How to Save Time, Money and Effort with Enterprise VoIP Software

Article Presented by:
Copyright © 2010 Alexander Anoshin


Today's economy requires all business to use all the enterprise resources most effectively. An IP telephony network is not an exception. From this article, you can learn how to:

automate client request processing and release your staff to fulfill more complicated tasks with a voice portal;

save your client time wasted waiting for the answer with an IVR application;

smooth out call peak hours with queuing software;

decrease time wasted searching for an appropriate specialist to process a client call with an SBR solution;

save your time and effort to check messages in numerous sources with unified messaging and voice mail service;

save your employee time on daily communications with a presence service;

save time and money for communications with audio- videoconference software;

cut your expenses for equipment by using IP phones instead of PCs with XML services;

decrease your employee telecom costs with call-accounting software;

reduce your VoIP network maintenance expenses with IP telephony management solutions.

Save your effort to process incoming calls and help your clients save their time IP telephony software provides you with several tools to reduce both your efforts to answer incoming calls and time that your clients spend to get the response from your client service.

A) With a voice portal you can provide your clients with an authorized access to your corporate databases and thus

automate processing of up to 80% of incoming calls;

release your staff for more complicated tasks.

B) An IVR application can help your clients

choose an appropriate operator to process their requests;

access pre-recorded voice messages and retrieve information from your databases (such as a caller's bank account balance or currency exchange rates) by using pre-defined menu buttons, and thus save your staff time and effort.

C) With virtual queuing software your clients will receive a timely response from your client service even if all operators are busy: they will just call, leave their contact information and return to their business while an available operator will automatically call them back. This is a convenient way to smooth out call peak hours.

D) Skill-based routing (SBR) software can help you automatically route an incoming call to:

a manager who usually serves a calling client or

an operator with a required skill set that can be defined from:

+ information about a calling client (such as his/her previous requests or his/her location and language he/she speaks, determined from a country/city phone code),

+ operator's product expertise, overall skill-level and language capability and thus reduce the time wasted passing a client call from one employee to another.

Save your Time on Daily Communications

A) With unified messaging and voice mail service you can save your time and effort to check numerous message sources by collecting all messages in a single mailbox that you can access both from your e-mail client or IP phone.

B) A presence service can save your time, wasted waiting for the answer of unavailable users, by providing the real-time information about a user status and preferable ways to communicate.

Get an Effective Tool for Long Distance Team Communications

With audio/video conferencing software you can substitute phone meetings with multiple local and remote participants for face-to-face ones and save on equipping special meeting rooms and travel expenses. In particular, conferencing software can help you:

plan meetings, automatically send invitations and connect the participants at the prescribed time;

share the documents;

send text messages;

organize a polling;

record a conference session and not only.

Cut Costs for Equipment by Using IP Phones Instead of PCs

The XML service technology allows you to deliver interactive content right to an IP phone display and, thus, to use it instead of a PC. With this capability, you can streamline many business processes without equipping workplaces with PCs. For example, you can:

access corporate databases in accordance with your access rights;

find quickly a necessary contact in a corporate address book;

send quick text/voice messages;

deliver content to a user/user group;

alert your employees when a panic button is pushed or a fire alarm is detected;

set a preferable way of communication;

sign-in for/sign-out from work.

This way you can also save your employee time on daily tasks.

Decrease your Employee Telecom Costs

Modern call accounting software is not only a tool to control employee telecom costs.

As call-accounting software provides you with various reports on user phone conversations that are built on the base of call detail records (CDRs) received from your IP PBX, you can use it to derive information about

phone expenses of each user/user group;

peak phone network hours;

the longest and the most expensive calls, etc.

By grounding on these data you can

compose an appropriate call plan to smooth out peak phone network hours;

set a number of rules to limit employee "friends and family" calls and even deny such communications at peak load hours to decrease both unnecessary expenses and network load.

Moreover, you can setup your call accounting software to reduce telecom costs with

individual limits on telephony expenses for each user/user group;

restrictions on long-distance calls and/or calls to flagged numbers (city/country codes);

grouping calls by users/user groups and allocating expenses properly to correct budgets (enabling charge back to departments, cost centers and clients).

You can also set you call accounting software to track:

unanswered calls and control if your employees return calls in a timely manner to improve your client satisfaction;

calls from suspicious phone numbers to protect employees from abuse/threatening calls;

calls to special extensions used for your marketing/advertising campaigns to measure these efforts.

Reduce Your VoIP Network Maintenance Expenses

The most of standard IP PBX administration interfaces are rather complicated, so you need highly skilled staff members to fulfill simple daily tasks. With special IP telephony management software you can simplify administration activities and entrust daily tasks to one, not necessarily experienced, employee. Thus you can both:

save time and money on IP PBX administration;

improve your qualified administrator motivation by giving them only the tasks that demand their experience and expertise.

