Ways to Use Call Forwarding Numbers to Draw Global Business Assets

AirWalk Telecom

call-forwardingGlobal business dealings have long been filled with challenges due to the difficulties concerned with maintaining and managing worldwide communications. Fortunately for companies considering global expansion, modern developments in telecommunications have finally made conducting trade on a worldwide level easy, attainable, and affordable. We recommend using Hoverwatch to track your phone calls.

How call forward numbers assist your company to develop?

An International Call Forwarding service allows you to make toll free phone numbers or your individual local phone numbers active anywhere in the world, meaning it is ideal for setting up a virtual or remote office anywhere on the earth. International call forwarding service offers local toll free numbers or call forwarding numbers from almost all countries and cities all over the world.

The international call forwarding system is designed principally for businesses desiring to set up a virtual presence all over the world through activating local call forwarding numbers or toll free numbers. These numbers operate as a local point of contact and forward incoming phone calls to any number in the world. If your business is located in the United Kingdom and if you would like to set up a local point of contact in the United States, France, Singapore and Germany, the international call forwarding service can offer local call forwarding numbers or toll free numbers in these nations. Once the numbers are made active, all incoming calls to these numbers in those countries will be forwarded locally to your business in the United Kingdom or to a specific call center chosen by you to get these calls.

The skill to redirect calls is very essential for businesses and for recurrent travelers. Instead of having to leave outgoing notes to people, informing them to call a diverse phone number, it is much easier to just redirect calls to another phone line. If you redirect your calls, you will have no necessity to concern about missing vital calls.

How you can develop your business through international call forwarding numbers?

As an international call forwarding service is crammed with all essential features for developing a company, you can rest guaranteed that you would be on the successful track of perking up your business.

The call recording feature of the service facilitates you to record all your incoming calls or just a smaller proportion of the calls acknowledged from any of your call forwarding numbers and heed them any time. You can even set up a confidential phone network to hook up your incoming phone calls with your internal telephone extensions or set up a greeting system to handle all your incoming calls.

When you use the international call forwarding service, you can improve the productivity of your business. You can achieve a superior operational efficiency that will translate into savings and cost benefits for your business, irrespective of its size.

Conclusion

Call forwarding is conventionally a tool that forwards incoming phone calls from one phone number to an added number. Though once call forwarding service was used only in the case a busy or disconnected main line, several business owners are currently start switching to the international call forwarding service. This service incorporates online call administration centers, that use call forwarding numbers to allow virtual number activation, which is one among the most admired tools of the international call forwarding service, and it enables the creation of local global phone numbers, which allow international customers, clients, and business relations to start the communication devoid of inviting long distance toll charges.

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Get a Toll Free Number for Your Ecommerce Store

AirWalk Telecom

marketing-strategies-426545_640All right, let’s talk for a minute about toll free numbers. Like I mentioned before, people get all freaked out when they hear “toll-free number”, they think, “Wow this is going to be this expensive, huge, challenging set-up that’s going to take a week or two or three” and that couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s super cheap and super simple. Activation happens instantly, you have the entered number the same day.

Credibility and Perception

Now the main reason you want a toll-free number isn’t necessarily so you can sit and answer the phone all day. Really, the biggest benefit to getting a toll free number is to be able to display it on your website. It instantly adds credibility and trust to your users and is an easy to remember tool for customers to give you a call. As soon as they get to your site, if they see an 800 number displayed on the template of your Ecommerce store, instantly, whether they realize it or not, subconsciously they think “This is a credible, trustworthy place that I should feel secure giving my credit card number to.”

Of all the trust graphics, which is what we call basically anything you display on your store that increases the trust of the visitors. Of all the trust graphics, getting an 1 800 toll free number is probably the biggest conversion improvement trust graphic you can display. It really gives that established, trustworthy company feel to all your websites, and like I mentioned before, you can actually use your 1-800 number for all your Ecommerce stores. So this is a small expense that you have to incur for this first store that you can use for all your upcoming stores.

So, like I said, you don’t necessarily need to man the phone all day. What we generally do and what we recommend is put a nice professional voicemail message for your customers that basically says something along the lines of “Thank you for calling our customer service department, we’re currently assisting other customers. Please leave your name, phone number and a detailed message and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.” So anybody that goes to voicemail just gets the perception, they get the idea that you’re really busy, you’re a successful store and if they seem like they are interested in ordering you can call them back. If their question is totally irrelevant and you don’t think there’s any chance they’re going to order, you can brush it off and not even return the call if you don’t want to.

During regular business hours, during the middle of the day when we’re at our computer or whatever, we do try to answer the phone because you will get some orders over the phone that you may not have gotten if you hadn’t answered the phone. So it is recommended to try and answer it during the day, but again you don’t need to feel like you’re a slave to your 800 number.

