Focus, Coordination, and Teamwork with VirtualPBX COO, Lon Baker
Posted on October 14, 2021 by Lon Baker
Change is one of the few constants for businesses, teams, and customers everywhere.
VirtualPBX has changed tremendously over our history, and the change has accelerated thanks to the demands of both our customers and team members.
The biggest challenges in this environment are maintaining focus and coordinating efforts to deliver on our mission — to deliver excellent service where and how people need to get things done.
How We Maintain Focus at VirtualPBX
The loss of focus creates stress, impacts morale, and can create a snowball effect that impacts the delivery of service, completion of projects, and most importantly costs your business time.
At VirtualPBX we strive to maintain focus for our team by reigning in meetings, carefully separating team communication into channels, leveraging our own platform, namely the VirtualPBX Softphone, to communicate the availability of team members, and automating certain tasks via Zapier. We have written about the use of Presence before, and it is critical to understand who is available when you want to speak with them – especially for remote teams.
For meetings we have a firm rule, any meeting lacking a published agenda is canceled, the default meeting length is 20 minutes, meetings start on time regardless of the presence of all attendees, and meeting recordings are used liberally so team members are on vacation or unavailable can catchup.
Coordinating Teams and Processes
We use Slack and our own platform for chat, and over the years have learned to use specific channels for specific topics, to minimize distracting team members.
Coordinating teams is an age-old management challenge, we find maintaining focus requires clearly defining how we manage processes — in our case the use of Notion, Monday.com, Pipedrive, Zapier, and our own Collaboration tools to keep everyone in sync, motivated, and able to perform at their best.
With constant change comes the need to consistently reassessing how your company and team execute. This can drive improvement in your business and your products, like it does for us every single day.
Fall for Savings on Our Most Popular Plan: Save with October Pricing
Posted on October 12, 2021 by Rachel Anderson
The leaves are falling and so are prices on our most popular plan!
Until the end of October, take advantage of 20% savings on our Advanced Unlimited Minutes Plan. But act fast, this deal on our customer favorite plan is over on November 1st 2021.
What Makes the Advanced Plan the Most Popular?
First, let’s start with the basics. Like all of our Unlimited Minutes Plans, the Advanced Plan includes unlimited local minutes to all 50 of the United States and Puerto Rico, Canada, and Mexico. It additionally includes 2,500 toll-free minutes and 10 local or toll-free numbers. With that volume, it would be safe to assume that this plan is geared towards mid-larger businesses, but since this plan is billed by the number of users, it’s a great way to deliver advanced features and a solid amount of call traffic at a price sized for any business.
Speaking of features, outside of our Custom Voice Solutions, the Advanced Plan is our most feature-rich plan. It includes customer favorites like Auto Attendant, Call Recording, Private Storage, a Webhooks Integration, and of course, SMS and Video Conferencing.
But what sets the Advanced Plan apart? Advanced Call Reports!
Advanced Call Reports delivers the most in depth reporting on call traffic, allowing business managers to find insights, evaluate department and individual performance, and to schedule critical data points to stakeholders. Most customers start with our over 40 report templates including Agent Reports, Service Level by Day, and Calls by Duration. But once our customers discover how easy it is to customize reports, they’re soon creating filters to break up data by incoming dialed phone number, drilling down on call transfers, and adding and subtracting columns to correlate important data points. But what’s the most advanced aspect of Advanced Call Reports? Customizable Wall Boards that show live data (like in the below video) and can even be displayed on screens in your workplace with our Amazon Fire Stick integration.
Get Advanced Call Reports on our Advanced Plan this Month – For 20% Off!
Discover more about your call traffic and take advantage of the feature-rich Advanced Plan with special October pricing. Head over to our October promotion landing page to get your 20% off discount. But don’t forget – this deal will disappear November 1st, 2021!
5 Best Business VoIP Features For Busy Professionals
Posted on September 24, 2021 by Charlie Galaviz
Business VoIP features for busy professionals offer time-saving and convenient solutions for everyday workflow inefficiencies.
As a Telecommunications company with remote and hybrid employees, creating a productive and streamlined workplace is our field of expertise.
Today’s blog will share five types of business VoIP features designed with busy professionals in mind.
1. DND
Make the switch from busy, to productive with Do-Not-Disturb. DND allows you to pause all incoming call activity temporarily. Furthermore, you’ll have the ability to direct callers to a default call flow such as an assistant or voicemail box. Most importantly, you’re able to focus on priority initiatives while keeping your customers satisfied.
2. Integrations
Automations are essential for efficient workflows and time management. At VirtualPBX, we lean on integrations that populate reports, log information, and send Slack alerts. Through Zapier, there are more than 3,000 business apps to choose from. Additionally, our Salesforce Integration makes it easy to click-to-call leads, schedule follow-ups, and input call notes.
