Every call answered by a person who knows your name

Plans depend on hours, desks and coverage. Get a staffing plan within 1 business day. For orientation, published US per-minute plans start around $235 a month for 50 minutes and reach $1,095 for 500 minutes, with overage of $2.95 to $4.70 a minute (OnceHub and NextPhone roundups, September 2026). AssistBPO prices a person for a block of hours instead of running a minute meter, so a busy week costs the same as a quiet one and the receptionist does admin in the gaps.

Either, and you can change it. Full coverage means the receptionist is the first ring on your published number through your hours. Overflow means your team answers first and calls roll to the receptionist after the number of rings you set, or when everyone is busy. Many clients start with overflow, watch the missed-call log for two weeks and then move the whole line across once they see how many calls were going to voicemail.

Any way you read them. The standard set is an SMS to the person named, an email with the caller's number and the reason, a Slack or Teams post to a channel, or a note on the contact in HubSpot or Zoho CRM. Urgent messages go by call to a number you nominate. Each message carries the time of the call, the caller's name and number, what they wanted and what the receptionist told them, so nobody has to ring back to find out what the call was about.

Yes. The receptionist puts the caller on hold, rings your mobile or desk line, tells you who is calling and why, and connects the call if you want it. If you decline or do not pick up, the caller hears that you are unavailable and a message is taken. You can set transfer rules by person, by time of day and by caller type, so a new-business call reaches you on site while a supplier gets a message.

The FAQ sheet covers the questions your callers ask most, and it grows every week as new ones come up. For anything outside it, the receptionist says that the right person will call back, captures the question word for word and sends it to you as a message. Guessing is not allowed. The weekly review lists every question that landed outside the script so you can decide whether to add an answer or keep routing it to you.

Your callers hear clear, natural English at a pace that suits your market. During the 72-hour match we listen to a sample of your existing calls and propose a receptionist whose voice and manner fit, and every receptionist passes a phone and English assessment before joining a client line. Recorded test calls are shared before go-live, so you hear the greeting exactly as your callers will and can ask for a change.

Yes. Nothing about your published number changes. If you use RingCentral, Dialpad, Aircall, Zoom Phone or a similar system, we add the receptionist as a user with a softphone and set the ring rules inside your account. If you use a landline or a carrier without a softphone, you forward the number to a line we provision on Twilio or a similar platform, either always or only when busy or unanswered.

A trained backup, who has sat in on your line and learned your script, covers the shift. The backup is part of the engagement from the start, not someone found on the day, and the team lead confirms cover in the morning check-in. Planned leave is scheduled in the weekly review. Your callers hear the same greeting and the same rules, and the end-of-day report arrives as usual.

Phone answering is about the line: full-time or overflow pickup, transfers and message delivery, with light admin between calls. The virtual receptionist service goes further into the front-desk role, with appointment booking as a core duty, lead qualification and more admin ownership. Buyers who mainly need calls caught and routed start here; buyers who need a front desk run start there. Moving between the two is a change to the plan, not a new hire.

Run both for a few days. Your current provider keeps the line while we build the greeting, the FAQ sheet and the transfer tree and run test calls, then you change the forwarding rule and leave the old plan live until its notice period ends. Nothing about your published number changes, so there is no window where callers reach a dead line. Terms here are month to month with thirty days notice, which is worth comparing against what your current contract says before you give notice on it.

Read the missed-call log before the answer rate. It breaks calls down by reason and by hour: after hours, line busy, caller hung up before pickup. Put that next to the inquiries logged in your CRM with the source tagged and you can see how many calls were going to voicemail before, and what they turned into afterwards. The end-of-day reports give you the raw list, the weekly review gives you the pattern, and the monthly QA scorecard covers how the calls themselves were handled.

Nothing happens to the invoice, because you are buying a person's shift rather than a bundle of minutes. What changes is the shape of the day: the admin tasks in the quiet gaps get squeezed first, and the call counts by hour in the weekly review will show it. If the volume holds, the options are extending the shift, moving to the 160-hour plan, or putting the overflow desk behind the dedicated receptionist. Thirty days notice changes hours in either direction, so a seasonal spike need not become a permanent decision.