With the trend of remote working leading to the growing demand for virtual receptionists, the need of saving costs while still delivering the best customer service has become crucial for the workplace.
If you are considering digitising your reception, you will find how using digital receptionists can address your front-of-house challenges while delivering the best visitor experience and customer service for your business.
What is the role of a digital receptionist?
Digital receptionist deals with phone calls, take messages, forward calls and answers basic FAQs in other locations for companies. Modern virtual video receptionist systems allow live, in-house or outsourced digital receptionists to greet visitors from remote locations through video technology.
Digital receptionists can deliver face-to-face remote service through an integrated visitor management system, providing first-class customer service while enhancing workplace safety and saving costs. If a visitor needs help, they can select an option that connects them to a digital receptionist that is located elsewhere in real-time.
Benefits of using digital receptionists
Technology like digital reception systems should serve as an autonomous process that cuts out manual tasks at your reception, while receptionists focus on face-to-face conversations to provide tailored customer services.
Let us explain the benefits of this combination of digital receptionist and visitor management systems.
1. Move from a reactive reception to an intuitive one
A common challenge faced by a reception team is that they are reacting to unpredictable visitor traffic. To explain it more, it means:
- Your receptionists might not be aware of the changes in meetings or the visitors they are expecting
- Queues at your reception area during peak hours
- Your receptionists rely on multiple manual tasks to check visitors in
Introducing a visitor management system that acts as a digital receptionist, can remove the queues and manual tasks at your reception area. In this way, your reception staff can focus on more complicated administrative tasks and provide more personalised service. However, visitors can still access human help from digital receptionists supporting your visitors’ check-in process.
2. Reduce receptionist’s holiday and training cover costs
Hiring a full-time receptionist can be expensive, but the cost-benefit is delivered by using a digital receptionist and only paying for the time you spend on answering the calls or repurposing your reception staff to other internal resources.
3. Improve digital efficiency
How efficient is your reception? If one receptionist can process one visitor every two minutes, they can handle up to 240 visitors if they are dedicated to this task.
The concept of Digital Efficiency is based on removing manual processes and parts of workflows that require multiple touches. If you look at concepts of measuring your reception’s efficiency such as:
- Visitor satisfaction
- Cost per visitor
- Visitor capacity
- Meetings that start on time
Then the value of the combination of visitor management systems and digital receptionists comes sharply into view.
4. Ensure the best customer experience, with or without receptionists on site
Relying on human presence to process visitors is one of the biggest frustrations for the facilities team because:
- It can easily become a single point of failure
- Sickness, holiday, and training require cover
- Peaks in traffic deliver queues as they cannot cope and therefore frustration
- Lulls in traffic can be worse and lead to intense boredom or worse staff turnover
However, with the support of a visitor management system that eliminates the repetitive tasks to process visitors, and a group of dedicated digital receptionists that are well-trained to provide professional customer service, you can ensure your reception service is always on point.
What if you have an unmanned reception?
Reducing long commute head offices in major cities and upgrading the “spoke locations” in secondary cities to serve hybrid workers have become a trend in the post-pandemic world.* This means there will be more local offices, less commuting and a far higher expectation of the smart workplace.
These spoke locations will have an unmanned reception where only one or no receptionist is at the front desk which could lead to a single point of failure. A sophisticated digital receptionist with the help of a visitor management system can help to deliver the best visitor experiences at all times.
*Source:
5. Upgrade your brand image
First impression matters and the reception is the first stop your visitors will encounter when they arrive at your premises. With digital receptionists’ support, you can provide an end-to-end user journey that makes their visits great and memorable, and build trust and reputation for your brand.
How to implement Digital Receptionists?
We’ve introduced how to best utilise virtual receptionists with technology, and how they are the key to continue delivering face-to-face customer service.
We recommend introducing a visitor management system, like Vgreet Virtual Reception, and outsourcing digital receptionists to maximise the ROI.
We partnered with Moneypenny Exec PA service who is a leading outsourced remote receptionist provider for call answering services, but with video call capability through our visitor management system, Vgreet.
Download the Vgreet brochure here
More resource
- How a digital reception system can benefit different types of receptions.
- The ultimate guide to visitor management
