What is a virtual receptionist?

The word arrived before AI did. For years it meant a person in a call center who picked up as though they were sitting at your front desk.

That ambiguity is why quotes for the same phrase range from $49 to nearly $2,000 a month. You are being quoted for two different products under one name.

Ask which one you are buying before you compare anything. The follow-up question is whether the person answering is dedicated to you or shared across dozens of businesses.

Say you run a small family law office. Call one comes at 9:10 am: a new client asks whether you handle custody cases and what a first consultation costs. That's a script question. Software or a shared remote agent will answer it equally well, and all that matters is that somebody does before the caller tries the next firm.

Call two comes at 1:30 pm. An existing client is crying because her ex didn't return the kids on time. No script covers this one. A trained person can slow down, say the right thing, and decide whether to interrupt the attorney. Software should recognize it's out of its depth and transfer, which is a worse experience than a good human and a better one than voicemail.

Call three, at 6:45 pm, is a process server who needs a fax number, and anything can answer that. So two of the three calls don't care which kind of virtual receptionist you bought, and the middle call is what the price gap pays for.

Before you sign with anyone, place five calls to the trial line yourself or have a friend do it. Make one at 8 am, one at lunch, one at 9 pm and one on a Sunday. Use the fifth to ask something that isn't in your script at all, such as whether you validate parking.

Score each call on four things: how long it rang before pickup, whether your business name was said correctly, whether the message that reached you matched what was said, and how the off-script question was handled. "I don't know, let me take a message" is a pass. A confident wrong answer is a fail. That's true from a person and from software. Lay the five message records side by side when you're done, because they'll tell you more than any feature grid.

GreetKeeper is software and says so. There is no room of agents behind it, and transfers go to your own team rather than to ours.

A trained human backstop is a different product at a different price, which is what staffed services like Ruby and Smith.ai sell. We are the software kind, and we say so rather than blur the two.

Our pricing is per answered call with the overage rate published, which is a comparison a human service cannot easily match on cost.