VirtualPBX Blog
Add Some Holiday Cheer, and Best Practices, to Your Phone System
Posted on December 11, 2018 by Casey Houser
Today’s guest post comes from Snap Recordings, a professional voice recording service provider with over 100 male and female voice talents that has been recognized as a leader in professional voice recordings for business phone systems. Order professionally recorded greetings by Snap Recordings from within your Dash account.
Most businesses will see a significant increase in phone calls during the busy holiday season. While this is great for your bottom line, more callers means longer hold times, and that can create caller frustration during an already stressful time of year. Does your phone system have the holiday cheer necessary to keep callers happy and engaged?
By adding professional holiday greetings and music to your business phone system, you can create a more festive experience for callers and reduce hangups. Meanwhile, you can focus on critical operations like tackling customer concerns and shipping goods.
Best of all, you don’t need to start from scratch. Simply adding some festive holiday background music and short seasonal greetings to your existing messages may be all you need to see positive results. Try these phone system preparation methods as soon as possible.
Add Holiday Cheer to Your Telephone Greeting
When you adjust your holiday hours and customer greetings in the VirtualPBX phone system, you give your callers the opportunity to stay up-to-date with ongoing company events. With a simple, friendly greeting, you can offer the courtesy of mentioning your changing schedule, and you can lighten the load on your receptionist.
Moreover, you can cross-promote your products and services to a captive audience. Customers may have to sit on hold for a few more minutes than usual, so it’s in your best interest to share important information about new products and possible shipping time changes while your audience is waiting.
Do all this with a bit of mirth. Research from as far back as the 1980’s has shown that providing structure to on-hold programming — through appropriate messages and music — can help reduce the perceived time a caller thinks they’re on hold. In short, your cheerfulness in messaging that sits alongside festive music can decrease the mental strain customers feel when they wait for a live company representative.
Express your gratitude to your customers and clients. Let them know you appreciate their continued business. Be as heartfelt as possible, and remain dedicated to a few effective goals by following some industry best practices.
Holiday Greetings Best Practices
Only use professionally-recorded greetings
Even the best self-recorded greetings fall short when it comes to fluid voice and crisp audio quality. Customers won’t perceive your business as competent and professional if you don’t sound professional.
Keep messages sincere
The holidays evoke warm, happy feelings, and your holiday greetings should have that same tone. If you want to sound honest and heartfelt avoid overly-wordy or sterile greetings.
Avoid religious sentiments
While many people have a religious connection to this time of year, not everyone shares the same beliefs. Unless your religious message resonates with your entire client base, you’re better off sticking to secular greetings.
Choose the right music
Working with a professional gives you access to a large library of holiday tracks. Be sure to choose holiday music that compliments your brand and conveys a tone that is in line with your image.
Don’t wait until the last minute
The holidays are a busy time for everyone. Getting started on your holiday greetings as soon as possible is the best way to set yourself up for success.
Grab Your Holiday Gift Box Today
Snap Recordings is offering VirtualPBX customers a Holiday Message Gift Box that includes 12 ready-to-use professional, pre-recorded holiday voicemail greetings and hold messages, a Holiday Messaging Guide, and a promo code good for your first order. Grab your gift box before January 7th, 2019 to take advantage of this value packed gift!
Don’t forget about our year-end Refurbished Phones and Hardware Sale. The sale ends December 31st!.
Get a Toll-Free Number to Present a Professional Image
Posted on December 6, 2018 by Casey Houser
If you don’t yet have a toll-free number for your business, you could be missing a great branding opportunity.
While it’s true that U.S. households are moving away from landline phones in favor of cellular phones, their lack of need for long-distance plans should not color your perception of your own need for a toll-free number.
Sure, individuals can call your local business number for free, from anywhere, on any cellular plan. But can they recognize your local number as easily as 1-800-SKY-DIVE or 1-800-FLO-WERS?
These examples stand out because they’re memorable. If you grab the right vanity phone number, you can make your own business just as memorable.
How to Pick Your Vanity Number
VirtualPBX partners with TollFreeNumbers.com to help you get the perfect toll-free number.
On our partner’s website, you can type in the name or market of your business and find numbers that relate.
Any number you choose will work with the VirtualPBX Business Phone System, and we’ll even waive the porting fee if you get a number from TollFreeNumbers.com.
Your Toll-Free Number Will Work Anywhere
Aside from you new phone number looking cool, it will also be recognizable from anywhere.
Consider what you think of when you see an ordinary out-of-town number like (702) 555-1234. If you live in area code 408 and you see a 702, you know the number isn’t located near you. It’s a turn-off, and it looks unprofessional.
However, a 1-800 number implies that you’re a business, no matter where you use it. It’s basically a free local phone number — just branded to your specifications and portable to anywhere you want to take it.
On any billboard, online marketing campaign, TV spot, or magazine feature, your toll-free number will represent you exactly as you want to be. And any caller can access it for free.
Upgrade Your Marketing
You can also use 1-800 numbers to better track your marketing efforts.
Say you have a marketing campaign taking place on billboards in Dallas, Washington D.C., and Boston. If you use the same number on each billboard, it will be hard to track where people are calling from unless you ask them.
