Just a bunch of ideas and ways to build your business.

There’s still a lot of businesses that rely on fax. The great thing about using a desktop fax service is that it can decrease operational costs associated with in-house fax systems or dedicated fax lines. It’s also easy to scale up or down your fax lines and meet and comply with security requirements.

If any of you are familiar with administering an in-house fax server you’ll know that it can be a big pain, not to mention costly.

Hmmm… Okay let’s talk some more about the benefits of using a hosted solution, because really there are a lot of them.

No Capital Outlay — With no additional hardware to acquire, capital expenditures are reduced and depreciation schedules eliminated. The risks associated with installing 3rd party software on your network are eliminated as well.

Utilization of Existing Infrastructure – Because outsourced fax services leverage existing email client and infrastructure, getting started is quick and seamless. Another great benefit of an outsourced solution is that you don’t have to hire or train additional staff to run the system.

Scalable and Flexible – With a hosted solution, companies are not constrained by their number of outbound telephone lines or system capacity. Hosted solutions are designed to be highly scalable to handle either rapid growth or reduced volume, based on market trends and patterns.

Self-Administering – The outsourced fax provider performs any required system maintenance and monitoring, upgrading and adding new features as they become available, freeing up your IT resources to focus on your core business.

How Desktop Works

Desktop users can send, receive, save, forward and track electronic faxes in seconds − right from their desktops. Documents no longer sit on the fax machine for everyone to see, and you’ll never experience the frustration of missing another important document because the fax number is busy. Work is accomplished faster, with total reliability and added security.

Desktop Fax allows you to turn your desktop into a document handling center for all inbound faxes. Receiving faxes as attachments means you can treat paper documents like electronic files – by viewing, printing, forwarding or deleting them. Additionally, you can rename the file and save it to your computer for easy document storage. Tracking inbound and outbound faxes can be next to impossible with traditional fax machines. However, Fax2Mail gives you complete control of all your e-fax and email documents via online administration tools. Using our secure SSL Web interface, you can control user registration, edit account profiles, and customize settings and options such as coversheet/email design, billing and delivery reports. And you can choose your own local or toll-free fax numbers.

How much does it cost? Desktop fax can cost you less than $10/month. You get your own private fax number and up to 300 fax pages for that price.

Oh… Did I mention that your faxes come to you in either a adobe acrobat .pdf file or a .tif file. Nice!

Here’s a great way to improve the efficiency of a Voice Broadcast by using our Hot Key Transfer feature. Here’s how it works. When the recipient is listening to the message you sent, they would have the option of pressing a key on the keypad of their phone, for example the “0″ (zero) key to get transferred to a live operator.

The last part of your message might go something like this…
“For more information on our products and services, or to purchase this now press the “0″ (zero) key on your keypad and you’ll be transferred to a live operator”

When the recipient presses the “0″ key our system automatically transfers the call to any number that you had set up in the system. The live operator answers the call and takes the order or provides the original recipient with any information that they require.

This commonly works well with verticals such as Collection Agencies, season-ticket renewals, membership renewals, appointment reminders or many other types of products or services were a live person would help to close the sale.

Some of the most common questions I usually get on this are;

Q: What if all the calls come at once and we can’t handle the load?

A: The Message Impact Voice Broadcast service has the ability to do call pacing. This allows you to pace the number of inbound transfers to the live operator or pace the number of outbound calls throughout the day, week, etc..

Q: I don’t have enough (or any) staff to answer the phone?

A: Consider using our Inbound Call Center Services. We will always have operators standing by to answer the inbound calls. It’s easy to add additional operators or remove them based on your inbound call requirements or to match any specific short-term campaigns that you initiate.

If you’re not sure if something like this would work for your type of business, please give us a call and we can discuss what might work best for you and your business. Even if you’d like to test something like this, the costs associated with the setup of a voice broadcast combined with the call center services are very reasonable, it’s very quick to set up, modify or take down again. No need to hire additional staffing for this kind of thing, let us do it for you.

We have posted a new grid on our web site that will hopefully make it easier for you to choose a web conferencing service. The grid outlines all the different services that we have to offer. Keep checking back as we will be continually updating the grid.

Did I miss anything? Please let me know if it’s been helpful for you or call me if you still need some clarity.

You can find it here.

