5 Time-Saving Tips for Customer Support

    Answering customer issues and troubleshooting problems can be difficult to manage and very time-consuming. Whether you’re a one-man or one-woman show, responding to every customer yourself, or working with a team of support agents, these tips offer simple strategies to help you assist them more effectively.   1. The virtues of online support. Handling customer inquiries through online support such as email and applicable messaging software is a great way to provide thoughtful answers and solutions, as well as to keep a written record of support conversations.   To get the most out of this method, it is necessary to set up notifications so that you can quickly respond. Responding to customers online, rather than over the phone, gives you a little more time to compose an answer for them; however, you should provide an answer quickly, clearly, and as comprehensive as possible, since you ideally want to …

How to Tell if Your Prices are Too Low

Typically, business owners will quickly correct their prices in the beginning when they realize their product or service really is worth more, and people are willing to pay for it. This can, however, be a problem that you encounter later in the life of your business for a variety of reasons, such as the release of new products. Undervaluing your product can be detrimental, and it’s important to examine the following to make sure you’re not giving it away, which could kill your business. Customers are frequently and consistently surprised at your low cost. This is one of the first indicators that you’ll notice when you’re not charging enough. If you receive comments from customers on a regular basis that sound something like, “Really? That’s all it costs?”, then once you get over your regret and self-loathing for not foreseeing this, it’s time to reevaluate the cost of your product. …

4 Ways to Start Improving Your Company’s Image

    This is a word that may inspire a different idea in each person’s mind, but one thing we can all agree on is that image has to do with public perception.   For the purposes of this article, we can define image as the overall impression that your business projects to the public, whether subconscious or sensory, from which they will decide what they think of your business.   If you find that the image your business projects is negative, inaccurate, or just nonexistent, the following points are 4 things that you can do to begin to change it for the better.   1. What image do you want to project? Crafting your company image is a deliberate process. Some businesses get lucky and just naturally exude the perfect vibe, like those people who are just charismatic and cool without even trying.   The rest of us have …

Area Code, Prefix, & Other Parts of a Phone Number

Did you ever wonder where the digits in your phone number come from, and what they mean? As you probably suspected, each segment has a reason for being there. Like most codes, it contains information in each part that allows it to function properly and to send your call to the right place. If you dial a phone number using even one digit more or less than the exact code (we’ve all tried it), then you quickly find that it simply doesn’t work. While we take it for granted that phone numbers work and don’t really think about how this number connects our call, the system is made possible by those groups of numbers working together in just the right way. Now you can finally understand what each part of the phone number means, and what it does. Call it Like it Is First things first—let’s name each part of …

3 Ways to Stay Interested in Your Business

    When you’re in business, it can be very easy to become bogged down and worn out from the never-ending stream of tasks necessary for you to keep everything running smoothly. The key to becoming inspired about your work again is to find out what you enjoy about it and concentrate your efforts based on that inspiration.   1. Remind yourself why you started in this business. We all lose sight of the forest for the trees; that’s why you have to remember what it was that interested you about your line of work, in the first place. This is first step because if you can’t get back to your original motivation, then you’ll just keep spinning your wheels every day.   You can bet that the heavy workload will be much easier to shoulder when you are enthusiastic about your work. Once you remember why you started your …

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How to Port a Phone Number from Vonage to Talkroute

Porting your Vonage phone number to Talkroute is just like porting any other number, except for the fact that they do not list your phone number on the phone bill, which is necessary to prove that you have authority to port the number. This article will explain how to work around that, as well as step-by-step instructions for getting your Vonage number successfully ported to Talkroute. 1. Gather pertinent information for the number you’re porting. Before you even get started, it’s a good idea 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 submit to your Talkroute porting agent when you put in the port request. Then, call Vonage and ask them if you can have a Customer Service Report (CSR), or a similar document with another name, which contains all the …

Backup Phone System for Any Business

  Your business depends on your phones, possibly more than any other system you have. Whether by network malfunction or act of God, there is no way to predict when the phones may go temporarily out of service—but you can prepare for it. Why leave it to chance?   Talkroute forwards your calls to any phone and any provider; that means you can use your cell phone, landline, or any other phone to take business calls while your primary system is down.   You can have a fully functional phone system that requires next to no maintenance, on deck and ready for those times when your primary phones unexpectedly go out.   HERE’S HOW IT WORKS   Pick a local or toll free number from our library of phone numbers, or transfer an existing number to Talkroute, which will serve as your main backup business line.   Add forwarding phones …

4 Reasons to Convert to a Seasonal Business

    There’s a vital question you should ask yourself, when business is [persistently] slow and you can’t seem to pull it out of the slump.   Before you completely rewrite your business plan or dump thousands into a new marketing campaign, ask yourself this: Would your business do better if it were seasonal?   It’s a fundamental question that you may not have considered when you opened your business, but it might just be your golden ticket.   1. You’ll lose money paying overhead, when there are no customers. When you’re hemorrhaging cash for 6 months out of the year, it can be pretty disconcerting. If you’ve been trying everything and can’t seem to stimulate revenue, then it might not be a bad idea to shut down for part of the year.   Shutting down for a season is a big leap for a small business that is already …

How to Keep Your Business Open for Decades

It’s true that small businesses are forced to close their doors every day, but you don’t have to become a part of that statistic. If you think bigger and plan for growth, then you may be able to prevent your small business from fizzling out in the first couple years.   The keys to remaining profitable are scalability, assurance of operating capital, and constant innovation. It may not be the holy trinity of success, but these tips will make sure you’re ahead of the game. Is it scalable? No matter what you’re selling, you’re far more likely to have long-term success if your business has the continual ability to scale-up because if you reach a point where you are not reaching any new customers, there’s a good chance it will fail. You might have to get creative to position yourself for growth down the line, since not all businesses are …

5 Ways to Properly Use Emoticons at Work

You could say that it’s unprofessional, but in this day and age, using emoticons to express intention, feeling, and even inflection is fairly ubiquitous in personal, as well as professional life. If you refuse to employ these miniature expressive cartoons for work conversations, based on pure principle, then you certainly don’t have to use them, but with closer consideration, you might actually change your mind because they can be useful. Emoticons are an advancement in communication, not a necessity, and here’s how they should be used. 1. To clarify a statement. The bottom line is that emoticons are a tool. You can use them to clarify an otherwise murky statement that could be easily misunderstood. Writing to a colleague, “Looks like you finally finished that project” is different than saying, “Looks like you finally finished that project 🙂 “. One may be taken as sarcastic and borderline accusatory, while the …