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(Credits:Carrie Taylor)
“Your call is very important to us. We appreciate your patience. The average hold time right now is sixteen minutes. Give me a fucking break!”
Excerpt from book “Rework” by Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson
Getting back to your customers quickly is probably the most important thing you can do as a small business entrepreneurs. However, there is so much to do and so little time. How can you possibly handle the hundreds of phone calls that come in every day without going insane?
Here come 7 Automated Ways that will help handle your numerous customer calls:
Google Voice is a FREE telecommunications service by Google launched on March 11, 2009. The service is provided to a U.S. phone number, chosen by the user from available numbers in selected area codes, free of charge to each user account. Inbound calls to this number are forwarded to other phone numbers of the subscriber. Outbound calls may be placed to domestic and international destinations by dialing the Google Voice number or from a web-based application. Cost: FREE
Skype Voicemail is the also a simple and low cost way to capture your customer voicemail. Your customers can call the Skype number. Your unanswered calls are sent to voicemail and you can listen to messages when you want, wherever you are signed in to Skype. You’ll need to buy Skype Credit to purchase voicemail but you can also use the credit to call landline and mobile phones and send SMS directly from Skype. Cost: $6 for 3 months or $20 for a full year.
RingCentral is another professional greetings, call routing and message mailboxes. You can route calls to all of your phone numbers—cell, home, landline, cousin’s house—into your RingCentral voicemail system, which eliminates the need to check multiple message lines. You can be notified of new messages, and you can listen to them from anywhere via email, phone or computer. Cost: Calls to local numbers to leave or listen to voicemail are FREE.
Voice Cloud is a real-time, voice-to-text transcription service allows multiple concurrent connections to instantaneously transcribe voicemail messages to text. Whether you are on a mobile device or online, they can immediately see who has called and what was said – ensuring that critical voicemails are never missed. Cost: $9.95 – $19.95 per month
Grasshopper is another live call forwarding and voicemail service. When you’re open for business you can have your incoming calls forwarded to your home, office or mobile phone. You specify the days of the week and the hours of the day the system will try to reach you or will roll over directly into voicemail. You can specify multiple numbers and the order in which they’re tried before the system puts the call into voice mail. You can also have your calls routed internationally. Cost: $9.95 – $199.95 per month
Vonage let you listen to your voicemail messages from any phone or by logging on to your Vonage Online Account. You can also get an email with an audio file attached, so you can listen to your voicemail messages from your PC – anytime you want. You can also get voicemail message transcripts sent to your cell phone as a text. Cost: $9.95 – $199.95 per month
eVoice is another service that answers and routes your business calls. It can transcribe your voicemail to text. Cost: $12.95 and up per month
About edith
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Edith Yeung is the Founder of BizTechDay and SFentrepreneur. She is also a lecturer at UC Berkeley International Program and committee member of the San Francisco Small Business Week. She has previously worked with AT&T Wireless, Oracle, Siebel, Autodesk, Cisco Systems, Symantec, American Management Systems (AMS), Telstra Australia, Matav Hungary Telecom and Taiwan Semi-Conductor. |
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September 23rd, 2010 at 5:25 am
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