Customer Experience 
As the demand for instant responses, 24/7 availability, and better customer experiences grows day by day, small businesses are faced with the challenge of answering every call and ensuring their customers don’t wait for any amount of time.
Left to humans alone, these are unreasonable expectations. But with the help of a virtual receptionist, the gap between demand and delivery shrinks considerably. They’re always on, never need a break, and don’t suffer from low morale after a negative call.
Combined with top-notch human support (for technical or sensitive queries), the best virtual receptionist services help ensure fewer missed calls, better customer experiences, and increased lead conversions. Here’s what you need to look for so you can cover all bases and start providing excellent customer service.
Key Features to Look for in a Virtual Receptionist Service
Here are nine must-have features in your virtual receptionist service.
24/7 availability
It’s expensive to employ humans for follow-the-sun customer support, especially if you’re a small business owner staying available just in case somebody calls. Hiring full-time staff for 24/7 coverage is cost-prohibitive. This is where AI virtual receptionists shine — staffing the phones at a fraction of the cost.
Round-the-clock coverage ensures phone calls are answered at any hour, which is especially important for service industries or businesses operating across time zones.
Customizable call scripts
Having the flexibility to change the message in different situations is vital to providing a humanized, positive customer journey. From the point of entry to maintaining control of a call, a virtual assistant must be able to understand and respond to both negative and positive sentiment accordingly.
Check for the ability to define greetings, brand messaging, and call handling rules when evaluating virtual receptionist services to ensure consistent tone and information accuracy.
Appointment scheduling and calendar sync
How much time does your receptionist spend chasing up personal organizers and trying to find mutual slots for meetings and appointments? You can take that chore off their plate and free them up for more value-adding tasks.
The best virtual receptionist services come with integrated booking capabilities to streamline the next actions from customer calls. Typical support includes Google Calendar, Outlook, and CRM-based calendars to reduce manual scheduling tasks.
CRM and business tool integration
Every call that comes into your business should get logged into your CRM, right? But what if you no longer needed to do that manually? You’d reduce post-call time and free up more resources to handle complex incoming calls and escalations.
Seamless integrations with platforms like Salesforce, HubSpot, or Zoho CRM for logging calls, tracking interactions, and managing customer data should all come as standard in your virtual receptionist solution.
Multichannel support
Did you know that virtual receptionists can handle multiple communication channels?
Just like a real person, virtual receptionists can support calls, texts, web chat, and even social media channels for unified communication coverage.
Call routing and transfer
If the virtual receptionist (or your configuration) deems that it shouldn’t deal with a call, it will route your customer to the right department or agent, with contextual details passed along.
Here, it’s using smart call routing to identify which staff members or departments are best suited to handle the query and find the quickest available person to transfer to.
Bilingual or multilingual support
When you have customers who speak little or no English, what happens in your current team? Often, either you can’t support them, or your receptionist/helpdesk must ask around to find someone who speaks their language. This can be a thing of the past, and you can start to treat all customers equally — or even expand your existing reach.
The best virtual receptionist services ensure accessibility for diverse customer bases and are often available in English and Spanish by default.
AI and automation
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the talk of the town. We would be remiss not to mention it when introducing you to a new automation tool. After all, the backbone of virtual receptionist services is AI and natural language processing (NLP).
Emerging solutions offer AI-driven automation — capable of answering FAQs, capturing leads, and even handling follow-ups — making them cost-effective for small teams.
Reporting and analytics
You may currently get call reports from your phone system. But what about deep insights that help you manage staffing levels, identify training gaps, and introduce upfront self-service?
Expect insights into call volume, response time, missed calls, and customer sentiment that can help you refine workflows and measure ROI.
Top 10 Virtual Receptionist Services
1. Nextiva XBert AI
XBert AI instantly answers every call or message to your business phone number, text, or chat with a natural, human-like voice that feels personal yet efficient. This virtual receptionist service then either deals with the query or routes it to an appropriate call center agent or back office specialist.
XBert learns from your website, FAQ knowledge bases, and machine learning protocols to handle real customer questions autonomously.
It can then schedule appointments, qualify leads, route calls, and integrate with your CRM for seamless follow-through. That’s the entire customer journey covered, if the scenario allows.
The best part? Businesses can go live in minutes, track transcripts and bookings, and rely on high uptime.
Best for: Businesses that want a single platform for phone, SMS, chat, and scheduling without separate tools or staff.
👉 Get started with Nextiva’s AI Receptionist here.
2. Smith.ai
Smith.ai’s virtual receptionist platform uses AI to screen, qualify, and prioritize incoming leads based on customizable question flows. It captures caller intent, fills out intake forms, and pushes data to CRMs automatically. The system can also escalate complex calls to a live agent when configured.
Smith.ai blends AI automation with a live answering service for more nuanced calls. Its AI agents handle intent recognition, lead qualification, and appointment scheduling, while you can ask a live virtual receptionist (someone who works for multiple companies and handles different types of calls) to step in for complex requests.
Integration with CRMs like HubSpot and Clio makes it popular among legal and professional firms seeking intelligent automation with human fallback.
If you wish to use an AI call answering service for some queries and humans for others, here’s a hybrid option for a best-of-both-worlds approach.
Best for: Professional services or agencies that rely on structured intake and high-value lead capture.
3. Abby Connect
Abby Connect’s AI receptionist handles routine calls and scheduling, then creates instant call summaries and transcripts for each interaction. Businesses can use these records to follow up, improve scripts, and audit call quality.
In the Enterprise plan, the Abby virtual receptionist integrates with CRMs and calendars, offering automation and detailed insight into every call.
