Davinci Virtual Blog

Growing numbers of business owners and entrepreneurs are switching out their permanent, fixed office space for virtual, on-demand office space. Research shows one-quarter of the workforce works at least some of the time away from their offices, a number expected to hit 40 percent in a couple years.

The reasons are myriad. Let’s recount some of the key drivers. First, permanent office space is expensive. Research shows small businesses spend upwards of 10 percent of their revenue on office space. Second, fixed office space is inflexible. You cannot add more offices when you need them, or eliminate them when you no longer need them. And one conference room size and configuration doesn’t fit every meeting requirement. Third, workers want flexibility. They’re even willing to take less pay in exchange for flexible work hours and the ability to work remotely; recruiting and retaining top talent becomes easier. Fourth, over three-quarters of workers indicate they are more productive if they have flexible work schedules—and this includes workplace flexibility. 

When it comes to industry segments, the use cases for virtual offices are quite compelling. Let’s take a look some of the more prominent ones.

Finance and Real Estate.

Finance and real estate professionals are busy and regularly on the go between different client meetings. Sometimes, you need a place to focus on work for a day; think day offices or even coworking spaces. In other instances, you need conference rooms for client meetings—in professional locations convenient to your clients. At the same time, rather than using your home address, a post office box, or a subpar address for a permanent office location you can afford.

Legal Firms.

Legal professionals have packed, fast-paced schedules—everything from defending a client in a courtroom, to researching and preparing a case, to taking a disposition, to meeting with a client. Law firms that lock themselves into permanent offices may find themselves spending valuable time running between meeting locations and their office—adding up to hours each week or weeks each year. For an organization that literally counts minutes when it comes to billable time, this can add up to a lot of lost revenue. Virtual offices give legal professionals the ability to use day offices, coworking spaces, and conference rooms with state-of-the-art features in professional locations close to courthouses, public transit, your clients. 

Media & Advertising.

Advertising and marketing professionals need to spend focused time working on client deliverables. But they also spend time in brainstorming sessions with other colleagues and clients. And as clients have high expectations when it comes to the offices and their locations, permanent office space can quickly add up. Plus, with clients in geographically dispersed locations, media and advertising professionals need professional offices on-demand. Virtual offices give them all of the above, with benefits that range from lower cost, to improved efficiencies, to greater flexibility.  

Entrepreneurs.

Cost is a critical driver for any entrepreneur who is just starting her or his business. Jettison the overhead of a permanent office and use virtual offices when you need them. Coworking spaces give you a chance to network with other entrepreneurs and small businesses, while conference rooms give you a private, professional space for meetings with customers and partners.

Healthcare.

Healthcare professionals have busy professional lives—going from one medical center to another and series of meetings with staff, physicians, and insurance companies. Having one physical office space may not make sense, whether focused time by yourself or those nonstop meetings you attend. This is where virtual offices can be especially useful. For that focused time working on projects or paperwork, day offices or coworking spaces are great places to land. For all of those meetings, virtual offices allow you to review and select the one that best meets your meeting requirements—from room size, to location, to configuration, to presentation tools. 

The list of potential industries could go on, but you get my point. The benefits of virtual offices are vast. Even for the business with a permanent office location, virtual offices provide them with a great opportunity to expand to new locations without adding expensive overhead, have a place to work and meet when traveling or meeting with customers and partners, and host meetings when their own facility isn’t the best/right venue

Whether you are running a home-based business or whether your are in the early stages of a startup, a virtual office address can greatly help your prospects. 

First impressions matter, and today the first thing people do when they hear of a new business or product is to look them up on Google or another search engine. Having a home or foreign address can turn many people away as it looks unprofessional and it doesn’t create a feeling of trust. 

Having a local and a well-known address can greatly help with SEO purposes, especially if you operate a business at a local level. A virtual office address can also help you setup your business in areas where having a home address is not legally acceptable. 

A virtual office address can help your business by helping you give a stronger, trustworthy first impression. Additionally, it can help you keep your privacy as you won’t need to list your home address to conduct business or receive business mail and packages. 

Other than providing you with a well-known physical address, virtual offices also offer services like mail handling and forwarding--among the greatest perks of this service is that you won’t have to deal with all the spam mail that people typically receive today.

Since a virtual office provides you with a real, physical address, it also means that you can visit this location should you need meeting space, conference rooms, or a desk to work for the day.

Last but not least, virtual office addresses are low-cost, meaning that they are a viable solution for freelancers, home workers, entrepreneurs, and startups in the early stages of development. They are also a great choice for established businesses seeking to enter a new market outside of their current location.

