How to Improve the ROI of Your Receptionists

Your receptionists play a large part in your company’s success. The better they perform, the better the customer experience, and the more your company profits. Thus, it’s vital that you make the most out of your receptionists’ capabilities so you can achieve the best possible reward.

Here are some ways you can improve the ROI of your receptionists:

Assign them with new tasks

Receptionists can do a lot more than greet customers and answer their questions. They can be highly flexible with administrative tasks. You can take advantage of this by transferring some tasks from other departments to your front desk’s workload.

For example, if you run a PT clinic, you can delegate some of your providers’ tasks to your receptionists. This way, you can improve your receptionists’ ROI and reduce provider burnout at the same time.

Here are some extra tasks you can assign them:

• Scheduling client appointments
• Managing and processing payments
• Being the gatekeeper for phone calls
• Doing data entry
• Answering customer emails

However, giving your receptionists extra work is more complex than it sounds. There are some things you have to keep in mind before you assign them new tasks:

• Determine if additional tasks can cause work overload or burnout.
• Make sure it aligns with their job description.
• Discuss with your front desk team first for their consent.
• If necessary, give them additional compensation.

Create customer service guidelines

A study on customer experience found that customers who are loyal to a brand talk about it among their peers, and 92% of respondents trust these recommendations more than any other type of advertising. On the other hand, 91% of respondents are unlikely to be return customers if they’re unhappy with the brand. In addition, 70% of respondents become loyal to a brand if the company solves their complaints effectively.

Receptionists play a major role in customer service. Thus, one way of improving their ROI is to set guidelines in how they perform in terms of customer service. These guidelines will serve as standards for their performance when interacting with your customers.

Here are some examples of customer service guidelines:

• Responding to emails – Ensure proper grammar, spelling, tone, and structure of emails.
• Scheduling appointments – Consider the preferences of both the customer and the relevant department.
• Directing customer queries – Provide the necessary key points of the query.
• Managing data entry – Maintain consistent formatting of spreadsheets.

When you implement these guidelines, it’s important that you avoid micromanaging your receptionists. In a survey of employees who experienced micromanagement, 69% of the respondents considered changing jobs while 71% said that it interfered with their job performance. Trust your receptionists to do the job, and they’ll do the job well.

Provide regular training and refreshers

It’s never enough to train your receptionists only at the beginning of their tenure in your company. In a 2018 study on employee engagement, 92% of respondents say that having formal job training makes them more engaged with their work. This is important because high employee engagement translates to higher work quality and job satisfaction (and vice versa).

Your receptionists are always on their feet with customers, but they still want to feel engaged with your company or they’ll be discouraged to perform well. To engage them, hold regular sessions for training and schedule refreshers to develop their skills. One effective method is roleplaying to hone their skills in customer interaction. You can also cater the training to each receptionist by giving them individual feedback so you can target specific strengths or weaknesses.

Make sure to keep changing the training sessions to prevent your receptionists from getting bored.

Ask for their feedback

Only receptionists know the front desk best. If you want to know how you can improve their productivity, they can tell you.

You can organize regular meetings with them to discuss any ongoing issues affecting the front desk. These meetings can serve as an avenue for them to speak their thoughts on various aspects of work, such as the team dynamic and workflow.

It’s important to keep an open mind and assure them that you’ll greatly appreciate their feedback. Perhaps they’ll point out that certain policies you put in place hamper their performance or cause bottlenecks.

Once you put together a list of problems they’ve identified, discuss effective long-term solutions that will solve those problems and help your receptionists improve their performance.

Relieve their stress

As the frontline of your company, your receptionists experience stress on the job in one way or another. In the long run, this can be a fatal issue that can affect your front desk. In a 2022 study on workplace stress, more than 50% of respondents reported that they feel a lot less engaged with work due to stress. This may eventually result in your receptionists taking more leaves or, worse, leaving your company.

Relieving your receptionists’ stress is one of your main priorities if you want to maintain a strong front desk team, let alone increase their ROI. One way of doing this is by lightening up their workload when it’s too overwhelming. In the same study, 39% of the respondents say that their stress comes from their workload. Other ways include talking to them or optimizing their workload.

Let them work remotely

Your receptionists have the potential to deliver the best results if they work remotely. This can be hard to believe especially given the common notion that being a receptionist is an in-person job. However, it is possible, and in fact very beneficial for your receptionists’ ROI.

You can do this with virtual receptionist services that let you transition your front desk to a remote work setup. This allows you to:

• Use the same front desk team to attend multiple locations at the same time.
• Make your front desk practically operate 24/7, being always available to answer customer queries.
• Allow your receptionists to enjoy the benefits of working from home.
• Reinvest your cost savings to enhancing the same front desk team rather than spend more on training new receptionists

WelcomeWare is an all-in-one hardware and software solution that gives you everything you need to enable and reap the benefits of a virtual front desk. It ticks all the boxes for improving your receptionists’ ROI and can significantly enhance your business’ customer service experience.