Recommendations for Toll Free Numbers

Now, we have a recommendation for toll free numbers and they’re called Global Call Forwarding and United World Telecom we feel the same way about Global Call Forwarding for 800 numbers as we feel about HostGator for hosting. We’ve been using Global Call Forwarding for several years now. 100% reliable, super cheap, great customer service, easy to configure, very professional set-up. Their basic plan — their lowest plan is $14.99 a month and again you can use that for all your stores. That includes, I believe, a 100 minutes, which should do you just fine for your first couple months. Once you start getting more traffic and sales and you’re getting more calls and using more minutes, you can step-up to the next plan which is what we use. And I believe that’s $29.99 a month and it includes like a thousand minutes, so that should be plenty of minutes for you, no matter how many stores you get. If you’re needing more than a thousand a month, you’re doing really well and that’s going to be the least of your problems is needing more 800 number minutes.

Now the cool thing about Global Call Forwarding is it’s so customizable, you can set it up to when your customer calls it says your business name, it gives them hold music, you can have it ring multiple phones simultaneously, you can have it ring your cellphone, your home phone, your Skype number whatever it might be. You can have it ring multiple numbers at the same time, or you can do a sequential order type thing where it rings your cellphone twice, and then your home phone twice and then your Skype number twice and then go to voicemail. It’s fully customizable so within their simple control panel you can set up business hours, off hours, you can even set it up to Follow me. You can create a rule, that’s basically the Follow me rule and whenever you’re taking off, leaving home for a while and you don’t want to miss customer calls you can change the Follow me rule and it will ring your cell while you’re gone.

What we do is, we actually have a Skype phone number on our computer and when we get an 800 number, we answer it with our Skype and then we can use our headset and talk to the customer while we continue to work on whatever we need to work on. So it keeps our hands free and we can do whatever we need to while we talk to the customer on the headset and that works great.

If you look below, there’s links to a couple good articles. One is to help you configure your Global Call Forwarding account and do all those cool things I just told you about and then the other one is how to use Global Call Forwarding with your Skype number which is what we do and what we recommend. So check those out.

That really does it for 800 numbers. The sign-up to start your two week free trial with Global Call Forwarding is actually below this video. Again this is something you can wait on, if you’re on a super tight budget, you can list your actual personal home or cell number for now or no number at all on your web store for now. But as soon as you can afford it, and if you can afford it today, we recommend getting an 800 number for your business as soon as possible, because it will increase your conversion rate.

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Most small businesses weak on phones

AirWalk Telecom

A majority of Americans use their cell phone at least once a day, and an increasing number of small businesses and startups are employing mobile devices for business purposes.

However, even with this increase in use, a surprising number of small businesses have yet to tap into the benefits a mobile strategy can bring, particularly considering the cost and mobility benefits new technology services offer, such as a virtual phone system.

According to a recently released Small Business Mobile Survey by Web.com, more than 61 percent of companies surveyed have no clear mobile strategy in place. Conversely, nearly 70 percent of SMBs said they believe mobile marketing is the key to business growth within the next five years.

“With more and more consumers specifically searching for local businesses on their mobile device, it is imperative that small businesses invest in a mobile presence,” chairman and CEO of Web.com David Brown said in a press release.

This is especially pertinent given that nearly half of Americans are using smartphones. In February 2012, research from the Pew Internet and American Life Project showed 45 percent of U.S. cell phone owners have an internet-enabled device, Fox reported.

This development can give businesses that utilize cloud services such as a virtual phone system the ability to incorporate professional features like call forwarding or call recording.

Small businesses that incorporate a virtual phone system from a provider such as United World Telecom or Onebox gain the advantages of a professional phone system without the high cost and need to install hardware. Benefits include a professional greeting, extensions, call forwarding, call recording, voicemail to email, and more.

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Three Ways A Mobile App Can Make You More Efficient

AirWalk Telecom

2015-06-16_1209A recent survey of customers shows that 71% use a mobile phone most frequently to conduct business. These days, there is a mobile app for almost anything you can think of. There are now over 400,000 apps for just the iPhone according to the latest numbers from Apple. Trying to determine which apps are right for you can be a difficult and time consuming process. Finding apps that are actually useful for you can be even more challenging, and costly. In this post, I will show how the eVoice mobile app can be a useful tool in managing your communications efficiently.

When a Product Team develops a mobile app, one of the primary goals is to provide customers with a simple and useful way to access some of the most popular features of the service. One of the key benefits of a service like UWT is the ability to maintain a professional image at all times, no matter where you are answering or making international phone calls.

Many customers are consultants, freelancers, self-employed, or entrepreneurs trying to run a business by themselves or with just a few employees. Hiring a full-time, or even part-time, employee to answer and direct calls simply isn’t in the budget for many of these businesses. While there are “Live Receptionist” services that are less expensive than hiring a receptionist, they can still cost more than 10 times the amount of a virtual phone number.

eVoice acts as a “virtual receptionist” that answers inbound calls, professionally greets callers, and automatically routes calls to any phone. Here are some situations where the free mobile app for your iPhone, Android, or BlackBerry device becomes especially useful.

