Maybe you’ve considered hiring a receptionist for your business, but you’re not ready to incur that cost quite yet. Maybe you work in a shared workspace or from your home, and you want to convey an air of professionalism, but you know that you don’t have an appropriate space to put a receptionist.
Perhaps it’s time to consider an off-site receptionist. You know it will help your sanity to have someone else handling customer calls and directing them where they need to go before they get to you, but you’re just not quite sure how an off-site receptionist will actually help your bottom line.
Let’s walk through all the financial benefits an off-site receptionist could have for your business.
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By The Numbers
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, receptionists typically make between $9.65 and $19.65 an hour. The average receptionist makes about $14.25 an hour. If you were to pay the average hourly rate to a receptionist for 40 hours of work per week that’s $570 a week. If you just need phone calls answered and routed, it’s unlikely that your receptionist will be spending all 40 hours a week doing just that.
If you hire an off-site receptionist, you will likely purchase a number of minutes for a phone call answering per month. For the entire month of answering incoming calls, you can hire an off-site receptionist for roughly the amount you’d pay an on-site receptionist in a week!
There are many accountants who work out of their homes or small offices who only need a receptionist to handle incoming calls for four to five months of the year. You’d be hard pressed to find someone can afford to work for less than half of the year.
With that in mind, accountants can hire an off-site receptionist to handle the incoming calls for those few months. This will not only decrease their stress level but increase the amount of tax filing appointments they have, therefore increasing their revenue.
If the average tax filing costs $275, the accountant could pay for the off-site receptionist monthly package with less than two appointments!
Better Use of Your Time
They say time is money, and your time as a business owner is (and should be!) valued at a high premium. When you begin to get bogged down in the day-to-day tasks related to keeping your business running smoothly, that’s when your business’s growth could stall out.
Hiring an off-site receptionist switches your attention from answering every single phone call to focusing more on what you can do to better your product or service. You’ll still have interaction with your clients, but it will be on your time. You’ll call them back when it’s convenient for you or if you do have the time, you’ll answer when they call. You’ll be able to manage your time more easily with an experienced professional fielding the phone calls first and giving you the option to ask them to take a message.
Turning Prospective Clients into New Clients
Did you know that if a phone call goes to voicemail many people don’t bother leaving a message? This is particularly accurate if you are a service based business and are one of a long a list of prospective businesses that client is considering. If they don’t get an answer from you, they will simply hang up and call the next number on their list.
With an off-site receptionist, you know that is not going to happen to you! They will be trained in your brand; this means that they will be able to answer any of the prospective client’s basic questions and then have the ability to send the prospective client directly to the proper person. This may be you or another member of your team but either way, it will be effective not only for you but for your potential client.
When you know that it’s time to take your business to the next level, but feel like hiring a receptionist is skipping a few levels, an off-site receptionist is a right decision for you. Click here to request a demo from Reliable Receptionist today!
