Front desk
The front desk is the reception function of a business: the person or system that greets visitors and callers. It answers first-line questions, takes details and directs each inquiry to the right place.
Also called: reception desk, reception, front office
On a physical premises the front desk is a place, the counter a visitor walks up to. In the context of phone handling it is a role: whoever or whatever answers the main number, works out what the caller needs, and either resolves it or passes it on.
That role is what receptionist services of every kind are selling. An in-house receptionist, a virtual receptionist service, an answering service and an AI receptionist are all different ways of staffing the same seat, and the choice between them usually comes down to hours of cover, cost and how much the front desk needs to know about the business.
A front desk that is unstaffed or busy is where missed calls happen, which is why the term appears so often alongside after-hours and overflow answering.