Virtual office or telephone answering?

Last week I spoke to several leading lights in the UK serviced office arena about various issues and one thing kept coming in to the conversation, should they be selling a virtual office product or telephone answering?

“What do you mean, they are different things!”

To people working in the serviced office space industry, these indeed are totally different services. A virtual office package involves answering calls, the use of a prestigious business address and mail forwarding among other things, whereas a telephone answering service is exactly what it says on the tin.

However, to a startup business, a virtual office could be something else completely (usually related to web software that allows them to speak on the phone via their computer), thats if they even know of the term at all. They know what a telephone answering service is though.

It highlights something about the industry that we all must improve upon, which is speaking in the same language as our customers. Whilst some people do know what a virtual office is, the vast majority do not. So, do you continue to sell Virtual Offices on your site and in your marketing materials or do you offer a Telephone Answering Service?

What is the answer? BOTH!

We recently ran a survey of 88 small business owners recently with one simple question:

If you were to start up a white-collar business tomorrow would you use:

1. Virtual Office
2. Telephone Answering
3. What is a Virtual Office?

We were surprised ourselves with the answers that were returned:

1. Virtual Office - 24%
2. Telephone Answering - 47%
3. What is a Virtual Office? - 29%

As you can see for yourself, the statistic that nearly a 3rd of people did not even understand what a virtual office was, is quite alarming. We expected that more people would choose a telephone answering service - and almost double the amount of people chose that option over a virtual office.

It is assumed that many of the people that did choose Telephone Answering did also not fully understand the concept of a virtual office. From feedback from only a few of the people in the survey, this appeared to be the case.

What information do we get from the survey?

We know that at least a third of the people we surveyed - who are all the ideal target audience for a virtual office - did not even know what it was. Of the 47% that selected telephone answering, a portion had only chosen this because, again, they did not understand what a virtual office was.

How can virtual offices become more mainstream?

Information and plenty of it. The more information that you can provide about BOTH telephone answering and virtual office services, the better. If someone on your site reads about telephone answering, they can be sold in to the idea of virtual offices very easily.

However, if you only have info on the site about virtual offices, then how are at most of your potential market going to know how you may be able to help them and their business to grow?

Choregus recommends: Get writing!