Blog: Business Education

Smith.ai is proud to announce outbound calling as part of every standard paid plan. We will now gladly make outbound calls to your existing clientele and affiliated businesses on your behalf. Let’s face it, as a professional, your days are already jammed with appointments, deadlines, and other obligations. Making appointment reminder calls, or confirming that paperwork has been received can take up precious minutes of your day. Let your receptionists work for you by taking these tasks off your daily to-do list. Your receptionists will contact your clients or business partners to pass along information or even reschedule appointments

Smith.ai is able to easily integrate with many existing VoIP solutions. Follow the instructions below to begin forwarding your existing Google Voice number to your new Smith virtual receptionists.

The first contact with a potential client is often the most important, but when you're a small business or a one-person-show, being available for every call can destroy your daily productivity. Even worse is when you step away from an important meeting, only to find yourself stuck answering an unsolicited sales or spam call.

Smith.ai’s virtual receptionist service has grown tremendously in the past year. Refining our existing features — and developing new ones to meet your needs — has kept us busy as we step into 2017. The list of things that our virtual receptionists can do for you and your business is ever-growing, but, in the spirit of ‘17, here are 17 of the most important ways our expert receptionists can assist you in the year ahead.

Calendly automatically detected your time zone when you created your account with them. Unfortunately, The default account settings enable the same detection feature when your Smith.ai virtual receptionist schedules an event for you, and books the event in the detected time zone. This can lead to confusion, missed appointments, and ultimately client dissatisfaction.

Receiving calls after-hours is inevitable. Though you may not be available to answer customer calls, making the best impression possible is essential to retaining current customers and landing potential new leads. Smith.ai's virtual receptionist service is dedicated to your success, even after business is done for the day, which is why we operate 24/7. But for those to whom you may want to offer an after-hours voicemail, you don't want them being met with a generic, impersonal greeting. You can provide Smith.ai with an audio file (ideally no longer than 30 seconds — people often hang up after that), and we will greet your callers with a custom voicemail message, for free.

We have all, at some point, called a business and upon not reaching them received the dreaded default voicemail greeting. Not only is that mechanical voice off-putting, but the default greeting does not typically yield useful information if you wish to call the customer back. The goal of Smith.ai’s virtual reception service is to help you put your best foot forward, even when you are not interacting directly with a client. We have put together a short list to help you record a custom voicemail greeting that will keep current customers coming back, and ensure new leads will have a positive impression of your business, even when you cannot be there to make one.

In our never-ending quest to reduce distractions and improve your workflow, Smith.ai has introduced three new features. Our intelligent system, in combination with our friendly, professional live receptionists work to provide you with effortless control when it comes to how your incoming calls are handled. All of our pros can now create lists of callers you always and never want directly transferred to you, as well as define the hours in which their receptionist is on duty.

A new term is taking root in customer care. It is ‘super-agent’, and it refers to a customer service representative supported by virtual technology and machine learning. Experts predict that this new breed of customer support professionals will replace what we currently have by 2025. We don’t have to wait a decade: Smith.ai has already begun the process of creating super-agents.