Are you backing up your data on a regular basis? If you are, that’s great and I commend you for that. If you’re not it’s something you might want to consider. Because really, it’s not a matter of if it happens, it’s more a matter of when it happens. It can be easy to procrastinate about, but did you know a USB or local hard drive will fail 15% of the time within 5 years?

Offsite backup services are really the best choice. I mean what happens if someone breaks into your house and steals your computer and your hard drive, and perhaps grabbed your box of backup DVDs. What if there’s a flood or a fire and all your precious data gets ruined? I’ve seen this happen before to several customers who neglected to do proper backup. Stop and think for a minute, what would happen if we lost all our business data? What would it cost us (me)? What about all those digital pictures you have on your personal computer? In the old days of film your negatives were usually your backup copy, but with digital most of us have all of our pictures on a hard drive or backup CD or DVD laying around the house or office somewhere.

There are several online backup services out there. I’ve been using Mozy for the backup of my critical data and Amazon S3 with JungleDisc to back up larger amounts of data such as older documents, history, pictures or anything else that I would like to keep for the long term. They are very reasonably priced and they really don’t take that long to set up. The good thing is once they’re set up you can configure them for automatic backup at predetermined intervals.

Just something to think about.

Make it a great day!

Have you ever thought about outsourcing your inbound customer inquiries, orders or technical support? It’s a lot easier and more cost effective than you may think. Perhaps you’re not getting enough inbound calls to support a full-time person to answer the phone for you.

With an inbound call center you can simply pay by the minute and have your phone answered by a fully trained call center support person. The call center person would be trained by your company and provided with a script and Q&A so that they can answer, assist, take orders or support whoever calls in. These services are particularly nice for small business.

Remember, one of the key rules of selling is to make it easy for your customer to buy. Why not let your customers order through a toll-free number 24 hours a day? Why not reduce the on hold waiting time for your customers calling in?

Yes, we now have call center services. Contact us for more info.

Our new website is now live. We’ll be adding more content to it over the next couple of months to reflect some of the additional services that we provide. Our new logo is completed. As mentioned in previous post we used Logoworks for the design. Overall I think Logoworks did a good job even though their customer service was inconsistent. Please take a moment to check out our new website and logo and tell me your comments.

We’re in the process of building a new messageimpact.com website and should have it online within the next 15 to 30 days. You’ll see improved layout, more content and a much easier to navigate site. I’ll be looking forward to any of your comments on this once it’s up and live.

Not only will we have a completely new website look and feel, but we’re also in the process of getting a new logo for Message Impact. We would also like to hear your comments on the new logo once completed. LogoWorks is doing the design for us. So far it’s been a rather lengthy process with Logo Works and their customer service seems very inconsistent. I will comment more on this once the logo is complete. If you’ve used Logoworks or any other logo design company before please feel free to post your comments.

Did you know that we only retain 20% of what we hear? Kind of disappointing when you think of the kind of money, time and effort that you can put into organizing and conducting a conference call. Not only your valuable time, but the valuable time of your customers, prospects or employees.

Also we only retain about 20% of what we see. But when we see and hear something together our retention level increases to over 50% retention. If you want to increase retention levels even further simply add participation or interaction into this equation. Now you have retention levels well above 50%.

By adding Web conferencing or collaboration to your regular teleconference calls you can over double the results you currently get. Try adding some polling questions in your Web conference or ask one of your participants to show you what they mean on a white board or by sharing out their desktop. With the conference polls it becomes quite easy to see who is really paying attention because you as the moderator can see who’s answering the polls or not.

If you’re already using teleconferencing it may well be worth a test to see if you can improve your desired results. these results will vary depending on who your audience is and what your subject might be. Now it’s just a matter of finding out the right Web conferencing or collaboration tool that’ll work for you and your participants.

With all the new startup Web conferencing services out there it’s getting even more difficult to figure out which services the best. I guess that really just depends on what’s most important to you. Maybe stop and think about that for a minute and write down a few key points as to what is the most important in a Web conferencing service. I just don’t mean features, I also mean what level of service or reliability do you want? If these conferences are critical to your business you better think about this. What’s it worth to you? What will it cost you if the service doesn’t work the way you wanted to or crashes right in the middle of a conference? Yes, Web conferencing services like Microsoft Live Meeting and WebEx cost more, but you can expect the reliability from the services. Quite often that old saying that goes “you get what you pay for” applies. I hope I’ve given you something to think about today.