You can also use IP telephony management software to

do phone inventory at all your sites from a single workplace:

with a special multi-location inventory feature or

by integrating IPX management software with your existing inventory solution and save your effort and time on phone inventory management;

remove compatibility restrictions with integration of your VoIP network components and thus cut costs for telephony network deployment/extension/upgrade.

Conclusion

By implementing IP telephony software you can solve several important business problems. You can

save your employee time and effort on daily tasks and communications;

improve your staff motivation and productivity;

optimize the joint work of the remote teams;

enhance the quality of your customer service;

cut your expenses for:

long-distance communications;

workplace equipment;

VoIP network deployment, extension and upgrade;

IP PBS administration and support.

About the Author:
You can learn how to empower your enterprise with VoIP in the book, "The Connected Enterprise", here http://bcs-it.com/books/connected-enterprise/ The free e-book, just as the article, was written by Alexander Anoshin, the CEO of BCS-IT, who specializes in VoIP solution development for enterprises.


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Cost Reduction for Business: How to Best Manage Your Costs

Article Presented by:
Copyright © 2010 Thayne Carper


Companies have to use various forms of financial studies - estimates, budgets, forecasts, analyses, and evaluations - to report and control their costs.

Brainstorm Methods to Cutting Costs and Create a Plan

You must develop a solid cost reduction plan that will allow you to control your costs. In your cost reduction plan, you will establish your goals and explain your forecasts. This plan will help you manage your expectations and, similar to a business turnaround plan, is flexible should the circumstances warrant some alteration. Once you have come up with a strategy, you must figure out ways to reduce costs, increase market share, and gain an edge against your competitors.

Expense Reductions are Unavoidable

Good cost reduction requires you to do three things. First, you must increase your revenue faster than your expenses go up. Second, you must decrease your expenses while sustaining revenue. Finally, you company must improve its productivity.

You should review your vendor contracts and look at their competition in order to find potential savings with a new group. It is also wise to assess your equipment and look for other savings opportunities. A good business owner seeking optimal cost reduction will figure out how to reduce utilities expenses, telephone charges, waste programs, office supply expenses, and copying costs. As the company owner, you are the facilitator of cost reduction initiatives that will reduce your business' expenses, and you must look at the benefits and costs of such potential reductions and more.

Companies sometimes use layoffs as a cost reduction measure; however, this strategy is often reactionary and flawed. When businesses have financial problems, they often scrutinize their finances closely and look to quickly cutting costs. Instead of laboring over one's company's finances and figuring out where the excess really lies, businesses all too often require job cuts in order to stabilize their finances. The fact is, layoffs have many consequences that can cause extraordinary long-term complications. Thus, it is often best for a company to explore other expense reductions first.

Utilize Technology to Grow Competitive

Effective cost reduction requires you to look at your business globally and flush out the financial issues that are draining your company of extra income. Even if your company is growing rapidly, you must not ignore excess expense issues; rather, you must adhere to your cost reduction plan even when times are good because the situation can change rapidly.

Due to the nature of the globalized world, businesses cannot afford to ignore the advances and necessities that technology affords. Amazingly enough, not all businesses utilize email, electronic transactions, and other features of the Internet and electronic communications. In doing so, they are cutting themselves short and restricting their own potential. A good cost reduction system will have a business owner take full advantage of the Internet and its time and cost savings resources.

A web presence is also a cost-effective way to increase visibility with customers and convert more leads into sales. Online marketing is one way to help a business remain competitive and financially stable.


About the Author:
Thayne Carper spent 4 years of college competing in student business plan competitions. He's never won a business plan competition and was dropped from his college's entrepreneurial program for lacking potential. Today, he is one of the youngest published experts on the topic of business turnarounds and cost reduction. Visit his website lower supply costs up to 30% for a copy of his report "The Definitive Guide to Doubling Your Profits in less than 6 Months" and learn how you can easily lower supply and service costs up to 30% without hiring a consultant. Learn more: http://www.ThayneCarper.com/


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Awaken The LION Within You

Article Presented by:
Copyright © 2010 Scott Bywater


Yesterday I read the "Mr. Brave" book to my 3 year old son.

And he asked me "What's brave?"

I explained to him that brave is anything you do when you are scared to do something, but you do it anyway. And that is a big part of living, isn't it?

Gathering the courage which the Lion thought he didn't have in the Wizard of Oz and doing stuff despite our fear.

I think Richard Branson put it best when he said: "The brave may not live forever - but the cautious do not live at all."

