Operating a business online is more common than ever before, with more than 70% of businesses in the United States being started from home. An online business has a lot of advantages over a brick-and-mortar business, the first and foremost being that it’s a lot less expensive to open and run. The business that operates entirely online doesn’t usually require

Voicemail isn’t the communication catch-all it once was. People are abandoning their voicemail inboxes in their personal lives, with some admitting they haven’t checked their voicemail in a year or more and simply delete the notifications as they come in. When those voicemails are mostly non-urgent calls from friends, telemarketers, and maybe parents, ignoring voicemail entirely becomes easy. In business,

When you first start a business or firm, you handle the calls (which, thankfully, are few in the beginning). Once your company starts growing and taking off, the call volume increases and it becomes obvious that you’ll need someone to take over your call answering duties. In this case, you might consider hiring a virtual receptionist or an in-house receptionist.

When someone calls your business, do you know what they really expect or want in a receptionist? Do they expect intense friendliness or a cool, professional tone? It can be difficult to say due to caller preferences, but there are a few points that most callers agree on. What do callers want in a receptionist and does yours make the

Attorneys are intensely busy throughout the workweek. They need to be in court often and have to remain flexible for their clients. The law office can offer some needed administrative support, but often, talented paralegals get stuck answering the phones instead of doing legal research. If you want to really succeed as an attorney and make use of your paralegal’s

Dr. Dori Gatter, a Conversational client, is using a virtual receptionist to turn prospects into clients. She was recently featured on the Selling the Couch podcast for practitioners to discuss ways to turn callers and prospects into clients. Dr. Gatter is a Licensed Professional Counselor with her own private practice and group practice in West Hartford, Connecticut. Find more information

If we told you that how you answer the phone can make or break your business, would you think it’s melodramatic? The fact is, the way you greet callers on the phone – or the way you don’t greet them – can undermine or support your success. It’s entirely up to you. If you’re finding that more and more often,

Having trouble growing your business? Growth should follow a somewhat predictable path – true, sustainable growth will be slow, but not nonexistent. If you’re not seeing any signs of growth and you think you should be, there’s still one thing you can change to kick-start your growth. It has to do with your customer service, and it’s such a simple

Wondering how people use a virtual receptionist who isn’t in the office with them? It sounds complicated, but it’s really not. It’s simple to forward calls to a virtual receptionist when you sign up with Conversational. We’ll show you how businesses forward calls to a virtual receptionist to be answered immediately. First, here’s a little background information on virtual receptionists

Maybe you’ve got a receptionist, and she’s great – she answers every call with a friendly tone, greets customers with a smile, and never fails to deliver a message to your desk. Or maybe you’ve got a different sort of receptionist – the kind who seems annoyed when customers come in or call, who calls out for unknown reasons, or