Let Your IVR Greet Clients with a Unique Mother’s Day Greeting This Coming Sunday!

Good customer service starts with a personal touch—small things that go a long way. It’s an indication that you’ve taken a moment out of your busy day to take notice of something different. That you are aware. That you care.

Different is special—and who doesn’t like special?

That’s why we love national holidays.

Now, you might think that an automated answering service is incapable of a ‘personal touch’—but that would be like saying that robots are incapable of feelings, and anyone who’s seen Spielberg’s A.I. knows better!

So here’s how your very own artificial intelligence (aka Auto Attendant) can respond in an intimate manner (with just a helpful nudge on your part):

Most virtual PBX systems should let you record and maintain a library of customized greetings to feed your IVR. So if you were to prepare a special message in advance, you could simply switch over to it when the appropriate day arrived—and that’s that. Simple, isn’t’ it?

You can prepare as many greetings as you like and be ready to meet any occasion.

It’s a small effort to show your customers that you care about going that extra mile to make them feel special.

Try it out this coming Mother’s Day!

(April 8^th, just in case you’ve forgotten... don’t worry, we won’t tell ;)

Every mother is sure to smile upon hearing your greeting—and as for the rest of us kids, we’ll have a chance to dart out to the nearest flower store and, breathing a sigh of relief, call to say ‘of course I didn’t forget mom—how could I!’

In both cases, you’ll have a friend for life.

Happy Mother’s Day everyone!

Labels: business, call, cloud computing, custom greeting, customer service, data center, IT, live answer, mother's day, phone system, technology, virtual IVR, virtual PBX, virtual phone

Know Your Leads: A Look at How Call Stats Can Help Improve Your Marketing Performance

Up till now, we’ve been mostly yapping about virtual PBX systems in general terms. But perhaps it’s time to get a bit more specific and examine individual features up close. Let’s start with something exotic, like the ability to view call stats.

Not unlike Clark Kent, this little feature might appear unimpressive on first sight (what’s with that dorky outfit and those square glasses)—but just throw it into the ring and see what happens.

That's because some things show their value only in action.

So here’s a practical scenario that will flush out any hidden superpowers.

Your Marketing Efforts

Let’s say you own a small business. Following the age-old advice, you've split your precious marketing eggs between several baskets: two local papers (the ‘Morning Sun’ and the ‘Faraway Star’), your website, and lastly, in a fit of creativity (or perhaps desperation) you decided to put up an ad on your local Craigslist Classifieds. 'What the heck’—it’s free, right?

Now comes the waiting game...

Your Dilemma

So while we sit here waiting for the phone to start going off the hook, why not ponder a philosophical question: wouldn’t it be nice to know just how many leads each of those platform generated?

I mean, if you only have one business number (and included this same phone number in all four places, how will you tell where each caller got whiff of you and your business?

Sure, you could start surveying your prospective clients. But that double-edged nuisance is going to slide right through your time and their patience—not the best way to get off to a good start...

Anything else?

You could perhaps try checking how many people ‘clicked’ on the ‘Contact us’ link on your website—but that doesn’t necessarily mean they all proceeded to call you, and it sure isn’t going to help you glean any information about the other three...

Fair to say, this is as far as your little foray into statistics is likely to get.

And here’s how Synclio can help you take it a step further:

Phone Call Number Tracking with Goolgle Analytics

First, Synclio gives you the ability to port numbers. ‘Porting’ numbers means that when a number is called the call is instantaneously redirected to a different number. Ever changed providers and had your calls follow you? That’s exactly it!

(Just don’t ask us how it’s done—we’ll call it ‘magic’)

Then, Synclio also lets you select as many local and toll-free phone numbers as you need.

Now let’s connect the dots.

Suppose you’ll assign a different phone number to each ad you've placed and port all four numbers to your one business line... You’ll still be receiving and answering calls on your phone just as you normally would, but in the background—magic will be happening!

When the day is done and you’ve signed up all those new customers, you’ll now be able to simply kick back, pull up your laptop, and watch as Synclio’s think-o-matic-extraordinaire (powered by Google Analytics) reveals just how many calls were placed to each of the numbers you have ported.

The Bottom Line

So even if you’ve been paying a hefty fee to see your ads prominently featured in the Morning Sun and the Faraway Star, you may learn from this little experiment that the bulk of callers actually followed your electronic bread-crumbs-trail via the freebie Craigslist.