1. Make outbound calls from your virtual phone number.

Let’s say you have a client, Matt, that you call on a regular basis. Matt is very busy and only accepts calls from numbers he recognizes, and he has your virtual phone number listed in his contacts. You have left your office early to visit the dentist. While you are in the waiting room, you read a voicemail message (yes, I said read – more on that in #2) that indicates Matt needs to hear from you about an important transaction. Matt is an important client and you want to get in touch right away, but Matt might not answer a call from your personal cell phone. However, with the eVoice mobile app you can place an outbound call using your virtual phone number. Matt will recognize the number, even though you are calling from your personal cell phone, and you just provided great service to an important client.

2. Manage your voicemail messages more effectively.

Natalie works as a successful wedding photographer. She gets a lot of phone calls from prospective clients with contact information, and also from wedding magazine sales reps asking her to advertise. Because she is often working a shoot or meeting with clients, most of her callers get forwarded to voicemail. The eVoice virtual phone number she uses as her business number includes voicemail transcriptions. Within seconds of getting a new voicemail, the message is transcribed to text and sent to her mobile app. Natalie can now quickly read the voicemail message on her phone. This is beneficial in several ways. First, it saves her the time of having to call in and retrieve messages via the phone. Time that is better spent attending to her business. Second, it allows her to organize messages and search transcriptions. That way, if she needs to reference the important information in a previous message; she can search for text in a message or even organize messages into folders for clients and vendors. The last benefit is related to #1. The mobile app provides call back functionality for voicemail messages and transcriptions. Simply select “Call Back” from the mobile app, and it will place a call to the caller id number used when the message was left.

3. Speed Dial.

The mobile app contains a speed dial section that allows you to easily add numbers to your list of important contacts. This feature also syncs with your online account management settings so that you can make changes on your phone and change or update them at a later time on your PC.

These are just some ways that the eVoice mobile app can be used to maintain your business image. Please feel free to share with us how eVoice is helping your business, or tell us what other mobile apps you find helpful.

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Six Ways To Think Differently About Work

AirWalk Telecom

Breaking … or at least bending … the rules, has been a consistent part of a marketing professional’s success for many years.

Perhaps it’s the creative instinct and drive which fuels a marketing professional’s desire toThink Different (to reference a famous tagline from notoriously marketing-savvy Apple).

Thinking different-ly often leads to working different-ly.

If you’re a mobile professional (and, who isn’t these days?), adapting your work approach to accommodate an on-the-go lifestyle can be challenging, but it can be done.

This is particularly true if you utilize mobile technology such as an iPad and/or cloud services like a virtual phone number or online fax service to help you stay in touch with your business while on the go..

For mobile marketing professionals, here are 6 tips that will help you work differently.
1. Set up a virtual office
The modern office is no longer defined by walls and cubicles. Your business, and your customers, are on the move. A cloud-based phone system, also known as a virtual phone system, can turn your smartphone into a mobile office with features like call routing, call screening, multiple extensions, personalized greetings, voice to text, and more.

2. Stop listening to voicemail messages
Juggling the busy demands of the day can make it difficult to answer every call. Get “voice to text” so voicemails are transcribed to a text message or email, allowing you to stay in the loop and prioritize responses. Being able to discreetly read messages while in a meeting helps you stay connected to the needs of customers and team members in real time.

Click on the following podcast to listen to an interview with marketing professional Ann Lazo, owner of Eagle Soars Consulting.
3. Get to the track
Using phone numbers to track advertising campaign performance isn’t a new tactic. However, being able to easily forward those calls and generate reports on those campaigns is an often overlooked feature of a service like eVoice. By using a toll-free or local virtual phone number, marketers can easily assign unique numbers to campaigns and instantly identify the best sources of traffic and ensure calls are being answered immediately by forwarding them to any location.

4. Meet me in the cloud
Motivate teams, customers and vendors to action with web conferencing. Use web conferencing to collaborate with remote team members, conduct marketing surveys or meet with clients. Web conferencing allows you to turn your desktop or laptop into a mobile conference room enabling you to maintain communication regardless of your location.

5. Reinforce a professional image
Your phone system makes a strong statement about your brand. Whether you are a business of one or a small business, a professionally recorded greeting message and an auto attendant can maximize the impression of professionalism with customers and further the credibility of your brand.

6. Think outside the box, and boundaries
Technology has eliminated the barriers of geographic location. A toll-free business phone number gives your marketing business a nationwide presence and the credibility associated with large, well established companies. Meanwhile, utilizing local phone numbers can help marketers reach new customers with easily recognizable prefixes.

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