CloudPhone Blog

With July 4th right around the corner, plans of a beach getaway or a cruise on the lake are surely on the horizon—and for many entrepreneurs that can cause stress! So how is an entrepreneur like you supposed to keep tabs on important calls and enjoy your time away from the office? Virtual numbers!

Virtual numbers work just like traditional phone lines, except they connect to any phone you want, including your mobile. Some virtual numbers, like the ones from Voxox CloudPhone, also come packed with enterprise level features like international call forwarding, voicemail transcription, and two-way SMS. Here are a few ways to use these features while you’re on the go:

Call Forwarding

What’s call forwarding? It’s a feature that allows you forward incoming calls to any phone you’d like. If you want your cell phone to forward to your hotel room phone, you can do that—or better yet, forward incoming calls to your team member who’s agreed to man the phones over the holiday.

International Call Forwarding  

Similar to call forwarding, no matter where you do business (or vacation), International Call Forwarding allows people to reach you anywhere on the globe—that is, if you want to be reached!

Text Messaging (SMS)

SMS open rates beat email nearly 5x over, so while you’re on the road, forget your email inbox and text your clients! But, before you sign up for a virtual number make sure your provider allows two-way SMS (CloudPhone does) so that you (or a team member) can respond to business related messages from where you're vacationing.

Custom Menu Options

Ever wish you could truly customize your business phone options? With many virtual number systems, you can. While your out of office, set up options for urgent vs. non-urgent calls and have emergencies forward to your cell!

Voicemail Transcription

If you’ve decided to let calls go to voicemail, but also want to keep up with urgent matters, voicemail transcription will be your best mate while on vacation! Listening to voicemails takes time, and often you don’t have a pen and paper handy to take down important details. With voicemail transcription you can sift through all messages and only return the important calls—plus, you’ll have all the details automatically transcribed in your inbox!

Now that you have the know-how to go off the grid, and still keep up with business communications, go out and enjoy your Fourth of July—after all, it only comes once a year! Sign up now for a virtual number with CloudPhone, and you can be headed to the beach in just minutes. 

The holidays are upon us and businesses everywhere, big and small, are working hard to beat the holiday rush. As a small business owner, your time and resources are limited, especially during the holiday hustle, so we put together a few last-minute ways you can update your small business phone system to have a seasonal twist!

Here are a few simple ideas on how to reign in the holiday spirit and treat your audience using your business phone in just a few minutes:

1. Record a Festive Voicemail

When clients call and they can’t reach you because you’re with family for the holidays, the next best thing is your voicemail—so why not make it fun by adding a little holiday flare? A customized and cheery voicemail will show your personality and give your clients a memorable experience. Try something like this: "Ho, ho, ho! You've reached Mindy's Salon. I'm either away from the workshop or with another little elf. Please leave a message and I'll call you back! Happy holidays!"

2. Send a Cheery SMS

Snail mail is great, but a text is a fast, convenient and inexpensive way to stay in touch with your client base. Over the holidays, send a festive message wishing them a Happy Holiday… and if you can, include a coupon or discount code for use in the New Year!

3. Create Holiday Extensions

With a virtual phone system like Voxox CloudPhone, updating extensions is easy, so adding in an extension for the North Pole or Santa's Workshop will give your customers a delight. It's also super easy to switch back to normal once the stockings and garland are packed away!

We hope these tips will liven up your business’ seasonal marketing and provide your clients with a little holiday joy! Do it today and share any fun client responses you get in the comments below!

With back to school now in full swing, everyone is just a bit busier. Whether you are a business owner who happens to be a parent, or if you own a business where parents or school age children are your main customers, you know that back to school season and school months can be a hectic time for your business!

Staying top of mind for your busy clientele and making sure your calendar is full is key to keeping your bottom line intact—shout out to photographers, local barbers, restaurant owners or the neighborhood coffee shop! With new technology and automated systems, it’s easier than ever to stay in touch with your customers in a number of ways.

