Q & A with Jill Nelson

By peter korn

The Portland Tribune, Oct 26, 2007, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (1 Reader comment)

JIM CLARK / P0RTLAND TRIBUNE

Jill Nelson runs Ruby Receptionists, where employees receive about 200 calls a day for everyone from financial planners and attorneys to psychics and furriers.

Every Friday, the Portland Tribune puts questions to a prominent – or not so prominent – local person.

From her expansive Pearl District office, Jill Nelson can listen to the world, and try to solve its small problems. Politely.

Nelson owns Portland-based Ruby Receptionists, which offers telephone answering and a little bit more to customers around the country. In fact, most of Nelson’s business is long-distance.

Fur stores in Baltimore and attorneys and law offices all over that are too big for an answering machine and too small for full-time receptionists hire Ruby’s all-women team to answer their phones.

Portland Tribune: What service exactly is being performed here – you’re not just phone operators, right?

Jill Nelson: We call ourselves virtual receptionists, even though we’re real. We perform all the functions of a receptionist, but we work from a remote location.

Tribune: So how big is your monthly phone bill?

Nelson: It’s 1,100 pages.

Tribune: But how big is your monthly phone bill?

Nelson: It’s five figures.

Tribune: Ever had the phones go out?

Nelson: The only thing that can take us down now is a power outage, and we’ve had three. Two were for a half-hour, and the other was an entire afternoon. When you called our phone lines you got, “All our circuits are busy.”

Tribune: Phones out for an afternoon. Was that a disaster?

Nelson: We needed to get a message to our clients so they could bypass our system. We used an e-mail blast service to send an e-mail that we were having a power outage.

Somehow, instead, the message said that we would be closed for Memorial Day.

By the time the power came on we had our e-mail box filled with questions. “What do you mean you’re closed for Memorial Day? Do you mean the Fourth of July?” But almost nobody questioned what was wrong with our phones.

Tribune: Your receptionists must have had some odd calls over the years.

Nelson: These days we focus on attorneys and financial planners, but early on we had a much more diverse set of clients. One of them was a psychic, and we booked her psychic readings.

There was one person who called regularly wanting to speak with the psychic because the ghost of her father was stuck in her spine.

Tribune: So was she a pain in the neck?

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