In conclusion, here’s how a virtual office address can help your business:

  • Professional image to potential clients and customers

  • Helps with SEO purposes

  • Helps establish a business and avoid legal fees

  • They provide add-on services like mail handling, live receptionists, and live web chat

  • They offer you access to a physical workspace

  • They offer limited hours for meeting space use

  • They are cost-effective

Want to learn more about what a Virtual Office can do for you? Click here to find out!

On the surface, virtual receptionist and answering services are fairly similar. With both services, an offsite, external agent will answer calls on your behalf and forward them as need be. However, virtual receptionists and answering services are different, each delivering on its service promise differently. 

If you are deciding between the two options, let us give you 10 reasons why virtual receptionists are better than an answering service. 

1. Less is More

Virtual receptionists handle a set number of accounts, which equates to better customer service and better attention.  

2. Personalized Attention

Because virtual receptionists handle a set number of accounts, it means that you will always have the same people answering your calls. This is especially good when you receive a lot of customer and client calls, as you can be sure that they will always be greeted by the same person, in a professional, friendly manner. Plus, services like these offer customizable greetings and call flows, so each client can be treated with the same professional tone set by you. 

3. Culture

Since you will be working with the same virtual receptionists, it gives them the chance to get to know your brand and your culture, and embodying them while they pick up and handle your calls. 

4. Your Right Arm

Virtual receptionists have the capacity to help you schedule appointments, book meeting rooms, set reminders, screen junk calls, and answers questions related to your business. 

5. Sales Orders

Since virtual receptionists get to know your brand and company, they can also help you in taking sales orders and making sure they are fulfilled. 

6. Frictionless

Virtual receptionists can transfer calls to you or a specific team member. If you know you will be busy, you can easily reach out to your virtual receptionists and let them know so that they can take messages for you instead of transferring the calls. 

7. Industry-Specific

Virtual receptionists are able to provide industry specific support, like medical, legal, service industries, and many more. Call flows are easily customizable for any business venture. 

8. Additional Amenities and Perks

Virtual receptionist services often come bundled with limited access to workspace or meeting rooms, providing you with a more robust service-offering. 

9. Cost-Effective

Virtual receptionists fulfill the same duties that in-house receptionists. However, they are much more cost-effective. You can purchase a specific minute plan for your business needs and not worry about the in-house cost of a full time employee. 

10. Complex call flows

With a team of dedicated virtual receptionists, they can handle more difficult calls and assure that your customer, client, or even patient is getting the care and help they need for a successfull call.  

Virtual receptionists offer businesses the ability to run a seamless, professional operation at a low cost. Want to learn more about the benefits of a Davinci Virtual Receptionist? Click here to check out our features and benefits!

Providing some of the most specialized virtual receptionist and virtual office services since 2006, our team has been supporting over 40,000 clients across the world. It’s this wide-spread, long-lasting impact that has placed us as a figurehead in the voice services industry. To increase transparency and highlight our success, we’ve teamed up with Clutch to put a spotlight on some of our customers’ stories and overall experience with us.

The world of answering may not seem the most exciting. But, actually, this fast-growing industry is a catching trend. One tip: you’ll want a highly ranked firm on your side.  

Clutch is a B2B ratings and reviews platform on a mission to provide buyers with the most transparent look into a business’s operations via in-depth, verified customer feedback. Covering over 7,000 companies across 500+ industry verticals ranging from digital agencies to answering services, Clutch is an established resource when it comes to buying decisions. At the root of their company analysis lie client interviews, where Clutch speaks to a company’s references on the challenges, solutions, and results of their time working together. Coupling this, Clutch utilizes a multi-faceted scoring methodology to rank firms based on factors such as market presence, clientele, and industry recognition. They are thereby able to identify the firms that deliver from those that do not and construct a Leaders Matrix.

Evaluating our team’s prowess in a variety of voice services, from virtual receptionist to appointment setting, Clutch has begun gathering client feedback and performing their company analysis. Taking a look at some of our reviews, here are what our customers have had to say about us so far:

“They save us around $5,000 per month…their strength is their experience in this area.”

“They have done a lot for my company. They have helped us become better at communicating and explaining. They have also taught us how to work as a team.”

“DaVinci Virtual provides excellent feedback in real cases. The level of knowledge and service was on point. They made my customer feel like they were cared about and important…each campaign was effective and with great turnaround times.”

Already, Clutch has placed us as the sixth best company in the world when it comes to virtual receptionist services.

Additionally, our team was featured by The Manifest on their report of the most highly-ranked virtual receptionists from around the world. The Manifest is Clutch’s sister website, highlighting insights on business news and industry lists.

We hope to continue this run of great work for our clients in everything we do. It’s been a pleasure, from the start, to support our customers’ in starting-up, maintaining, or expanding their businesses. To read more about clients’ experiences, stay up-to-date with our Clutch profile here. 

