Virtual Receptionists & Phone Answering

How do we compare with Ruby Receptionists and other providers?

Because we focus on live telephone answering for business professionals, not for medical or dentist offices, we are very efficient. We stripped unnecessary features and focus on what most businesses need from live answering. This means we can offer considerably lower prices than our competition. That single focus grounded in our “WE CARE” company foundational value is why we are also able to deliver an outstanding quality of service.
As a result, the price difference with our competitors like Davinci Virtual, Ruby Receptionists, and Abby Connect* is significant, as shown in the table below.

(*) from data collected in June 2021

(**) on average: an Executive call takes 48 seconds of receptionist time; the 200 free calls limit for the Executive package is equivalent to 160 minutes of receptionist time per month; the overage charge of $0.85 per call is equivalent to $1.06 per minute; 97% of our users experience fewer than 100 calls per month and 99% experience fewer than 200 calls per month

What we do well and what we don’t do

To keep our prices low, we do not provide extensive calendaring services or other features that can be useful to some (such as medical offices) but expensive to support. Our virtual receptionists, based in our Sacramento, California and Reno, Nevada answering centers will do the best job at greeting your customers, screening and patching them to you, and taking messages if necessary. Since we are not paid by the minute, there is no incentive to inflate the live answering time charged to you, and we can better focus on maximizing the quality and efficiency of our call answering.

Who is our live answering service for?

Our business answering services work especially well for attorneys, consultants, real estate professionals, start-ups, freelancers, small businesses, small regional offices of larger companies, marketing professionals, financial advisors, CPAs, and many other business professionals, but are not a good fit for medical offices. We support business professionals in need of establishing a strong local identity and a reliable human voice to answer their calls.

The combination of a local (or toll-free) phone number and your CloudVO virtual receptionist answering your calls will help you establish a strong business identity and avoid losing callers when you are not available. For an even stronger business identity, consider using a local business address at any of our locations that offer mail services.

How different are we from our competition?

Pay special attention to the footnote at the bottom of our comparison table with Davinci, Ruby, and Abby, who we use as proxies for our competition. Most call centers will charge per minute of the receptionist time. It is hard for a user to have a real sense of the time it takes for an outside receptionist to process a call and even harder to track. It makes it difficult to know what package to use and there is no way to know if the virtual receptionists that support you are efficient at processing calls. If there is time lost in the process, you could be charged for it!

We have a different approach: charging only after 100 calls per month for our Standard package and 200 calls per month for the Executive package, regardless of how long each call takes to process! We thought it would be simpler to place a “heavy call limit,” which you can understand and track in full transparency, rather than a limit for receptionist time which you cannot control. The footnote in the above table shares our stats of average receptionist time to process a call and number of customers that experience fewer than 100 and 200 calls per month so that you know what to expect and you can compare our service and prices with others on an apple-to-apple basis with full transparency. Remember we do not support medical offices whose calls typically take longer to process than regular business calls, which is in part why we can price our service geared at business professionals much more aggressively than our competitors..