Going to reshuffle your marketing eggs now? You betcha!

This is just one of the ways viewing call stats can help improve your business strategy and marketing performance.

And it teaches us never to judge a man or a feature by their outfit—at least not before they've had a chance to take it off and kick some @#$!

09/19/11 Edited to adjust spelling and update information.

Labels: business, call, call stats, cloud computing, how to improve marketing performance, leads, marketing, porting, statistics, technology, virtual PBX, virtual phone

Don’t Go Reinventing the Wheel... Here's Why Building a Physical Phone System is a Bad Idea.

So you’re thinking of putting together a physical phone system. Good. Let’s try something for a minute. Take a deep breath. Let it out slowly. Count to ten.

Still seem like a good idea?

Ok, read on then.

It may have been the norm in the old days to have your hand in everything: grow your own food, raise your own beef, build your own house and even cut your own hair. But not too long ago a little something called the Industrial Revolution took place. That pretty much changed all of it.

Adam Smith, for instance, had observed that a worker trained in making nails yielded a far greater quota than a man uninitiated in the fine art of nail-making. This was a process he had identified as the division of labor, or specialization, and argued that a man becomes far more productive when his time, energy, and resources are directed in a single endeavor.

So let’s see how it applies to the question at hand.

You’re running a business. That’s your niche. If it’s a small business, chances are you’re already wearing more than a few hats.

Do you really want to add another with a small ‘IT’ logo to your wardrobe?

Let’s look at it from a Cost vs. Value perspective, dear to the heart of any entrepreneur.

You might have read a clever article about some open source PBX product now available for free download. Then recalled how, flipping through the flyer of a local electronics store, you had noted the rock-bottom prices of hardware components. Your little number-crunching machine then went on to put two plus two together—and next you were in your car driving towards the nearest Tigerdirect outlet, ready to build that sexy phone system you’ve always wanted.

Well, it’s a good thing your wife did some research and sent you this article before you got too far, because here comes a reality check:

A physical phone system is a complex combo of software and hardware equipment that will require, at the very least, proper setup, configuration, and maintenance.

There was only one reason businesses in the past went through the trouble of setting up those clunkers—and that’s because they didn’t really have an alternative.

It’s true that today you can put together an equally robust physical system for a fraction of what it used to take—especially with open source applications—but that doesn’t mean that every 10-year-old and his sister can crack open their piggy-banks and go nuts... That’s because buying the equipment is only half the trouble. Next you need to have everything set up, configured, and installed—a highly involved process.

So your options quickly dwindle down to either taking a crash course in the relevant IT technologies, or (more likely) hiring a professional.

Guess what, the professional has a family to feed, and he didn’t get that nice certificate only to cover a hole in the wall—he got it to bring home some milk. One guess who’s going to be his cow...

But even once everything has been set up, it’s still only half the trouble (no, I didn’t skip simple math at school). Like a brand new house, once it’s been built, the darn thing still has to be maintained. Go see any homeowner after his first winter to find out if he’s still wearing that picture-perfect smile.

Equipment fails, software gets corrupted, and even when everything seems to be sailing smoothly, the whole thing needs to be periodically updated and upgraded. So if you thought you’ve seen the last of that ‘professional’ with the first visit, be prepared to find yourself signing a long-term contract and feeding the calves on a regular basis.

So why not spare yourself the pain and go with a more streamlined solution? After all, you didn’t lay down infrastructure when you needed your first land-line, or opened a hairdressing salon to get your hair cut—you simply purchased a service. Why start doing things differently?

As for value, a virtual PBX gives you all the features you’d find in a physical one (and more) with the added freedom of the web, for a single low monthly fee.

This has ‘Smart Business ’ written all over it.

You must be good at what you do, but virtual phone systems is our niche. So why not prove the father of capitalism right yet again and start trading?

For more information about the benefit of going virtual, check out: ‘5 Reasons Virtual Systems are Taking Over the Physical World’.

And for a breakdown of most features you’re likely to encounter, try our last post: ‘Anatomy of a Virtual Phone System: What’s In It, and Why You Need It’.

Labels: asterisk, business, call, cloud computing, devision of labor, IT, open source, phone system, specialization, technology, virtual PBX, virtual phone