Best for: Teams that want both automated call handling and strong documentation for accountability or compliance.
4. Goodcall
Goodcall allows companies to create branded virtual agents with distinct personalities and voices trained on business-specific data to create a great first impression when your calls get answered.
Each AI phone agent can handle unlimited minutes, route calls, answer FAQs, and push results into CRMs via Zapier. This flexibility makes it easy to scale or run multiple brand personas across different phone lines.
Best for: Small and midsize businesses that need an affordable, customizable AI receptionist that sounds on-brand.
5. Synthflow AI
Synthflow’s AI tool emphasizes enterprise-grade data protection and deep workflow customization. Like Nextiva, it hosts its own voice platform to deliver carrier-grade call quality. When you’re comparing virtual receptionist services, distorted audio is often the first red flag. Uptime, reliability, and quality of service ensure this doesn’t happen here.
Inside the Synthflow designer, users can create call flows through a no-code builder, automate appointment scheduling, and capture analytics in real time.
On the back end, Synthflow supports SOC2 and GDPR and is HIPAA compliant, making it ideal for industries that handle sensitive client information.
Best for: Regulated sectors like healthcare, finance, or legal services where data privacy and reliability are critical.
6. Rosie
Rosie provides pretrained AI agents for different industries — like property management, home services, and law firms — so setup is quick and accurate. There’s no playing around with templates or long configurations. You simply choose which agent you’d like to use. This does restrict the target market somewhat — but it’s a clear goal for Rosie.
Each online virtual receptionist can be trained on your website data, handle bilingual conversations, and summarize live calls for easy follow-up.
Best for: Businesses needing an AI receptionist that already understands their industry language and workflows.
7. SoundHound Smart Answering
When you first get started on SoundHound, it takes you through a “getting to know you” phase so it can learn what your business provides and the types of customers it will be dealing with.
SoundHound’s conversational AI then focuses on speech realism and fast response times, enabling natural, human-like exchanges without noticeable lag. Its answering service understands interruptions, slang, and context, allowing callers to speak freely rather than navigate rigid auto attendant menus.
Best for: Businesses prioritizing lifelike conversations and brand image, such as hospitality, retail, and customer-facing service brands.
8. PolyAI Voice Assistant
PolyAI builds advanced conversational agents that handle high volumes in multiple languages with contextual memory. Your assistant can greet callers, verify information, and resolve requests without scripting every scenario.
While used by major global brands, smaller businesses may find the setup complex and the voice latency noticeable compared to newer, faster engines.
Best for: Large organizations serving international customers who require natural, multilingual interactions — and those with the time and patience to get the audio quality right.
9. Replicant Voice AI
Replicant automates repetitive inbound and outbound calls with its proprietary “Thinking Machine” voice engine. It can authenticate callers, collect data, answer questions, and transfer when necessary.
The Replicant analytics dashboard helps teams measure handle time, resolution rate, and sentiment across thousands of calls, with no upper limit specified on the Professional and Enterprise plans.
Best for: Contact centers or enterprises aiming to replace Tier 1 agents and manage heavy call volumes autonomously.
10. Talkdesk Virtual Agent
Talkdesk’s Autopilot virtual agent integrates directly into its contact center as a service (CCaaS) ecosystem, giving companies a way to automate calls while maintaining unified reporting and routing.
Talkdesk comes with a no-code builder to let non-technical users create AI call flows for FAQs, scheduling, notifications, and routing logic in minutes. It’s an easy bolt-on if you’re already using Talkdesk for contact center-type inquiries.
Best for: Businesses already using Talkdesk or those that want a full contact center platform with built-in virtual reception capabilities.
Scale Smarter With the Right Virtual Receptionist: Nextiva’s XBert AI
A virtual receptionist keeps your business responsive and professional around the clock, freeing up day staff to dedicate their time to more technical and empathetic queries.
The best platforms combine lifelike voice, smart automation, and deep integrations so every caller feels attended to — even when your team is busy or offline.
Nextiva’s XBert delivers all of that in one platform. It can:
- Answer business calls
- Handle basic queries
- Book appointments
- Reschedule appointments
- Capture leads
- Route escalations
- Sync every detail with your CRM
If you need a fast, reliable, and easy-to-set-up virtual receptionist with fair pricing and its own voice platform, XBert helps businesses reduce missed calls and turn every conversation into an opportunity.
Answer every call 24/7: Try Nextiva XBert here. 👇
Your AI receptionist that never misses a call.
XBert is your AI answering service that handles calls, texts, and chats 24/7. It greets customers, books appointments, and captures leads while your business grows.
Virtual Receptionist FAQs
A virtual receptionist is software that answers calls, understands requests, completes tasks like booking or data capture, and routes conversations without a human operator.
Yes. Virtual receptionists answer in real time, triage spam, capture details accurately, and convert messages into structured notes and transcripts.
They use predefined knowledge, retrieval from your site or documents, and escalation paths. If confidence is low, they confirm details, gather essentials, and transfer with context.
All you need to do is provide your business basics, connect your calendar and CRM, add FAQs and policies, and define transfer rules. Most teams can go live the same day with an initial script and iterate over time.
There are many ways to measure your return on investment for a virtual receptionist service. You can track missed calls, booked appointments, response times, after-hours calls, and revenue influenced by calls handled by the virtual receptionist. In comparison to hiring another member of helpdesk staff, you may spend 25% of a full-time employee’s salary for an always-on virtual alternative.
👉 Use our free AI Receptionist ROI calculator here.
