Home Office Telephony

Service Providers Listen Up! : Home Based Businesses Have “Mucho” Telecom Buying Power

One of my biggest frustrations as a telecom consultant to home based business owners is the lack of viable choices in the market for this segment of consumers. Most service providers (such as phone companies and broadband carriers) offer plans for either residential customers or business customers and there's a marked difference in pricing from one to the other. This forces most bootstrapping home based business owners to lie and claim to be residential customers when in fact they run legitimate businesses worthy of better service level agreements than home users.

Why is this so? According to a recent study done by AMI Partners, a consulting and research firm, the approximately 15 million U.S home based businesses are expected to reach $19 billion (Yes, that's BILLION!) in telecom related spending in 2007. And that number is expected to rise to $19.5 billion in 2008. That is not chump change.

Did you hear that, service providers? We are a force to be reckoned with and we want affordable rates with better service level agreements. Those providers who cater to our sector will reap handsome rewards. Those who lag behind will soon regret it.

Feature Of The Week: Auto-Attendant

Starting this week I will dedicate one post a week to discussing a particular feature of virtual phone systems. I will not only define the feature and list what it does but I will give you examples of how the feature can help your home based or small businesse be more productive and sound more professional.

This week I have picked the feature that I believe best accomplishes the goal of making your business sound as polished as a large, established company: the Automated Attendant.

According to Webster's New World Telecom Dictionary an Automated Attendant (or Auto Attendant) is "An application in which an interactive voice processor automates many of the functions of a human attendant, answering an incoming call and prompting the caller through a series of spoken menu options to directly access a department or station through touchtone or speech input."

In plain English, an auto-attendant is your very own personal secretary, who works seven days a week, 24 hours a day, never calls in sick or needs a vacation and always answers your calls exactly the way you want them to be answered every single time. Most people who call a business expect a receptionist of some sort to answer the call. Just because you work out of your home office doesn't mean you can't have one too.

Here are a few additional benefits that an auto-attendant can provide your small business:

• It screens your calls and whispers the caller's name so that you know whether it's that huge client you've been trying to land for the last month or just a pesky telemarketer wanting you to take a survey. Some systems go as far as automatically recognizing your current clients from your Outlook address book by their caller ID and giving them priority handling.
• It forwards your calls to the right place every time. Some of you may use your cell phone number as your only business number and are paying the mobile companies dearly for all those minutes. Have the auto-attendant forward your calls to your home line when at home and save yourself some precious cell minutes.
• It greets your callers and forward your calls in a certain way during your established business hours and only take messages for you afterhours. This really helps in setting boundaries with your clients and prevents your business from taking over your whole life.
• It acts as your VP of Business Development by automatically handling some of your lead's inquiries for you. See my previous post: Get More Clients Using Your Telephone.

Unfortunately, my automated attendant will not bring me my coffee in the morning (actually my caffeine of choice is Diet Coke) but since I no longer need to answer my phone every time it rings anymore I have the time to get my own.

Is Your Phone Image Consistent With Your Branding?

Most entrepreneurs and small business owners today know the importance of developing a brand for their business. Countless books have been written about the topic. Marketing gurus talk about it incessantly. They tell us to invest in a "corporate identity", get a memorable logo, a professional business card and a sharp looking website. But they seem stop there. To me something very important is being overlooked.

Does your sound match your branding? Once someone sees your website and is impressed enough to call your number - and hopefully hire you - will they hear something as professional and polished as the rest of your business image?

If I call your number right now would I be inspired to hire you or to hang up as quickly as possible? If it's the latter, take a look at some of the technologies we discuss in this blog and make use of them.

Here are some things you can do to spruce up your "phone image":

1. If you use an auto-attendant make sure the recording is of an actual human being – preferably you. However, if you don't care for your own voice, have a friend record the message for you or hire a professional to do it. Companies like Holdcom or Amazing Voice will do the recording for you. Whatever you do don't leave the computer generated prompts no matter how smooth it sounds. Nothing says generic like a robotic voice in your ear.
2. Offer lots of information – a description of your services, information about your business process, your business hours. Have enough information to build trust with your caller but not so much that it would require 4 menus and 15 sub-menus to deliver it. No one will sit through 25 prompts.
3. Always give callers the option to go straight to voicemail and bypass additional prompts. This will be especially appreciated by people who call you frequently. 

