Property Management - Case Study
Virtual Receptionist Service for businesses of up to 5 people
Our live virtual receptionist team are based in the UK and will answer calls in your company name in a friendly and professional manner to create the right image for your business.
We have been providing virtual receptionist services since 2004 and have worked with more than 1000 small businesses. The team is big enough to handle peaks in the number of calls but not too big as we do not want to sound like a call centre.
Virtual receptionist service – property management case study
A property management company who run a number of multi-tenant buildings use our receptionist team during the day and our automated telephone answering system out of hours.
Call Handling
They have an established telephone number on a normal BT line into their office. During office hours they wanted to answer calls themselves if they were available but overflow to our virtual receptionist team when they were not.
To achieve this they set the BT line to ring in their office for 15 seconds before diverting to Office Answers. BT normally play a message “your call is being diverted” but they contacted BT and arranged for this message to be be turned off. The caller is therefore not aware that the call has diverted elsewhere.
When calls overflow our virtual receptionist team answer in their company name as though they were in the same office. We take a message and send it through to the appropriate person.
Out of Hours
Being a property management company they do get a number of calls out of hours and wanted an effective way of routing these to the appropriate service engineer. We added our automated phone answering system to the set up to handle the out of hours calls. An out of hours caller hears a greeting and is given several options, such as electrical issues, water issues.
The call is the routed to the appropriate contact. These contacts can change from week to week so we have shown our customer how to use the web interface to change the contact number for whoever is on call. They therefore manage the call routing themselves.
Business Growth
Their business in the UK has grown over the past few years and they had more people in their office during the day. This meant they could answer more calls themselves but they carried on with the receptionist service because there were still times when they could n’t answer all calls, particularly if one or two people were out of the office.
They were happy to continue with the receptionist service because, other than the relatively low subscription charge, they only paid for calls when they were all busy so this was an efficient way of handling the overflow.
The out of hours system has also grown as their business expands and we added another layer so the caller first chooses which property they are in and the second layer asks them what type of problem they have. The call can then be routed to the relevant person.