Much has been written on the implications of the workplace on bottom-line business results in recent years. We’ve seen an evolution occur in how businesses approach issues such as workspace design, work hours, and remote work. 

Work atmosphere is a critical determining factor of employee productivity and even business growth. A toxic work environment can become a huge drain, sucking the vital energy from projects and meetings. Workplaces that lack flexibility, embody tops-down decision-making, and employ poor meeting planning and execution dramatically impact bottom-line results. In these cases, employees who lack a sense of ownership disengage. Following are five things that businesses can do to ensure their workplace atmospheres remain positive, enabling rather than inhibiting business success.

1. Flexible, On-Demand Workplace

While some businesses remain wed to the idea of an 9-to-5 workday and mandate that their employees work from a permanent office five days a week, others are jettisoning this model for one that embraces flexible work hours and a concept that work takes place anywhere and anytime. The digital era and demographic and cultural changes deconstruct idea of the traditional workplace. Rather than measuring workers based on their time spent working in an assigned office space, businesses evaluate them on business results. The benefits of the flexible workplace are myriad and documented in various third-party studies—from quality of personal/family life, to employee engagement and retention, to recruitment of new workers. 

The rise of virtual offices where businesses no longer maintain a permanent office location but instead rely on virtual offices addresses, such as Davinci Virtual Offices, and on-demand day offices, coworking spaces, and rented meeting rooms, such as those available on Davinci Meeting Rooms, offer compelling benefits to both businesses and employees. In the case of the former, businesses obtain professional office addresses in highly sought-after locations without paying for permanent office space. And when it comes to office and meeting room space, businesses have a pay-as-you-use model, whereby they only incur cost when they need an office space or meeting room. 

2. Supplemental Services

Small businesses are inundated with the demands their customers, employers, and partners place on them. Managing these incoming requests and questions and routing them to the appropriate members of your team can have a substantial impact on the engagement and morale of the workspace. The same is true of certain outbound activities—from scheduling appointments to sales outreach. 

But for many small businesses, hiring a full-time employee is difficult, if not impossible, in terms of expense. Too often, business leaders and their teams can become quickly frustrated and distracted by the “extraneous” noise that takes place around the business. This is where virtual assistants, such as Davinci Live Receptionists, who can employ any number of engagement channels—phone, email, text, and live web chat—help businesses remain focused on what matters while ensuring that incoming and outgoing communications become more focused on the core elements of their business and customers. 

3. Workspace Appearance

The appearances of permanent office space are difficult to maintain. Furniture placement, lighting, and desk clutter are just a few of the things that businesses need to worry about. An on-demand workplace means this is offloaded to the workspace provider. 

When furniture is placed in the wrong configuration, lighting isn’t in the right place (e.g., workplace experts recommend layering lights), and desks are full of clutter, workplace atmosphere suffers. In addition to appearance, comfortability also matters. Office chairs must be ergonomic, workplaces free of distracting external noise, and office spaces need to include presentation and meeting tools that streamline worker productivity. Other appearance factors businesses need to consider include temperature, air quality, number of workers in the space, desk setting, and safety. 

All of this requires planning; businesses that fail to think through these types of issues will suffer the negative consequences. In the case of coworking spaces or on-demand offices or meeting rooms, businesses can focus on their work or the purpose and outcomes of a meeting rather than fretting about these types of issues.  

4. Meeting Planning and Execution

Many business leaders and their workers consider meetings as a waste of time. Frustrations boil over, with collaboration becoming rarer and worker productivity diminishing. 

Yet, despite this widespread agreement, no business is going to do away with them. Meetings remain a critical part of every business. The upside is that by following a best-practice meeting checklist businesses can turn meetings into productive sessions while improving employee engagement and morale. Just a few of the things that you can do to improve the quality and outcomes of meetings include determining the meeting type and purpose beforehand, identifying the right participants along with their roles and responsibilities, and finding and selecting the right meeting room, among others. 

5. Employee Empowerment

Research shows employees who feel their opinions aren’t respected and lack the ability to participate in and influence decision-making are less engaged and productive—and more likely to remain with an employer—than employees who are. It is true for organizations of all sizes—from small entrepreneurial businesses to large enterprises. For small business owners who typically have substantial stake in their companies, this level of empowerment may be difficult, though critically important. Those failing to listen to and empower their employees do so at their own peril. 

A Positive Workplace Atmosphere: Infectious and Ubiquitous 

It doesn’t take a lot to sour a workplace atmosphere. The wrong office configuration, cluttered offices, the wrong meeting rooms, un-empowered employees, and phone calls and emails that interrupt critical work engender negativity that can detract from business results and ongoing business momentum. However, by doing just a few things and embracing the technologies and promises of the digital era, businesses reverse course, creating a workplace where productivity and engagement are infectious and ubiquitous.