Here are a few ideas on how to keep your clients engaged:

1. Send Extra Text Reminders

Sending an extra text reminder is never a bad idea on the regular, much less when parents are busy running around shopping for tonight’s groceries or dropping kids of at practice. By reminding your clients about their hair, nail, massage, etc. appointment several times leading up to it (i.e.: a week before, day before and day of), there is less chance it will slip off their radar and a better chance you won’t be stuck with an empty, unpaid seat.

2. Make Old Fashioned Phone Calls

Depending on your business and your relationship with your clients, calling your customers before their upcoming appointment or reservation is a great way to make sure your calendar stays booked. If you own a restaurant, confirm the reservation a day ahead of time. If the original customer can’t make it, at least you’ll know the table is open for another paying patron.

3. Offer Timely Discounts and Sales

Everyone loves a deal, especially money-conscious parents, so why not take advantage of it with a promotion or coupon? Sharing a text or email campaign offering your clients a discount on coffee during a certain time of the day (perhaps right after school drop offs) or a coupon to your restaurant on a usually slow week night is a great way to drum up business!

4. Record Themed Voicemails

If you own a business like a photography studio or a hair salon where incoming calls are the norm, have fun with your voicemail greetings. Try holiday themed ideas or a play on words with your business name or the season. For example, “Hi there! Are you FALL-ing into a hairstyle rut? Our expert stylists can help. Please leave your name, number and preferred time to come in and I’ll get back to you shortly. We look forward to sprucing up your ‘do!”

When put to work strategically, automation and technology can save your small business time and money – and generate business! At Voxox, we aim to make running your small business easier by providing a convenient, reliable and cost-effective solution for business phone communications.

Have any other ideas on how local business can use technology and automation to engage their customers? We’d love to hear it. Comment below!

Voxox CTO and co-founder Kevin Hertz recently spoke on a podcast with Telecom Reseller's Doug Green regarding the company's partnership with Malaysian carrier Digi and the roll out of Cloud Phone in Malaysia under the brand Omni Hotline. Click on the podcast link above to listen to the 16 minute podcast.

With the increased number of remote workers in the US and across the globe, chances are you have team members who work from a coffee shop across state lines or a beach on a tropical island. Wherever they are, having a call transfer feature for your mobile (powered by a service like Voxox Cloud Phone) allows you to transfer business phone calls to the mobile phones of your colleagues—no matter where they are and all while you're still on the line. 

The ability to seamlessly transfer calls not only gives your business a professional feel, but it also allows you to keep the caller engaged. Rattling off a phone number and expecting a caller to remember it and actually call back is a lot to expect. Once they're on the line, you don't want to lose them due to outdated technology. 

Here’s how call transfer works:

Let's say you're working from home and you receive a call to your sales extension from a prospective client (with Voxox Cloud Phone you can configure multiple "departments" to ring to the same phone). You answer and after a brief conversation realize your colleague, Ben, was the one who originally scoped them out and has been working to close the deal. Rather than jumping in the middle, you decide Ben should take the call. You let the caller know they'll be transferred, you enter Ben's virtual extension, and voila—Ben's phone is ringing and he's connected with the client on the spot.

Ben picks up, closes the deal and your business just earned a new contract. Would this have happened if you told the caller they needed to hang up and call Ben directly? Maybe, but why risk it?

While not all sales hinge on a phone call and not all phone calls are the crux of a sale, call transfer offers two enormous benefits: convenience for your team and callers, and a professional feel that won’t go unnoticed. It’s important, especially as a small business, to recognize the image you portray to incoming callers when your phone system sounds and acts like a business phone system should.

Call transfer is a feature that all businesses, big and small, need. When coupled with additional enterprise level features like conference calling, business SMS and voicemail transcription, your phone system starts to work for you—saving you time so you can focus on building your business.

Entrepreneurs and small business owners have been making the switch to virtual number services because they are cost efficient, convenient for travel and come with a slew of enterprise-level features. One of such helpful features is a Virtual Receptionist (also known as “auto-attendant”). This automated service handles your incoming calls, allowing callers to be transferred to an extension or sent to a specific voicemail without going through a real-life telephone operator or receptionist. This can be a life-saver for small businesses unable to afford a full-time employee for fielding calls. The Virtual Receptionist saves time and money, while maintaining the business image and operations. 

