virtual receptionists can defuse the situation with ease and maintain a customer relationship that nearly went to ruin.

Improving your customer relationships is one of many things that virtual receptionists can do for your business. If you want to experience all the benefits that a virtual front desk can give you, use a dedicated virtual receptionist platform like WelcomeWare which lets you leverage your current front desk team across multiple locations.