Entering the “Virtual World”

Virtual receptionist, receptionist, answering phone calls for your company

 

Central Communications offers a Virtual Receptionist Service for companies. It’s more than simply answering phones, it is literally able to take the place of the person who sat at the desk in your front lobby. Depending upon the information you supply us with, and the types of questions you are prepared to have us handle for you, this service can usually free up that staff person to work on other vitals tasks within your company.

There is another virtual service that has begun to spring up as well. That is the Virtual Assistant. Some business people are busy enough to need a little help, but not busy enough to hire someone full time. Others are plenty busy, but they don’t necessarily need for their assistant to work out of the same office, if they have a computer, internet access and a phone, it doesn’t matter where they are physically located.

In fact, Central Comm is often given instructions to make the Virtual Assistant the first contact person on the list when there are incoming calls and questions which we might not have the answer to. Virtual Assistants perform a wide variety of tasks for companies. From typing up Proposals, to setting up schedules, they can handle all manner of business tasks. Entrepreneur had some helpful information about a few things you might like to hire a virtual assistant to do

Online Research: You can easily farm out Internet research to virtual assistants. Common requests include finding information on corporate websites, exploring new products and vetting potential employees or business contacts, says Sue Kramer Harrawood, president of Peace of Mind Virtual Assistance, an Orland Park, Ill., firm that provides companies with virtual assistants. Be sure to send clear instructions, along with user names and passwords so assistants can get access to specialty search tools or paid websites. Tristen O’Brien, an eBay marketing expert in Westfield, Indiana, asks his assistant to help him find blog topics, as well as occasionally proofread his blog [link: www.theebayentrepreneur.com] on eBay selling. “She researches what is trending and reports back to me,” O’Brien says.

Database entries: Whether it’s a slew of new business cards picked up at a conference or updated information for existing contacts, keeping databases current is a suitable task for virtual assistants. Be specific about your needs and expectations, and make sure the virtual assistant has done this type of work before so there’s less room for errors, Kramer Harrawood says. “Follow up is a huge thing for business owners. Sometimes clients will fax or scan business cards to us, and [virtual assistants] will plug them into the database.”

Data presentations: Turning raw data into a clear PowerPoint presentation or summarizing research findings in a Word document can be a huge time saver when prepping for meetings, says Rich Pearson, chief marketing officer at eLance.com, a jobs website for freelancers in Mountain View, Calif., who uses a virtual assistant himself. The data “comes back in a format I can share,” he says.”

If your workload is getting too heavy, why not give our services as Virtual Receptionists a try? And then, when you have that up and running go ahead and hire that Virtual Assistant!

Central Communications

Riverside and Henderson

Answering Service USA