New Users Onboarding Tutorial

Welcome to Virtual Front Desk!

Virtual Front Desk gives organizations a flexible way to manage receptions without requiring someone to be physically present at the front desk. Visitors can use a station to check in, find information, notify an employee, or connect with a live person by video.

There are two main parts to Virtual Front Desk:

1. The Station
   The station is a tablet or all-in-one computer located in a public lobby, reception area, or service location. Visitors use the station to select from the available options, such as contacting an employee, checking in, requesting assistance, or starting a video call.
2. The Dashboard
   The dashboard is where users such as receptionists or other team members log in to receive and answer incoming video calls from one or multiple Virtual Front Desk stations.

Depending on how your organization has set up Virtual Front Desk, a station can connect or notify team members through:

• Email
• SMS
• Phone call
• Video call through the Virtual Front Desk web app
• Microsoft Teams and other supported applications

This article is designed for regular users of Virtual Front Desk rather than administrators who configure the platform.

If you will be receiving video calls through the Virtual Front Desk dashboard, follow the steps below to get familiar with the application, prepare your account, and learn how to receive and manage calls.

Please note users imported from Azure Active Directory (Entra) will not receive an email invitation to log in at app.virtualfrontdesk.com to join an organization. Provided the Integration with Microsoft Teams is successfull, they will start receiving calls directly into Teams without ever having to log in or even know about Virtual Front Desk.

Let's start!

1. As a regular user or receptioinist, your administrator will send you an email invitation to join his organization. The very first step is to log in to app.virtualfrontdesk.com. Make sure you select the right region. *You must always log in with the same region as your organization.
   
   US: .com
   Canada: .ca
   Europe: .global
   Asia: .asia
   
   If by mistake, you log in with the wrong region, it will create a new account for you. Log out, log in again selecting the right region and select the approriate organization from the top left corner of the dashboard.
   
2. A user can be part of several organizations at once. If you have logged in to Virtual Front Desk prior to receiving an invitation to join another organization, you may have your own organization where you are the owner. When you receive an invite, you will be part of two organizations. Just make sure that when you log in to the system, you go to the top left and select the right organization, the organization for whom you're working right now.
   
   
   
3. Virtual Front Desk is a web app. The dashboard is a website. You can keep it open in your browser. We recommend Chrome or Edge. If you're using Chrome, you can also go into the URL, and on the right, you will see an installed option. This will install a link on your desktop so that Virtual Front Desk will always be available on your desktop, even if the Chrome page is not open.
   
   
   
   
4. The Virtual Front Desk page needs to be open in your browser, but you can write emails, you can be working in another app as long as it's open in your browser. You will get the notifications.
   
5. If you want to receive video calls in your dashboard, you have to make sure that your webcam is available and that permissions are given for Virtual Front Desk to use your webcam. You will see in the dashboard that it's prompting you to give those notifications. Please allow them for the webcam, the microphone, and your desktop also. Please note that the browser is handling your webcam, not Virtual Front Desk. If something goes wrong with your microphone or the webcam, you have to look at the Google permission and Google access to your webcam. Virtual Front Desk allows you to select which webcam to use from your settings under your profile. Once you've set the right webcam, if you have an issue with your volume or your camera, you have to look at your browser or your computer to fix the issue.
   
   
   
   
6. The dashboard gives you a view of what is happening in your organization. You will see which users or receptionists are online or offline. You will see several statuses for stations, and you also have the waiting list on the right. This is where you will see the notifications come in from the stations that want to call you.
   
7. When you see a notification on the right, you can click anywhere on it or on the green button to connect to the call. If you're already on a video call, or if you're on the phone and you cannot take the call, you can click on the hold button. This will put the visitor on hold, and you can answer it when you are available. The notification will display the name of the location, the name of the station, and the name of the button that was pressed.
   