What about you? Have you thought about how your brand sounds lately?

Top 10 Benefits Of A Virtual PBX

On the last post I talked about what a Virtual PBX (VPBX) is. On this one I will list what I consider to be the main benefits of using a VPBX in your business. Here they are in no particular order:

1. Work from anywhere – A VPBX allows you to forward your calls automatically to your cell phone or any other alternate number. This means you no longer need to be tied to your desk to wait for that important call. The coffee shop, the airport, the beach, any place can now become your office. If you travel often you can access all your messages and faxes through the web as well as get notifications by text message, e-mail or pager as soon as you have received a new message.

2. Project a more polished, established and reputable company image – Your automated cyber secretary (aka automated attendant) will answer your calls, transfer your calls and take messages. When a caller hears "Please hold the line while I transfer your call to John Smith" they picture John Smith in a suit, sitting at a desk in his office. He doesn't need to know you are sitting in a coffee shop in your shorts and T-shirt – unless you want to tell him. Remember, perception is reality. And the most common perception is that someone in a suit and tie is more trustworthy than someone in a pair of shorts. Ask anyone.

3. Unified Communications - That's the fancy way to say you have one phone number that will handle all your calls, faxes and voicemails. Think of how much tidier your business card will look with just one number as your contact number instead of listing your business line number, cell phone number, fax number and pager number. You can maximize this benefit by using a "vanity" toll free number that spells out something memorable like 800-call-john. No prospect will ever forget that number.

4. Marketing information about your company available 24/7 – Prospects can dial an information extension and listen to a list of your products and services, or details on your latest promotions. They can also request the system to fax them a brochure, white paper or an article of interest to them. Your prospect can do all of this even at 3 AM while you are sound asleep. Your business can now be "open" 24 hours a day.

5. No software or equipment to buy – VPBX services are an add-on to your current services and require no additional equipment. Think of a VPBX as a system that ties all of your communications services together.

6. You can make changes to your system on the fly – With the local phone or cell companies if you want to make any changes to your service you have to call them, wait on hold until someone answers, request the change, wait for the change to complete and the pay them a service fee for that privilege. With VPBXs you can make any change you want at any time you want through their web based interface or through phone access. Adding and deleting, extensions, changing your greetings, activating features, setting up your call forwarding rules, anything you want to move, add or change can be done by you without any waiting or extra charges.

7. Easy and automatic disaster recovery – As I discussed in my previous post, you should always be ready for a disaster. VPBXs will provide business continuity through any situation that may face you. Being able to quickly and easily make changes to your system will ensure that no calls are missed and that prospects can continue to reach you – or at least your business.

8. Ability to prioritize calls - As an independent professional or home based business owner your time is extremely precious. How will you ever have the time to get any work done if you are at the mercy of your phone? Most VPBX's offer what they call a "whisper" feature. This feature allows you to listen to the name of the person who is calling and then decide if you'll take the call, send the caller to voicemail or transfer the caller to another extension (for example, a colleague or the info line extension). You could also place your system in "Do Not Disturb" mode which means all your callers will immediately get your voicemail without the phone ever ringing. Then you can answer your voicemails at your convenience. Aahh! A little peace and quiet can be so nice.

9. Have a local presence in a distant market - Aside from a toll free number which allows for anyone in the country to call you without them having to pay a dime, you can also get a local number in many areas that are not local to you. For example, if you are in Miami, Florida but you have a lot of clients in Los Angeles, California, you can get an L.A number that will terminate in your VPBX. This gives you a local presence no matter where you are located.

10. Pay only for what you need – VPBXs systems are scalable and grow as you grow. You can start out with a simple system and a limited amount of minutes and as your business grows you can add more minutes, more extensions and more features. All this without having to change systems.

Can you see why I love Virtual PBX's? Never have so many features and capabilities been available to micro businesses like ours. Take advantage of this great technology! I will soon add to this blog a list of my recommended VPBX companies but in the meantime just do a Google search and you will find the most popular. If you have any questions about them feel free to contact me.

What In The World Is A Virtual PBX and Why Should I Care?

