VA – Dictation Line

A ‘Dictation Line’ is Born – April 2010

OK here is my latest snippet of information, a tiny glimpse into the exciting world of hosted communications where only the fittest survive, and the possibilities are endless!!

Project 1: – Dictation Line

They say that the best ideas are the simple ones and this project is a case in point.

I picked up an incoming enquiry from a very nice lady responding to one of our e-shots. She was a Virtual Assistant (VA) and had been on the lookout for a dictation Service and had tried a number of software packages, but had yet to find anything that either worked or was easy to use.

At this point we didn’t actually have a product called a Dictation Line, but it didn’t sound like rocket science. All she was after was a telephony service that her clients could call to dictate a letter or two and a playback facility!

The solution came by adapting our One 2 Voicemail service so that a message of up to one hour long could be left. The final product came with an 0844 Access Number, login details for our call management platform to playback or download the recordings and a personalised Intro Message along the lines of the one below:

“Thank you for calling the VA Dictation Line. Your recording can last for a maximum of one hour… please do remember to speak clearly, giving your contact name at the start of your dictation. You can start recording after the tone… Here comes the tone”

Now there hasn’t exactly been a rush for this yet, but I am thinking that at just £25 set up & £5 per month, my phone will soon be ringing off the hook !!

Michael Jones
Teleproject UK Limited
Tel: 0800 316 8605
www.teleproject-uk.com

Create A Virtual Office

The Virtual Office
As someone who has been involved in setting up three businesses in the last 20 years, I really was amazed when starting our current venture in July 09, at just how easy it now is to create a professional business infrastructure for minimal outlay and without the need for business premises, a Virtual Office if you like.

The convergence of two industry sectors, namely IT & Telecoms has given birth to a new breed of hosted communications solutions that will help to make your new or existing business a more flexible and responsive outfit. The great news is that for most of these services there is little or no capital outlay and no lengthy contracts, meaning you can get up and running quickly without hitting your cash flow too hard.

At the hub of every virtual office is a broadband connection, this can be a fixed or wireless broadband in your home office or a dongle to use with your laptop, if you have this in place and a mobile you can easily create a virtual office.
Put simply a ‘hosted’ service is one where the equipment delivering the technology is located offsite at the supplier’s premises. We use a number of hosted solutions to help shape our business, here are the main ones:

A Hosted Telephone System:
In my home office I have a Cisco IP Telephone Handset which plugs into my BT broadband router, enabling me to make calls over the internet at a reduced rate. Two of my colleagues are on the same system and despite the fact that we are in three separate locations we can transfer calls between each other, place calls on hold with music and see when one of us is already on a call. The service also comes with voicemail and whilst we each have a direct line, any of us can pick up the designated main line. Calls between our group are free of charge which is great. The phone has all the features of a phone system yet costs approx £80 for the handset and £10 per user per month.

Hosted Desktop:
We have in effect outsourced our server and software requirements. This service gives us the latest version of Microsoft Professional plus our email (Outlook). The only difference is that we access our hosted desktop via our broadband connection rather than using the hard drive on our PC’s. We have also been able to add our own licensed version of Sage Accounting software. The benefits to our business are immense, importantly it means I can access my desktop and email from anywhere, the remote servers that are hosting our service are very quick and more secure than my pc or laptop, and our data is automatically backed up every four hours. The hosted desktop service also includes synchronising our email, calendar and task lists with our Blackberry’s, so we really are able to work from anywhere in the world. The hosted desktop service is widely available and costs between £40 & £50 per user per month…… A Virtual Office & Your IT Support Covered.

Virtual Telephone Numbers:
The wrap around our business is our virtual telephone numbers that come with loads of inbound call management features as standard and can be controlled online 24/7.
For our main line we decided to use an 0800 number so that customers can call us free of charge from a landline, we use this in conjunction with one of the call management features known as a Virtual Reception. This is a simple menu driven service with three options, in our case Press 1 for Sales, Press 2 for Technical Support and Press 3 for Accounts. We have set this up so that calls to the sales department are first directed to an external live call answering service at a cost to us of £1 per call, before calls are patched through to one of our mobiles based on the nature of the enquiry. Calls for the technical support department are directed to our team in Manchester and calls to the accounts department are directed to a voicemail service where the caller is asked to leave a message on our ring back service, these messages are automatically emailed to me and I am usually able to call the customer back within the hour.
In addition to the main line we each have an 0844 number as a direct line. This has a Call to Group feature set up. I love this feature it is so simple, but incredibly effective, whenever someone calls, both my office landline and my mobile ring at the same time, if I am working from home I answer the call using my landline handset and if I am on the road I use my mobile. There is a cost to me of 10p per min when I use my mobile, but I keep the calls short and call people back.
The majority of telecoms service providers offer a similar service and you should be able to achieve the same for approximately £200 set up and £20 per month.
Well that is how we did it…….. not only are hosted services cost effective, they are quick to implement and scalable. If we take in to account our Blackberry’s, mobile broadband plus all of the above services our cost per person per month is less than £125 including the various call charges.