If one Virtual Receptionist helps keep your business communications flowing... imagine what multiple Virtual Receptionists can do! Voxox Cloud Phone has taken this question seriously and recently launched the ability for Cloud Phone users to program multiple Virtual Receptionists that can route from one to the other. Having multiple Virtual Receptionists lets smal business owners create multiple greetings and menu options for callers, creating even more efficiency in communications. 

Here are a few ways you can put this new feature to work for your business today:

1) Menu option that connects to a Spanish language Virtual Receptionist

Spanish is the second-most widely spoken language in the world (after Mandarin Chinese), with over 400 million native speakers, so chances are your business has gotten a Spanish-speaking caller or two! Providing a convenience and courtesy like a bilingual Virtual Receptionist menu will not go unnoticed by your Spanish-speaking customers.

2) Two businesses on one account with their own greeting and menu options

Micro or small business owners that want to go in on a virtual phone system together to save a little bit of cash can each program their own Virtual Receptionist to fit their business needs. This is also a cost effective and convenient feature for those who own more than one business and want to consolidate phone services for their companies.

3) Switching between weekday and weekend Virtual Receptionist menus

Some virtual phone systems like Voxox Cloud Phone let you set call answering parameters based the day and time. Combined with the multiple Virtual Receptionist feature, you can make sure callers are always receiving the correct message and menu options – no matter when they call.

Have any other ideas for how to use multiple Virtual Receptionists? Comment below and share with us!

With warm weather and sunshine enticing you and your team to play hooky, summer months can be some of the least productive of the year. Thoughts of travelling, hitting the beach and enjoying the outdoors can leave employees feeling unmotivated and drained. So why not let them fulfill their summertime dreams, all while keeping productivity up? You can with virtual numbers.

Technology and mobile gadgets allow us to travel and work from anywhere, all while keeping in touch with globally dispersed teams. Virtual numbers are a convenient and inexpensive way to take important work-related calls with you while you’re on-the-go – and maybe even allow you to extend your vacation!

Here are 5 ways your team can use virtual numbers (and all the features that come with them) to keep productivity up during the summer months.... and still enjoy the sunshine

1. Call Forwarding

If you want to work outdoors and won’t be around the office, call forwarding lets you take calls straight to your cell and avoid the risk of missing an important call.

2. Call Screening

Maintaining a professional image is essential for building rapport with clients, and that means giving out your cellphone number, no matter how dedicated it may seem, can backfire. By receiving work calls to your business’ virtual number, you will know when you’re fielding a business call – and if you’re not prepared to answer, just send it to voicemail – saving you face in case they caught you waist deep in margaritas! 

3. International Extensions

If you are planning to travel out of the country, you can set a 3 digit extension to follow you no matter where you are in the world. Say you're based in California and are planning to go to Belize on a family trip. As a business owner you're not able to unplug for too long, and luckily Belize has only a 1 hour time difference from your usual work day hours. You can set your virtual number to forward to your hotel or a local cell phone you rented, and the caller (who is dialing your main business line and extension will be able to reach you (if you want them to!). A great way to balance work and play and make the kids happy to stay abroad longer.

4. Voicemail

If a caller ends up at your voicemail, for whatever reason, they won’t be the wiser that they called a virtual number linked to your cell phone – as they’ll be prompted to leave a message by your custom, professional voicemail greeting. And you can easily and quickly pick up the voicemail, no matter where you are.

5. Voicemail Transcription

Listening to a voicemail isn’t always easy, especially when your cell service isn’t strong. But voicemail transcription lets you read your voicemails via email or text – so as long as you can grab a wifi signal you’ll be in the loop.

If you’re feeling a summer slump in workplace productivity or are looking for ways to avoid it all together, provide your team with the tool they need to succeed – a virtual number! With the right service, set-up is easy and because the benefits of virtual numbers go far beyond mobility, you’ll be reaping the rewards all year long. 