In this post I would like to simplify a very technical sounding term: Virtual PBX (VPBX) . As an independent service professional or small business owner you may have heard that term here and there and maybe wondered if your business would benefit from having one. Some of you may have a VPBX and still not understand exactly what it is. Here is the regular Joe's (or Jane, in my case) bare bones explanation of a Virtual PBX.

To understand what a VPBX is, you need to first understand what a PBX is. You might not know it but you come into contact with PBX's almost daily; when you call your bank to get your balance, call your doctor's office to make an appointment, or when you call your insurance agency to ask about your policy.

A PBX (Private Branch Exchange) is simply a phone switch which routes calls within a private network – like an office building or a campus. In the olden days PBX's were huge pieces of equipment that resided in a business' phone closet and allowed calls to be received by one main extension (typically the operator or receptionist) and then transferred to other extensions within that network.

As technology progressed PBX's got smaller and smarter. The PBXs of today can do so much more than just transfer calls. They can take messages, forward your calls to outside numbers, put callers on hold, speed-dial and the list goes on.

Historically, only big corporations or government offices could afford to buy such systems. Little entrepreneurs such as you and I have had to depend on the local phone company to act as our PBX. We could get some of the features like Call Waiting, Call Hold and Call Forwarding but the choices were limited.

Enter the Virtual PBX. This marvel of modern technology provides you – the solo or small business owner – practically all the features of a conventional PBX for a fraction of the cost.

The main differentiator between a PBX and a VPBX is how the service is delivered. With a PBX you have to buy hardware that is housed in your place of business. Not only is this hardware extremely expensive for the budget of a 1 to 5 person business but it would take up quite a bit of space in your already crammed home office.

A Virtual PBX is mostly software driven and the service provider's servers that house this software could be located on the other side of the country (or the world) from your office – hence the term "virtual". The provider partitions a section of their pbx and gives you full control over it through a web interface.

Why should you care about Virtual PBX's? Because like it or not, home-based businesses competing in the marketplace still suffer from an image problem. Credibility is usually the biggest hurdle to overcome when you work from home.

Picture this scenario: a potential client surfs the web for a service he needs. He comes across two company's websites that appear to address his needs. He calls the first company and he is greeted by a very pleasant receptionist who takes his information, gives him some information about the company and tells him someone from the sales department will call him back. He decides to call the second company. The line rings several times before a voice answers the line with a simple: "Hello?" Click. Dial tone.

Now, I know most of you would not answer the phone that way (or at least I sincerely hope you wouldn't) but even if you answer with your most chipper, professional voice it does not quite have the effect of the first call.

For better or worse, consumers often equate bigger with better. I'm definitely not suggesting that you pretend to be bigger than you are. I don't particularly subscribe to that philosophy. I am suggesting that you set up a system that will give your caller a sense of security, a feeling of having reached a professional, polished, established business. Virtual PBX's allow you to do just that.

Stay tuned for my next post where I will share with you all the benefits of using a Virtual PBX for your business.

When Disaster Strikes

As I write this, tropical storm Noel is hanging out in the Bahamas. Although it is swirling quite a ways from where I live (just south of Vero Beach) we have been seeing a lot of rain with wind gusts of 20 to 30 miles an hour. I'm used to this. I go through it every year around this time. Except for a few years when I traveled, I've lived half of my life in Puerto Rico and the other half in Florida – both smack in the middle of "Hurricane Alley". Now that I'm a business owner I not only have to worry about my personal home and possessions but also my business operations and assets.

Wherever you happen to live, no one is safe from business crippling disasters; earthquakes, fires, tornadoes, ice storms and on and on. Most independent service professionals are smart enough to have a disaster recovery plan of sorts. You may have an online data backup service like Mozy or a portable hard drive but have you given any thought to your phone system? How will you stay in touch with clients and prospects if your home office is destroyed or your phone and internet services go down for an extended period of time?

