01
What is a virtual receptionist?
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A virtual receptionist is a phone answering arrangement where someone outside your business answers your calls in your business name. Traditionally that someone is a human in a call centre answering for dozens of businesses at once, billed per call or per minute on top of a monthly retainer. Increasingly it is an AI receptionist: software that answers in a natural voice, at any hour, for a flat monthly price.
02
How quickly can I get a virtual receptionist answering my phone?
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Same day. You keep your existing number and point your call diversion at your Talkify agent, which takes a few minutes with your phone provider. We load your services, hours, prices and escalation rules, you listen to it and adjust the wording, and it starts answering. There is no hardware, no number porting and no setup fee.
03
Is a virtual receptionist a real person?
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With traditional NZ services, yes: a real person in a call centre, usually during business hours, reading from your script between calls for other clients. With an AI virtual receptionist like Talkify, the voice is generated but the conversation is real: it answers questions about your business, books appointments and takes messages, and most callers do not pick that it is AI. Ring 03 242 1262 and judge for yourself.
04
How much does a virtual receptionist cost in NZ?
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Human services advertise low entry prices, often $19 to $50 a month, but bill per call or per minute on top. At a realistic 60 to 80 calls a month most NZ businesses land between $200 and $500, and a busy month costs more. After-hours cover is usually extra. Talkify is $129/month at the founding rate for your first 3 months, then $199, with 200 minutes included and overage from 10c a minute, 24/7 included, no setup fee.
05
Does it only answer after hours?
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No, and in practice that is not where most of the value shows up. In the call reports our customers have shared with us, the majority of answered calls arrive during ordinary business hours, because the phone rings while the person who would answer it is already on another call or in front of a customer. One electrical contractor takes their heaviest volume at nine in the morning. Your agent covers both: the overflow during the day and the calls that used to hit voicemail at night.
06
What does a human virtual receptionist do that AI cannot?
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Genuine human judgement on messy, emotionally loaded calls is still a human strength: a distressed caller, a sensitive complaint, a negotiation. If your calls are mostly that, a quality human service is worth the premium. Most business calls are not that. They are bookings, opening hours, prices, availability and messages, which an AI handles instantly, simultaneously and identically well at 2pm or 2am, and hands the hard ones to you with context.
07
What does an AI receptionist do that a human service cannot?
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Answer every call at once with zero hold time, around the clock, including public holidays, without per-call billing. Talkify also finishes the work on the call: it reads your live calendar and books the appointment, rather than taking a message for you to ring back. A message is a lead you still have to chase. A booking is revenue.
08
Can I switch from my answering service to Talkify without changing numbers?
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Yes. Talkify works by call forwarding from your existing number, the same way your current service does. Point your diversion at your Talkify agent and you are live the same day. There is no porting, no hardware and no lock-in, so you can run it alongside your current service and compare for a week.
09
Will it sound like my business?
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You choose the voice (32 of them, including real NZ and Australian voices and te reo Māori greetings), the greeting, the tone and the vocabulary. It introduces itself with your business name, follows your escalation rules, and never has an off day. You can update any wording from the dashboard and it goes live in seconds.
10
What is a virtual front desk?
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A virtual front desk is the reception job done for the people who ring rather than the people who walk in, by somebody who is not in the building. It greets in your business name, answers what the caller rang to ask, keeps the appointment book, takes a proper message when that is the right outcome, and writes all of it down. For the many businesses that never had a reception desk in the first place, a van, a treatment room, a workshop or a kitchen, it is the first front desk they have ever had.
11
Is there a pay as you go virtual receptionist option?
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Yes, and it means what the words say rather than what the traditional services mean by them. You pay $10 a month for the number, then $1 a minute for the calls you actually handle, drawn from a prepaid balance, with $10 of credit to start. No plan, no minimum, no contract. Once your volume settles a flat plan is usually cheaper, and you can move onto one without changing your number.
12
Where do my call recordings and transcripts live?
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Audio, transcripts and call metadata are stored in New Zealand data centres and encrypted at rest with AES-256. Those recordings contain your customers' personal information, which the Privacy Act makes you responsible for, so it is worth asking any provider the same question and getting the answer in writing.