If you have multiple toll-free numbers, though, you can route those inbound calls to specific business representatives who will know, ahead of time, how to address the caller. The VirtualPBX business phone plans let you effectively route calls in a number of ways, including with Advanced Transfers and ACD Queues.
It’s holiday season, so while you’re grabbing a toll-free number for accessibility and marketing purposes, give your business an additional gift from our Refurbished Phones and Hardware Sale. We’re overstocked on many refurbished desk and conference phones, adapters and routers, and computers.
Click the banner below to begin shopping. Don’t wait! Our supply is limited, and the sale closes on December 31st.
Check Out Our Refurbished Phones and Hardware Sale!
Posted on December 4, 2018 by Casey Houser
If you’ve been waiting to purchase hardware for your office, our Refurbished Phones and Hardware Sale could be your chance to save big.
Check out our dozens of desk phones, routers, and computers available for purchase up to 80 percent off retail.
You could save hundreds of dollars on the hardware we’ve made available through this event.
Refurbished Desk and Conference Phones
Our Year-End Phones and Hardware Sale brings you a number of refurbished devices — all restored to their factory conditions.
The overstock from our phone rental program has left us with a number of desk and conference phones, including the Yealink W52P desk phone and Yealink CP920 conference phone models.
You can upgrade your office with hardware that works like new but comes at an extremely reduced price.
Adapters and Routers You Can Own
Adapters and Routers You Can OwnWe’re also full up with the Cisco SPA112 analog phone adapter and several Netgear routers, including similar hardware from brands like Audiocodes.
And don’t miss our few Samsung and Asus Chrome Boxes and Apple Mac Minis. You’ll want to grab those quickly because we only have a few in stock.
Gifts Come Early
Treat your business to an early set of gifts with some new hardware for the office reception or conference room.
Get the party started by clicking the banner below. Happy shopping!
Remote Work Infographic: Coffee Shop Essentials
Posted on November 30, 2018 by Charlie Galaviz
By 2020, 34% of international business leaders believe over 50% of their employees will work remotely.
Accordingly, should companies meet the requests of their employees, the telecommute pendulum will swing closer towards that norm in 2019, and it won’t be just requests to work from home. In a survey of remote professionals, 27.08% say they prefer working from coffee shops over working from home or coworking facilities.
What’s not to love about coffee shops? Free wifi, cost-savings, and the aroma of freshly brewed cups of joe. Consequently, what makes coffee shops great can also make them not so great if you don’t come prepared. With our top 5 essentials, you can maximize your productivity and efficiency at your local coffee house.
Already a customer? You’re in luck! The VirtualPBX Web Phone is included for free with any business phone plan. Take a look at our Adding a Web Phone Guide for easy step-by-step instructions on setup.
Got any remote work best practices for coffee shops? Let us know on Facebook and Twitter!
CIO Applications Chooses VirtualPBX as Top Enterprise Communications Provider
Posted on November 27, 2018 by Casey Houser
CIO Applications, a Silicon Valley IT print publication, has chosen VirtualPBX as one of the Top 25 Enterprise Communications Service Providers for 2018.
This grants us a prominent title among all communications service providers and a full-page feature in the coming issue of CIO’s magazine.
Our CEO’s Take
For the CIO Applications feature, VirtualPBX CEO Paul Hammond commented on our present service offerings:
“We are on a mission to offer the best voice solutions with the utmost attention to customer care,” he said. “We have raised the bar for our performance as a communications service provider with solutions that address the needs of any business, regardless of our size.”
He continued by noting our path for the future:
“We intend to offer another 20 years of service and continue to operate as we always have – with an open office door and a dedicated team of employees ready to meet the ever-changing face of the communications market.”
Our Product Lineup
Our portfolio of products begins, foremost, with our business phone system, Dash. It comes with multiple enterprise-grade features such as Call Recording and Conferencing, Hot Desking, Ring Groups, and an Automated Attendant. Large businesses with hundreds of employees, or startups with only a dedicated few, can take advantage of the best feature set in the industry.
From there, we offer a range of desk phones and conference phones alongside our Softphone App for desktop and mobile and VirtualPBX Mobile service, for native 4G LTE calling.
We have something for every employee – whether they work from home, in an office, or make the majority of their sales while in commute. CIO Applications covered that fact by highlighting both our products and services before focusing on our future endeavors like API Access and Call Recording storage options, which you can see further in the article copy shown here.
Our Dedicated Team
Paul’s praise of our staff only begins to scratch the surface of each individual employee’s dedication to the portfolio we offer.
From our Marketing team to Sales; from Services to Support; and from Product Development to the Management Team, we all put in the hard work necessary to make VirtualPBX a leading medium-size company in a market filled with giants. We create an enterprise-level set of products with the feel personal touch that only a smaller outfit can provide.
This comes across well in the CIO Applications piece that notes our humble beginnings – a basement in San Francisco – and our trajectory from creating the “first commercially-available hosted business phone system” to today. Our distributed workforce of a few dozen employees completes what takes other businesses double the budget and manpower to achieve.
We’re all excited to be recognized in the Top 25 in our market. This award bears that out and gives us reason to keep looking forward.