Here's a checklist of things to consider:

• Do you have the ability to forward you main business line to a cell phone; yours or an employee or colleague?
• Can you retrieve your voicemails by calling your system? If you only have answering machine you may lose important messages if it's destroyed.
• Will you be able to continue to receive important faxes? Or are you solely dependent on your fax machine?
• If the disaster has taken out both your home office business line and your cell phone line (this has happened to me more than once) are you able to record a message on your system letting clients know your situation and giving them alternative options to speaking to you – such as calling a colleague or leaving you a message that you can listen to when you are able. Right before hurricane Wilma in 2005 - which was projected to (and did) move right over my area - I recorded an outgoing message on my system telling callers I would be unavailable and that I would get back to them as soon as possible. In the meantime they could call a colleague of mine who was not in the path of the storm.

This is one of the main reasons I recommend virtual pbx services. They allow you to get back to business much more quickly than land lines or even VOIP services.

Noel is a mild storm compared to others I've lived through and it is not forecasted to come my way. Even if it does, I'm ready. Is you business ready for a disaster?

Your Phone is Ringing…. Now What? Handling Business Calls on a Shoestring Budget

When I first started my journey as a self-employed professional (Ok… when I was forced into self-employment by a company layoff) one of the biggest questions I had was: "How will I handle my business calls when I work from home?" It didn't matter that I made my living in the telecommunications field for the previous 10 years, this question still dumbfounded me. Since I had little monetary resources (read: I was broke) I wondered if I could get away with just using my home phone line or even my cell phone.

What to do?.... What to do?.... If you are just starting out and the state of your bank account leaves much to be desired, here are some things to consider:

• Using your Cell Phone for all your business calls:

  Pros: Typically, you will be the only one answering your cell phone so there is little danger of your partner or one of your children picking up the phone and potentially turning off your prospects. A cell phone, being highly portable, will allow you to always be available when money calls (as I like to say).

  Cons: Depending on what kind of service plan you have, receiving all your business calls on your cell phone could get expensive since you are typically charged by the minute. Mobiles can be unpredictable as far as voice quality (good reception) and call connection (dropped calls). The last thing you want as you are trying to close that profitable deal is a bunch of static on the line or for the call to drop at that crucial "Yes, I will buy from you" moment.

• Purchasing a "Distinctive Ring" service from your phone company:

  Distinctive Ring (as is known by most companies) is an add-on service for your home phone that you can order from local phone company. It allows you to have an additional telephone number – which you can promote as your business number – that has a different ring tone than your regular phone number. 

  Pros: It lets you know that the incoming call is for your business before you pick up the phone and tells everyone else in your family to keep their hands off. No additional equipment is required and it costs between $5.00 and $10.00 USD a month.

  Cons: If the line is being used by a member of your family (for example your chatty teenager) the call may be lost. If you have Call Waiting your teenager may hear the tone indicating there's a call waiting but decide not to switch over (that story about the football player having a crush on her is just too good to interrupt) and if you don't have Call Waiting the caller would hear a busy signal.

• Purchasing Voicemail with multiple boxes:

  Some local service phone companies sell a voicemail system for your home that will have multiple extensions. If you choose, you could tell all the members of your family that no one is to touch the phone when it is ringing and to let all calls go to voicemail. That way the caller will hear a message such as this: "Thank you for Calling. To speak with Victoria Santiago from Clarity Transactions press 1. To speak with Kenneth press 2. To speak with Ryan press 3." After the caller chooses the right number they can leave a message for that person.

  Pros: Inexpensive solution. You can get a voicemail system that handles multiple boxes for about $5.00 and $7.00 USD a month. Every member of your family manages their own mailbox which gives each their privacy. You don't have to listen to your partner's messages while retrieving your own. And it's definitely a better option than having one voicemail message saying "You've reached the Smith family. Please leave a message". Your prospect is not calling your family he is calling your business.

  Cons: This option will only work if all calls are answered by the voicemail system. If you have teenagers at home… good luck with that. Having this type of set up is also not as professional as you might want. The fact that you work from is basically advertised on your message and some prospects may not be comfortable with that and hang up. It is much better if the prospects learn that you have a home office AFTER you've been able to fully impress them withal the wonderful things you can do for them.

The list above is my favorite least expensive tactics to start handling your business calls. Feel free to share your own.

I should mention that, in my opinion, none of the strategies above portray the best "phone impression" of you and your business. I bit the bullet from the beginning and purchased a virtual phone system with an automated attendant and it is the solution I recommend to most independent professionals. Stay tuned for future posts on this subject.