3. Reports
For managers, it’s important to trust but verify that business operations are running like clockwork. As a result, we believe live data and performance reports are must-haves for every team. Tools like Call Logs and Advanced Call Reports allow you to quickly check the status of call activity to identify which teams may need assistance or see which priorities need shifting for the day.
4. Dynamic Voicemail Boxes
Checking voicemails are time-consuming; however, technology has come a long way in the past few years. Dynamic Voicemail allows you to set voicemail greetings, receive voicemail transcriptions to email inboxes, and wire up time-saving integrations. Furthermore, sending callers to voicemail is a viable strategy to preserve your time and screen your callers.
5. VirtualPBX Softphone App
Transform your smartphone or computer into a powerful communication hub capable of HD voice, Business SMS, and Video Conferencing. The VirtualPBX Softphone App also includes collaborative features like user presence, team chat, and file-sharing that will keep you productive no matter how busy your schedule gets.
Create a Faster Workflow Today
Ready to fine-tune your business workflows? VirtualPBX is an award-winning VoIP ecosystem with features like HD Voice, SMS, Video, and so much more. Our Dash platform allows you to streamline communications with your clients and employees from anywhere. In addition, you’ll have the ability to create custom integrations and utilize our API to meet your specific communication needs.
If you would like to learn more, our experts are happy to offer a free demo of all that VirtualPBX has to offer your business.
VirtualPBX Adds Puerto Rico to Local Traffic List
Posted on September 15, 2021 by Rachel Anderson
Our customers asked and we listened – Puerto Rico has officially been added as a location for VirtualPBX local traffic! With a population over three million and its status as a United States territory, there has been no shortage of call traffic to and from Puerto Rico and the Continental US. In fact, at VirtualPBX, we’ve seen this number grow and with it, the demand to make those calls easier. Now, by categorizing this traffic as local, VirtualPBX customers can save even more.
What Else is Considered Local Traffic?
All VirtualPBX Plans allow for either a set number of local minutes each month (Spark Plans) or an unlimited number of local minutes per month (Flex, Essentials, and Advanced Plans). The following locations are all included in this group:
- 50 United States (including Alaska and Hawaii)
- Canada
- Mexico
- Puerto Rico
Start Making Calls to Puerto Rico
Not a customer yet? No problem! Browse our Business Phone Plans to find the feature set and included minutes that work best for you and your team. Each plan includes free training sessions – simply ask your VirtualPBX representative to help set you up to make calls to and/or from Puerto Rico. Of course, if you prefer to work directly with a sales team member to help steer you in the right direction, we have representatives standing by right here in our online chat!
Already a VirtualPBX customer? Reach out to us by phone, chat, or email [email protected] to enable this on your account. Once this has been enabled, you may define which devices on your account should and should not be able to make calls to and from Puerto Rico.
Tech Talks with COO Lon Baker: The Future of Work is Remote
Posted on September 9, 2021 by Lon Baker
Having been around for over twenty years we have seen business change in so many ways. From the adoption of what became known as hosted phone services to distributed mobile collaboration applications.
In today’s environment, after over a year of disruptions to the workplace, a growing number of people have had to adapt and develop new work habits; adopting collaboration tools, working from home, and embracing the challenges and benefits. A growing number of employees view going back to the the old ways as a step in the wrong direction.
The Future of Work is Remote
These employees are now looking for innovative and agile companies that have embraced this new work world and is an opportunity to recruit the best of the best from anywhere in the world.
99% of the best employees do not live anywhere near your company’s geographic offices. Embracing collaboration tools that include voice, video, sms and automation tools, will allow them to seamlessly form distributed teams that will propel their business.
Collaboration Tools Power Remote Teams
At VirtualPBX we use our own tools to manage teams spread out across the United States and overseas. The backbone being our voice platform and Desktop and Mobile Softphone that displays real-time presence information for employees. This allows each of us to see when someone is available, busy, away, on a call or in a meeting.
Our Collaboration tools powers our video conferencing and screen sharing for scheduled or quick on the fly meetings.
Additionally, our platform includes a rich API and integrations with Zapier that helps teams improve our process, automate repetitive tasks, collect business data, or implement email, SMS and Slack notifications for key internal and external events.
All of these tools allow us to have a more connected and effective team than when we had as a geographically based team 5 years ago.
Today we are recruiting remote team members for our Sales, Marketing and Billing teams. Just one of our recent job posting generated 10 time the number of applicants by focusing on recruiting for remote-only positions.
If your company wants to thrive in the new remote work first world, embrace platforms that connect your teams and empower them to build processes to help them work better.