Big business on a small business budget - Part 3 of 3
Posted on May 18, 2008 at 1:00 am by Kolgoth">
Kolgoth
This post is the third and final in a 3-part series about making your small business appear larger than it’s true size. The first post focused on the value of a website to your business. The second post discussed the merit and necessity of quality branding. If you haven’t taken the time to read them or are a new visitor, please check out Part 1 and Part 2 of this series. Remember, your ultimate goal is to get the most growth for your dollar so without further adieu - read on for the final tip in this series for how to give your business a larger appearance to your potential customers…
The final simple and often overlooked component of this series is a phone system. I’ve never dealt with a multimillion dollar organization that did not have an extension-based phone system. It’s one of the costs of doing business at that point. Someone or something has to route calls to the appropriate individuals in a large company and although this role is often augmented by a human who parses the calls for select individuals (such as executives & sales departments) or perhaps a front desk receptionist during standard business hours for all incoming calls, more often than not it’s handled primarily by a PBX system.
Just a quick review for those unfamiliar; PBX stands for Private Branch Exchange. For more information than you really need or care to know, check out the Wikipedia entry. In essence, it’s a computerized telephony switchboard for a specific company, rather than the general public. It handles call routing for the incoming phone number to specific extensions that are associated with individuals or departments. These are the systems that we all love to loathe. I can’t tell you how many times I personally have muttered into the phone “I just want to talk to a REAL PERSON!” Despite the potential annoyance, it’s a necessary evil and can make your life significantly easier. The key to overcoming this annoyance is in your voice recorded menu, make sure you list 0 as the first option, “If you’d like to speak to a FuzionTek representative immediately, please press 0″ and then continuing with “If you’d like to speak to Sales, Press 1. For purchasing, press 2.” and so on and so forth. If you can afford it, have the recording done professionally. If not, just do it yourself - write yourself a script, practice it and record it. It’s that simple!
The value in adding a PBX, notedly a VOIP PBX (Wikipedia article on VOIP here), is that you appear to have many more employees and organizational hierarchy than is actually present in your organization. You can have an extension for Sales, Technical Support, Purchasing, etc and rather than the extensions listed on the voice recording or your website actually going to a person who’s job is dedicated to that - it can all forward directly to your cell phone or perhaps a single multiline VOIP desk phone. You also get a tremendous amount of features that can often cost a high premium from your local telephone provider. These can include voice mail, conference calling, music-on-hold, call waiting, caller ID, and simultaneous ring, all often found the with the ability to manage your phone system from an easy-to-use online control panel.
Now for the favorite part - cost! You’d be amazed at the low cost options that are available to you nowadays. If you’re looking for a quality provider that can help you with the setup to make the process as easy as possible and do so at a price point that’s extremely competitive for the level of service, I recommend giving the folks at HelpDesk Georgia a call (Disclosure: I do contract work occasionally with them to assist with the occassional influx of work) and talking to them about what would be best for your organization. I also recommend that you do some shopping around - check out VOIPRanks.com and VOIPReview.org for additional companies and resources. Of course, don’t forget to Google it. If you have knowledge and ability to support and host your own servers, check out solutions for Asterisk/Trixbox on google. Using services similar to VoicePulse’s VoicePulse Connect, you can get a phone line with free incoming minutes for as little as $11/month. Just as an aside; no I’m not affiliated with VoicePulse in anyway - just happens to be one of the companies my clients have used in the past that I believe has a good price point.
At least for now, the business world still associates phone extensions with brick & mortar operations. This works in your favor - your operation can be the epitome of business 2.0 and run your company while sitting on the beach in Fiji and still accept calls like you’re sitting in your office at your 14,000 square foot building. How’s that for a hard life?
This concludes our first series about how to make your business appear larger on a typical small business budget - if you’ve got any ideas, input or even rebuttals - please let me know in the comments - I’d love to hear from you!
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