A virtual receptionist answers your phone without sitting at your front desk. It can be a person in a call centre working from a script about your business, or an automated voice assistant that answers from information you have given it. Either way the job is a receptionist's first job: pick up, say whose phone it is, answer the simple questions, and write down what the caller wants so the business can act on it.
Four questions are worth asking of any option. What does it know: your actual prices and hours, or a general script? What is it allowed to promise: a confirmed time, or only a request? How do you hear about each call? And what does it cost per month or per call?
In practice
A day spa with a receptionist three days a week has the phone unattended on the other four. It counts 60 calls a month on those days, mostly about bookings and vouchers. With a virtual receptionist covering those days, and diverted calls when the desk is busy, the owner reads a summary of each call that evening and replies by text the next morning. If 20 of the 60 calls become bookings averaging $150, that is $3,000 of work a month that used to depend on callers trying again.
Be plain with clients about what they are speaking to. A caller who is told in the first sentence that this is an assistant is never caught out halfway through the call.
In Glow Line
Glow Line is an automated virtual receptionist. Every call opens with "Thanks for calling", your business name and "this is the virtual assistant for the team". The assistant answers from your saved services, prices, hours and notes, takes a booking request or a message, and texts you. See what the assistant says.