Virtual Assistant and Remote Reception services are gaining more popularity with several types of businesses.

What are these services?

Remote reception  is a service provided by an outsourced call answering company, where they will manage the calls that come into your business, and then take a message or transfer the call depending on the requirements of the caller.

A virtual assistant is an asset who provides professional administrative, technical, or creative assistance to clients remotely from a home office.

There are many benefits to using services like these if you can find one that works well with acupuncture, preventative medicine, or wellness centers.  Below are a few of the reasons it might help your practice and make sense to subscribe to a virtual service. It’s not the perfect fit for every practice, but it could help you get established and ready to bring on your own receptionist eventually. It can help you look busier and more professional than having your clinic calls picked up on your cell phone or calling your clients back late at night to take care of scheduling needs. Below are a few of the pros and cons or outsourcing some of your administrative tasks.

PROS

  1. Cost:  This is by far the biggest pro.  You can decrease your reception costs nearly 75% by using a remote reception service.  And you won’t have payroll taxes.
  2. Space:  You can eliminate the need for a reception desk and a place for your receptionist to sit. You will be able to fit into a smaller space potentially saving you even more overhead.
  3. Time:  You don’t have to spend as much time training and hiring staff.
  4. Consistency: Your calls will get answered and messages returned just as quickly if not quicker than with an in-house receptionist.
  5. Scheduling :  Clients won’t even know that the person they interact with is in a different location.   They might inquire when they first show up, but most clients don’t mind at all that the scheduler is located off-site.  And with a web-based scheduling program, your virtual assistant has access to your schedule anytime from anywhere.
  6. Reliability: Virtual assistants don’t call in sick or take vacations.  They are always available to help with your needs.
  7.  Simplicity: You don’t have to offer benefits or give them treatments, and you don’t have to worry about them quitting.
  8. Communication: As long as you have email and a cell phone, you can easily discuss issues that arise during the day and messages can get relayed to you as are received.
  9. Cell phone:  You can stop using your cell phone as your business phone, or reduce the amount of patients contacting you on your personal number.

CONS

  1. Camaraderie:  It’s nice to have someone to work with in your clinic environment besides your patients.  Sometimes it creates a more lively office environment to have a staff person to talk to during the work day. These relationships can be fun and make coming to work more pleasurable.
  2. Personal Greeter:  The clients won’t have that warm welcome when they show up for their first visit unless you are near the waiting room when they arrive.
  3. Extra tasks:  You’ll miss out on the extra tasks that a personal assistant provides, like running to the post office for you, or ordering herbs, etc. (although in my personal experience, many receptionists aren’t qualified to do my Chinese herb orders).
  4. Dual jobs:  Sometimes a front desk assistant can do your insurance billing or your bookkeeping in house if you are lucky enough to find such a multi-talented individual that can handle that many balls in the air. This is a rare find in our experience.

If you wish to talk to us about the remote reception/assistant services we offer, give us a call or email.  Acuhub provides much more than just an answering service. We become part of your team and your clients get to know us. We’d be happy to answer your questions and see if we can support your practice.