Time Warner Talkroute

How to Port a Number from Time Warner to Talkroute

If you’re porting your phone number to a new service provider, and your current provider happens to be Time Warner, then you’re in luck because they usually process port-outs in a timely manner. They also make it easy to access your phone bill on demand, which your Talkroute porting agent will need for verification. Here is how to successfully port your Time Warner number to Talkroute. 1. Prepare yourself beforehand by gathering your information. Before you get started, it’s good to put together all the information you have that is associated with your phone number. Start with your most recent phone bill, which you will need to send to your Talkroute porting agent for verification. (See #3 of this article) Then, call Time Warner, and ask them if they will send you a Customer Service Report (CSR), or a similar document that contains all the information they have on file …

Talkroute Blog Year in Review: Top Posts of 2016

We’ve laughed, we’ve cried… not really—this isn’t that kind of blog. We have covered a lot of ground though, exploring everything from market research, to optimizing your phone system. Over the past year, the goal was to focus our content on understanding how a virtual phone system works, what is involved with porting a phone number, and as always, providing support for startups and small businesses of all kinds. Here are the greatest hits of what we covered over the past year: The Market Research Process: A Fresh Perspective Your goal should be to uncover specific data that will truly help you establish whether your market is large enough to sustain your business, and the only way to do it is by learning as much as possible about the people who populate your market. Keep reading 4 Simple Steps to Reducing Your Carbon Footprint This is where “going green” moves …

Set the Perfect Ring Time for Your Office Phones

    One of the most common questions we get at Talkroute is, how long should we let our phones ring? And the real question behind this is, of course: How long will it take for our customers to hang up? The obvious answer is that the caller should have to wait for as few rings as possible before someone answers, but there are just a few factors to consider.   What should the caller hear while they are holding? Whatever your customer hears before you answer should keep them happy while they wait. You know when you call your phone company, you listen to the menu options, press “0” to speak to a person, and then you hear some elevator music and an occasional voice insisting that, “Your call is very important to us”–that whole thing? Then, all of a sudden, the elevator music stops and it starts to …

Promoting Your Business as Family Can Boost Sales

Many businesses could attract a great many more customers than they are, simply by telling their story. You may not think that your story matters much to customers, but in fact it can be just the element that causes them to choose you over your competitors. You can use points like how long your company has existed, positive things that other customers have said about you, and whether or not you are a family-run business, to sway new customers in your favor. What is considered a “family business”? Just as if you were building your résumé for a new employer, you can organize the facts in such a way that it portrays your business in a more attractive light, without ever telling untruths. Businesses have long understood that customers like to hear that they are a “family-owned & operated” company; and first of all, if your business is indeed exclusively …

3 Exceptional Stories of Small Business Success

There are thousands of new small businesses opening every day, and though it’s remarkable enough to start any new business, there are some that innovate beyond what is expected. The following are 3 outstanding stories of small businesses that adapted to the demands of the market, pushed through challenging economic times, and excelled despite their circumstances. Artistic Finishes, Inc. Our recent recession put strain on many industries, and the home construction industry was among those hit the hardest. One scrappy small business based out of Roseville, MN became a much larger business when they discovered that home builders had a need for pre-finished hardwood flooring. Builders were previously forced to go through two companies—one for the material, and one for the finish. Then the flooring fabricators were forced to retool and rethink their business when the housing bubble popped. Crippled by the crash, Artistic’s revenues were cut in half, from …

Shared Office Space

In a Shared Office Space, Get Your Own Phone Bill

    For most individuals and businesses, one thing you don’t usually worry about is getting the phone bill from your service provider. This is typically not an issue because they can furnish a bill for any phone number you own upon request, at any time. In most cases, you are the account holder, which means that the provider has no problem giving you a bill or CSR (Customer Service Report) for your number whenever you need it; however, there is an exception that makes obtaining your phone bill an unexpected challenge.   The Shared Office Space There is at least one case in which you will have a really hard time getting your phone bill, and that is when, though you are the one using your phone number, you are not the account holder for this number.   This happens when your business operates out of a shared office …

Why Small Businesses Fail and How to Prevent It

We hear the statistics all the time: “Thousands of new businesses open every day; half of all businesses tank after 5 years,” and so on. So why is the outlook for new business owners so dismal? You could have an extensive, very semantic conversation about why businesses just can’t seem to make it over the hump and stay open for the long haul. There have to be some basic, overarching deficiencies that cause them to fail so quickly, right? Businesses go under for a variety of reasons, but in this post, we will attempt to pin down the thought processes of new business owners and the decisions they make to sabotage their own success. Failure to anticipate unexpected losses. It’s important to be very mindful of the position you are in during the crucial first couple of years of a new business. Like a nascent organism waking up in the …

How to Create Memorable Extensions for Your Team

When you have multiple employees in various departments, you’re probably going to want to give each of those employees their own extension. The extension numbers assigned to employees is not something that a business usually spends very much time considering, but there actually is some method, and even a little science to choosing the right number for each extension. Whether you decide to use 1, 2, 3, or 4-digit extensions, you can optimize them for memorability and consistency using the techniques described below. Tips for helping people to remember your extensions. A study published in the British Journal of Psychiatry to determine what types of numbers are the easiest to remember, in which a group of 500 test subjects participated, concluded that there are four categories of numbers that people find easiest to memorize. In order of memorability, the categories are as follows: 1. Single-digit numbers 2. Teen numbers (10-19) …

5 Places to Find Customer Feedback You Can Use

Tracking down customer feedback can be tricky business. You would think it would be easy to find, but when you actually start looking, you end up wading through all kinds of comments that may not be useful to you, if you can find them at all. What you want to look for is the negative feedback, as well as your customers’ questions that they’ve posted in various online platforms. Yes, it is great to see comments from people raving about your business, so you know what’s working, but finding out what’s wrong with your product or service is what you need, to improve. So where do you find this kind of feedback? There are a few channels where you can look for it, and they may not be obvious at first. 1) Independent Online Discussion Forums Start with a simple Google search of your business’ name, and see what comes …

How to Look Behind the Data: An Introduction

    Many small businesses are driven by data, some using it for only some operations, and others using it to direct the entire course of the business. The problem with data, though, is that it doesn’t always give you the full picture. It can even be deceiving, if you don’t know what you’re looking at. The following suggestions will help you to look at the big picture of all that data, and see what it is really telling you.   Avoiding Tunnel-Vision Looking “behind” the data sometimes means looking at a variety of factors, not just one dataset. To see the whole picture you might need to consider things like time, demographics, or pre-existing conditions. To illustrate what I mean, imagine that you’re examining the number of units of a product that were sold for the month. It’s easy to just say, “We sold 20% fewer units than the …