Michael Jones
Teleproject UK Limited
Tel: 0800 316 8605
http://www.teleproject-uk.com

Inbound Call Handling

March 2010 – Inbound Call Handling Overview

After a typically slow January business really picked at the beginning of Feb and the enquiries have been coming in thick and fast. The best thing about my role at Teleproject UK is the variety of projects that I get to work on and the great people that we get to collaborate with.  Below is just a few of the opportunities that came our way last month.

Project 1: – SMS API

I was approached by the Director of an existing client who use us as one of their inbound telecoms providers, the conversation went like this “mike you mentioned that you offer a SMS (text message) service, our current provider is having problems and our service has been down for a number of hours, can you help?”

In this situation SMS was an integral part of the client’s day to day business model, not a marketing tool, if we were going to help we would need to act fast.

Well the call came in at 5.20pm and by 6pm all of the client’s SMS messages were being delivered via our platform. One of our technicians had called the client’s head of IT and given him our API and login details for our online management system, after a quick chat they were on the same page and in no time the backlog of messages were delivered.

 

Project2: – Hosted Call Queuing

I had been calling this particular call centre manager for a while so was very pleased to receive his call “mike we have been asked to provide live call answering for a product recall campaign, we anticipate 60,000 calls averaging 5 minutes each across the course of 1 month and we would like to look at the call queuing system that you showed us in November to see if it is suitable”

This was great news, hosted call queuing is a core product on our platform so I was confident that we would impress. The call came in on a Tuesday and the campaign was due to start with national press advertising on the following Monday, so we needed to quickly demonstrate that Teleproject UK and our call queuing system were up to the job.

The key issue was to demonstrate that our queuing system could regulate the number of calls that are fed through to the call centre agents at any one time, fortunately this is a standard feature and we were able to demonstrate that by using a simple drop down menu in the online management system they could instantly change the number of agents from 1 to 200.

After a quick chat with our technical director about how we handle callers that want to opt out of the queue and leave their contact details for a ring back, it was over to me to discuss the commercials. This was easy, we do not charge set up fees or rentals for this type of project and as the client had chosen to use a 0844 number to front the campaign we were able to offer a very generous revenue share for every minute of call traffic generated by the campaign.

The latest news on this project is that we have just completed the first week without a hitch and I am now trying to think of a promotion / incentive for the agents based on perhaps the agent who takes most calls or agents that answer the 10,000^th call, 20,000^th call etc… let you know what I come up with!

Project3: – Active Cab

New business opportunities really can pop up in the most unexpected way, as project no 3 proves. It all started when I called for a taxi, I hadn’t used this firm, before but had been let down by my regular firm so gave them a go. When I rang I noticed that my call was greeted by an automated service that transferred my call directly to the driver rather than go through to a live controller.

More often than not I would have said nothing, but on this occasion I decided to make enquiries, explaining that it was a service that we could offer on our IVR platform, if they were ever unhappy with their current provider. There was some interest as the driver asked me for a business card and said that he would pass it on.

Wow….  the very next day I got a call from one of the partners of this taxi firm, who told me that they were unhappy with their current provider and would like to meet with me to discuss the possibility of Teleproject UK building them a bespoke version of this service.

 The initial meeting went well, the guys from the taxi firm were serious about moving their inbound call handling business and I was able to give them some good news. Prior to the meeting I had put a call into our technical director to enquire if we had built this type of service before and as good luck would have it we actually had a finished product.

On the surface this appears like a typical call centre application with calls coming in through one main number and being distributed to the next available operator, only in this case the agents aren’t sat in a call centre but in their cars with calls directed to their mobile phones. In reality there is significantly more going on, which explains why by all accounts this service had taken the best part of six months to build plus testing. Like all of our services Active Cab can be managed online, however in this instance there are three sets of permission based login details, Cab Company, Supervisor and Driver. Other online features include management of call recordings, detailed call logs that offer a real insight in to who, when and for how long plus a breakdown of call charges per driver for internal billing purposes.

From an operational perspective the system has caller CLI barring, callers who call back within 25 minutes to chase up their cab are directed back to the same driver, a dedicated number for drivers to login and log out with, a ring back feature to let customers know that their cab is outside and half a dozen other features that make this service a genuine alternative to having a physical radio controlled set up.

It was decided that the next stage would be for me to give our prospective clients access to a test service that they could evaluate at their own leisure, since we had already uncovered a couple of changes that they would like to make.

Well that’s about it for now, next update along in a couple of weeks.

 

Michael Jones

Teleproject UK Limited

Tel: 0800 316 8605

www.teleproject-uk.com