Work From a Home Virtual Office – The #1 Way to Cut Your Overhead and Still Operate at Full Strength
When business slows down, you need to act fast to conserve your capital while you wait out the cycle. Today, millions of business people are saving big money by closing their expensive offices and working from their home office. Like most things, there is a right way and a wrong way to do this.
The wrong way is to move your office phones into your house and answer the phones yourself. First of all, you will still be paying the phone company for your business phone and fax numbers. Next, by answering all calls yourself, you are loading yourself up with all of the work that used to be performed by your staff. Finally, when you are not in your home office, you will lose calls. Yes, they may go to voice mail, but nobody calls your business to leave a message. They call to talk with someone. And if you are not available, even if they do leave a message, they will probably call a competitor who does answer the phone.
So what is the Right Way? First, find a Virtual Office service provider who will let you transfer your phone and fax numbers to them. You will probably save hundreds of dollars every month, because you will not have to pay the phone company anymore.
Ask your Virtual Office provider to set up a virtual Auto Attendant, using your phone number. Callers will hear your custom menu, something like: “Thank you for calling The Mortgage Brokers. If you know the extension of the person you are calling, you may enter it at any time or press 9 for the Dial by Name Directory. For information on a new mortgage, or to refinance your existing mortgage, press 1. If you are calling to check the status of your mortgage application, press 2. For our address, fax number and hours of operation, press 3. All other callers, press 4.”
Calls are transferred to you and your staff, live, wherever you are, at your home office or cell phone, just as if you were in the office. You should also have features such as Station to Station Transfer, that allows you to transfer a call to someone else in your company, with just a couple of keystrokes.
When you do not take a call, voice mail will take your messages. You can listen to your messages by phone. Voice mail will also deliver the messages to you by email, so you can listen to your messages over your computer or any Internet devise. This also gives you a permanent record of each message.
Your Virtual Office will also receive and deliver your faxes to your email. The cost of Fax to Email is so low, that you should give everyone their own private fax number.
A complete Virtual Office, including extensions, call transfer and fax to email is as little as $19.95mo yet, you will sound like a professional, quality and trustworthy business and no one will know that you are actually working from that extra bedroom. You will save money and will probably sound even more professional then when you were working in an office.
Mark Gordon is the President of American Voice Mail. American Voice Mail is a hosted service provider that has provided telephone Virtual Office services to over 1 Million clients. American Voice Mail owns one of the world’s largest telephone number networks with local virtual office telephone numbers and services in 40 countries worldwide.
Copyright 2007 Mark Gordon