Don’t Let Adversity Throw You Off Your Game

  Maintaining a successful small business is fraught with battles every day, that threaten to compromise what you’ve worked so hard to build, and it is enough to injure your confidence or even make you feel as if you need to change course. It’s just resistance, otherwise known as adversity, and it’s important to remember that it is something you can overcome.   Put It In Perspective When you are trying to expand, for example, and your investors won’t part with any more dough, no matter how lucrative you propose it to be, that’s not the end of the story for your expansion. You can come up with a more convincing proposal, sell it to other investors, and at the very least, continue to be successful at your company’s current size & scope and expand it later on. That’s just one example, but the point is that you can’t let …

How the Auto Attendant Changed the Game

  Adding an auto attendant to your phone system gives you a great advantage over the typical system that simply rings your phones directly for a staff member to pick up your calls. For some organizations, sending calls directly to your phones works very well and suits the nature of the business; however, an auto attendant can, in many scenarios, save time for your employees and manage calls far more efficiently. An auto attendant has many names. You might call it a phone tree, IVR (Interactive Voice Response), or as we call it at Talkroute, a Call Menu. Whatever you call it, the auto attendant was a groundbreaking innovation that provides businesses with massive benefits. These are a few.   Block Spammers & Robo-Dialers One of the most common reasons that people want a service with an auto attendant is to use it as a first line of defense against …

Is Greater Technology Becoming a Distraction?

Do you ever get the feeling that you’re not operating at full capacity? It’s difficult to pin down what the reason for that is, and though there is sometimes an event or personal hardship that takes you down a notch, it usually happens gradually. You’re plugging along, putting out the daily fires, but you wake up one day and suddenly realize that you haven’t been getting as much done as you were before. There are a variety of things that may be holding you back, most of which are totally fixable. The Distracted Age More than ever, we all have to be aware of the many things that can distract us from our work these days, especially environmental and technological factors. We’re living in the Information Age, but we could well call it the Distracted Age. There are so many things that constantly vie for our attention, from political and …

Toll Free Numbers

Toll Free Numbers Make Your Business Seem Bigger

Obviously, a simple phone number isn’t going to grow your business in a literal sense, but a toll free number will give customers the impression that you have a larger reach. There is a reason that toll free numbers exist today, and it goes beyond the original purpose of advertising a phone number that people knew was not going to cost them anything if they dialed it. These numbers convey a very effective message, telling them that the business attached to it is a solid, established business with a broad reach. The Power of Association In the memory of most people, a toll free number is what they always saw attached to large companies, like the phone company or a big-box retail store, to name a couple. A toll free number has a certain feel that seems omni-regional, large-scale, national. It is a programmed psychological connection of which we can …

How to Be Calm When Dealing with Customers

Do your customers ever make you angry? It’s pretty much guaranteed that it will happen sometimes, which is why it’s imperative that you have a plan to manage it. Some CSRs have a talent for this, and some do not; so, if you’re not talented with the endless capacity for kindness, then this post will give you some tools not just to act the part of someone who is kind (which will come off as sarcastic and disingenuous, anyway), but to truly quell your anger when dealing with tough customers. Put Our Weapons Down It’s the solution to so many different problems, where it concerns people. When you put yourself in the position of the person with whom you’re speaking and try to see the situation through their eyes, it will disarm you most of the time. That’s when you can actually help them, which then makes them treat you …

Using Call Queues to Manage Your Business Calls

What are call queues good for? We all know basically what they do, but is there a way to optimize how you use them? Every virtual phone service does call queues a little differently, approaching call management from different angles. The one constant is that they allow you to support multiple calls at the same time, which is even more valuable if you use them to their full potential. Part of a Balanced On-Hold Program Like the rest of your phone system, call queues are only as effective as their weakest link, and there are a couple of things that need to work together to create an on-hold program that does what it’s supposed to do—manage caller fatigue and keep them on the line. One crucial thing is that, even though the caller is just waiting for you to answer, there still has to be something happening on the line …

How to Write the Subject Line of a Marketing Email

  How much time do you spend thinking about the subject line of your emails before you send them out? Hopefully, you spend a good while thinking about it because it’s more important than the body of the email, by far.   Think of It as a Blog Post Headline Marketers these days are focusing a lot of their energy on blog content, written as well as video, and we all realize at this point that the headline of a post is one of the most crucial elements of the content, if not the most crucial. Within seconds, the headline is what will make the recipient decide to either click through, or ignore the post. Marketing emails are less popular now, but they are still used because they still convert. The subject line of an email is equally important.   Would You Click On It? We’ve harped on this many …

Why You Should Give Toll Free Numbers a Try

Does your business have a toll free number? It’s understandable if you want to project a connection with your community with a local phone number, which is a tried and true strategy. Meanwhile, there are always toll free numbers available if you want to convey an established, national feel to customers. The following reasons are why you should consider it. A Variety of Area Codes Many people think that toll free numbers only have the (800) area code, but that’s definitely not the case. A toll free number can have the area codes, 888, 877, 866, 855, 844, or 833—and they are all the same type of phone number; there is no difference except for the digits in the area code. That gives you a lot of options, so that you’re much more likely to find the number that you want, as opposed to the limited selection you’ll find in …

When the Luster of Your New Business Wears Off

The dictionary literally defines luster as “a period of five years”. That’s one of its definitions, anyway, but the point is that it is temporary. When you open a new business that is well-planned out, there’s a good chance that you’ll have great success and hopefully, broad acceptance from the market. The challenge is that, for many small businesses, that initial period of massive popularity will be short-lived—probably a lot shorter than five years—after which the luster fades and revenue plateaus. This is extremely common, though, and it is a phenomenon that a company can overcome with the right strategy. Innovate The first and best way to overcome this obstacle is to continue to innovate. It’s really easy to keep on doing what brought you so much success in the first place, and whatever you’re already doing will bring you loyal customers who got in on the ground floor. But …

NOVA Landscape and Design

Ali Hashimi, Owner & Founder Talkroute User since September 2016 www.novalandscapedesign.com   Ali is not new to the game of running a business. He has decades of experience in his field, and like many small business owners today, Ali found that his outdated phone system could not support the growth of his business. He searched for a solution to his telephone woes, and he found Talkroute. Here is the story of how Ali transformed his business with a virtual phone system:   My name is Ali Hashimi, and I’m the President and Founder of NOVA Landscape and Design. We are a design build landscaping firm located in Dumfries, Virginia, and we have been servicing the greater Northern Virginia area for over 20 years. I first came across Talkroute while doing research for a virtual phone system for our growing landscape business. I spoke to numerous companies; however, none of them …