   
   
8. Those notifications or video calls can be sent only to you, or they can be sent to a group of receptionists. The system can video call several computers all at once until someone answers, or it can call receptionists in a call queue, one receptionist after the other. It will try to ring you for 15 seconds, and it will get to the other one, and to the next one, and to the next one.
9. Please note that you can set a call forwarding option. If no one picks up the video call, you can have the system dial a phone number after X amount of seconds as a backup plan to make sure someone talks to your visitor.
10. A user or receptionist can also decide to receive SMS or email notifications alongside a video call. When someone clicks a button for you, you could get an SMS at the same time telling you that someone is calling your computer. This could be very handy if you are in the kitchen or somewhere else and you're not at your desk. You will be notified that someone is calling you on your computer.
11. Virtual Front Desk has its own mobile application, so you can download Virtual Front Desk from the App Store and/or Virtual Front Desk from the Google Play Store. When you log in to this app, you can receive video calls on your mobile devices. Please note: the mobile app is just to receive video calls. There's no other functionality. When you answer a video call, you do not have the functions that you would find if you are answering the video calls from a computer.
    
    https://help.virtualfrontdesk.com/en/article/mobile-application-iphone-and-ipad
    
12. Virtual Front Desk offers a streaming feature, so each station can display a live stream of your lobby. If you see someone walking around or see someone in the lobby and you would like to proactively interact with the lobby, you can click on the Call button on the streaming view and call the station directly. This will open the camera of the station and your camera, and you can greet the visitor without the visitor having to touch the station. Please note: you can only monitor four lobbies at once per Dashboard. Those streams are not recorded, and there is no audio to it. When the streaming is on, they do not know that you are looking into the lobby. They see the buttons, and they see the normal welcome screen.
    
    https://help.virtualfrontdesk.com/en/article/monitoring-or-live-streaming-your-stations
    
13. When you are in a video call, if you have another call coming in, you can swap from one call to the other. You can greet a visitor, say that you will be back shortly, and go back to the previous call.
14. When you are in a video call, you can do almost anything a receptionist would do as if you were physically behind the desk.

• take IDs
• screenshots
• digital scanner
• send a text over to the screen
• send documents to sign
• send documents to a printer
• share screen
• even take payments
  
  
  Please take the time to read the article below to understand how to use these features.

https://help.virtualfrontdesk.com/en/article/live-call-features

Virtual Front Desk offers a full visitor management system, meaning that any visitors can go to the station and:

• answer questions
• sign documents
• fill online forms
• take a selfie
• take a picture of their ID
• print a visitor badge before making any calls

Those signing forms are created by your administrators.

15. The Virtual Front Desk station can also show an employee list on its welcome screen and display:

• PDFs
• QR code
• online forms
• and looping videos
  

16. Virtual Front Desk also has its own AI receptionist programmed to greet visitors and answer many questions prior to making a call to a human receptionist. This feature can be very handy to have the station's AI agent answer repeated questions that could be resolved without having to video call a receptionist. This AI feature will always offer to call someone if it cannot answer a question.
    
17. The history section, one of the main menu items on the left, will display the call log: all the action that's been taking place in the organization.

• How many calls, date, duration, who answered them, along with any documents saved from a specific call.
• All the other action that's been taking place on the station like was there a button pressed for a PDF or a QR code.
• The log of all the sign in forms. If you are using sign forms and people are signing themselves by entering information on the station, you will see the answers, document signed, screenshots taken and more.
• The pre-registration log is to see who has pre-registered, or, in other words, filled out a sign-in form with their own computer or their own device prior to visiting your building. Those visitors will then only have to scan a QR code at the station to check themselves in. They won't have to enter their information at the station.
• A transaction log for those using Virtual Front Desk to make payments.

18. Virtual Front Desk is a web app doing video calls. You have to make sure that you have a stable, high-speed internet connection and a recent computer that can easily handle the latest version of Chrome. If you have an unstable network, if your computer is too old or not powerful enough or outdated, you won't have a good experience with Virtual Front Desk. Make sure that you have the best and latest tools to provide the best service and enjoy the app fully.
    
19. Virtual Front Desk has a help center at the bottom right of the screen. You can type any questions into the chat to display the documentation associated with them. The app is fully documented, and I invite you to spend some time in the documentation to understand the full possibilities that Virtual Front Desk offers. It's a powerful tool that can offer you much more than you can imagine.
    
20. We also have a live chat for support. This is where you want to communicate with us for support. You can ask any question, and the bot will try to answer. If you're not satisfied with the answer, just ask to speak to a live support agent, and we will jump on the chat with you as soon as we are available.The chat is very efficient because we can do video calls from the chat, we can share screens, and you will have a real person helping you, looking at your dashboard if you share it. For support, the live chat is the best. We are open from 7 am to 7 pm Eastern Time, New York.