As a small business owner with limited resources, improving productivity is likely at or near the top of your priority list. But if you type “how to improve productivity for a small business” into a search engine, the number of results you’ll receive will probably be similar to the number of stars in the universe.

New articles and videos filled with tips and tricks for improving operations are constantly popping up on the Internet and while many offer quality suggestions, the sheer volume can be a bit overwhelming. Implementing a dozen different strategies at once is probably not the best idea, so we suggest you start with one—adopting a small business phone system.

Photo Courtesy of Flikr User Sebastiaan ter Burg

A phone service designed specifically for small and microbusinesses can increase productivity—specifically mobile productivity—by putting the power of an enterprise system in your pocket. With a cloud-based phone service you can use your mobile phone to get:

• A business-specific line where you can be reached no matter where you are
• Voicemail to email that ensures you get important messages even while you’re traveling
• Professional greetings that can be customized from anywhere you have Internet access 

On top of productivity gains you’ll see your company can also cut costs with a small business phone service. Monthly fees are reasonable and because the service is web-based and maintained by the vendor you’ll avoid installation and maintenance costs altogether.

When you own a small business, you simply can’t afford to let valuable time go unused—fortunately you don’t have to.

Want some tips on creating a great mobile workforce? Take a look!

Those of you running your own non-employer business understand that at any given moment you might be your company’s billing, sales and marketing departments—all at once. As a sole proprietor you simply don’t have the option to turn a task over to a coworker. But just because every department of your company is actually just you, it doesn’t mean you have to look small-time to the outside world.

A small business virtual phone can provide the same features and functionality offered by traditional wire-based systems including easy-to-set-up extensions for your departments. With this technology all you need is a mobile phone to get your business looking like a Fortune 500 company. 

For example, let’s say a prospect or new client calls your business specific line—another feature of a small business phone service—with a billing question while you’re in the tunnel at Grand Central Station or on an airplane to Los Angeles. Because of your location, you’re unable to answer the call. You are unable to answer the call. With a small business virtual phone, your customer is professionally greeted and presented extension options for each division of your company, giving you big business presence that projects an air of credibility.

No matter what industry you are in, competition is stiff in today’s congested marketplace. According to a customer service survey by Zendesk, 55 percent of customers said they switched to a different company for a product after having a bad customer experience, which can include something as seemingly insignificant as an unprofessional interaction with a company’s phone service.

You’ve worked tirelessly to build a great product or service and to generate leads and the last thing you need is to forfeit lose out on business because your phone system makes a bad impression. As the saying goes, “you never get a second chance to make…” well, you know. 

So, you’re a hot new startup operation with the potential to make an immediate impact on the market. But do you have the communications capabilities to support your goals? If you are struggling to find the right enterprise phone solution, perhaps you are looking in the wrong place.

Photo Courtesy of Flikr User Sebastiaan ter Burg

A small business phone system is designed for small companies and startups like yours. It gives you big business presence for a low monthly price, including features like: 

Auto attendants

When customers get a professional automated greeting they get the feeling they are dealing with a Fortune 500 Company and not a brand new venture. So if you happen to be indisposed when an important call comes through, your customers have a first impression that keeps them coming back. A small business phone system managed through the cloud also gives you ability to change your greeting—or other settings—as long as you have a connection.

Conference calling

Nothing looks more professional than the ability to loop in another member of your team to get an answer for a potential client at a moment’s notice.

Voicemail to email

Suppose you’re in a meeting, and you receive an important voicemail but you don’t want to leave the room. A voicemail transcription service takes care of this, granting you the power to read your voicemail right over the interface of your mobile device.

Virtual extensions

Virtual extensions are another way to extend your business presence. Even if you are a sole proprietor you can configure your system with extensions for billing, sales, or customer service departments.   

As a new business owner there is no reason to settle for less than the functionality you need or pay more than you can afford. Now, go forth and succeed!