Virtual Technical Support, Virtual Marketing Support

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 virtual 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 with help of live answering service.

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 Blackberrys, mobile broadband plus all of the above services our cost per person per month is less than 125 including the various call charges.

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