And that's a very true statement in my book.

After all, what is living if you are always playing things safe. Always taking the safe job. Always living out of fear.

Isn't it far better to throw caution to the wind, bite the bullet and give things a shot?

I mean, within reason.

Richard Branson (yes, I have just finished reading his book, Business Stripped Bare) defines the most critical factor in any business decision you'll ever have to make as all boiling down to this question:

"If this all crashes, will it bring the whole house tumbling down like a pack of cards?"

So it's a balance, right?

But I truly do believe fortune does favour the brave.

And when you promote your business via direct response marketing you test small before rolling out a campaign.

You don't throw $40,000 at an ad without a test.

YOu put $1,000, $2,000 or $5,000 towards it and see if it flies.

And then when it does, you reinvest your funds.

What's more, you try lots of different campaigns and have lots of different marketing funnels so if one thing stops working for you, you have plenty of others.

But it takes courage to spend money on an ad.

It takes courage to start up a new campaign.

It takes courage to send out 1,000 direct marketing letters without knowing for sure if they are going to work. But as you can see at http://www.scottbywater.com/proof this approach works.

So have the courage today to grab the bull by the horns and start up a new campaign for getting more customers.

And if you want to increase your odds of making it a success, make sure you check out http://www.morecustomersmadeeasy.com/




About the Author:
Scott Bywater is an advertising copywriting expert and the author of Cash-Flow Advertising. To gain access to all of his copywriting tips on how to get more customers via his eye opening "Copywriting Selling Secrets" newsletter, simply head on over to his web site at http://www.copywritingthatsells.com.au/


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Look Out For The Smoking Gun

Article Presented by:
Copyright © 2010 Scott Bywater


In the legal world, there is a term called "Smoking Gun" which refers to that critical piece of information which makes it impossible for your opponent to win a court case.

It's a fact, a piece of evidence or whatever which proves what you have to say beyond any seed of doubt.

And there are a lot of correlations between law and advertising because when you are selling via the printed word, your jury is your customer.

And you must do everything in your power to prove your case beyond any shadow of a doubt.

So what could be some examples of a "smoking gun" in the advertising world?

Well, let's say I own a piece of property on the coast of Western Australia and I want to sell it. But I am having trouble getting the price I want.

Perhaps a "smoking gun" piece of information I could find is the fact property in coastal areas has gained 20% or 30% or 40% (or whatever) greater capital growth returns than properties anywhere else in the country.

Makes sense, right?

Of course, I have no idea if it is true.

But if I was the buyer, I'd find it pretty hard to ignore a fact like this.

What about if I was selling tyres? Well, this is a pretty easy one. If I owned a tyre shop, I would be looking for a piece of information about what percent of accidents happen from old tyres.

How about shoes?

If I was selling shoes, I would look for information about how the shoe affected other areas of the body. Looking into things like foot reflexology, and the interconnectedness between feet and overall health, feet and its effect on back pain, etc.

And if I could find that little gem of information, no longer am I purely selling shoes, I am selling an overall health solution. And people will pay for quality if you can prove that it's going to make their overall health better.

Makes sense, doesn't it?

So today, consider doing some research on these facts. Check out web sites such as the Sydney Morning Herald, Daily Telegraph, CNN, Highbeam Research and CNN and see what facts you can dig up about your industry which could be your "Smoking Gun."




About the Author:
Scott Bywater is a direct response copywriter with extensive experience in B2B and B2C writing. Mr Bywater is the author of Cash-Flow Advertising and More Customers Made Easy. You can gain access to his copywriting and marketing tips via his entertaining and eye opening "Copywriting Selling Secrets" newsletter available at http://www.copywritingthatsells.com.au/


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Business Turnaround: Reorganize Your Company and Focus on Its Profitable Areas

Article Presented by:
Copyright © 2010 Thayne Carper


After you have determined the root cause of your company's problems, you must now reorganize to make your company profitable. All companies have strengths and weaknesses, and it would be wise to recognize which areas are assets to you and which need improvement.

Identify Assets and Liabilities

A good business turnaround plan would have you determine how your profitable core is composed and which products or services are the biggest money losers. A business turnaround requires you to focus on the good, as the products or services that are the foundation of your company should be maintained and given far more attention than your company's weaker elements.

Once you have determined what products or services are money makers or money losers, you should use your best products or services as the foundation of your reorganized business - this is key for a business turnaround plan. This may not result in any significant changes; for example, if 90% of your business is profitable and the other 10% not, then eliminating the weaker elements will likely not fundamentally change the nature of your business.

However, if 20% of your business is profitable and the rest not, then this will be a serious reorganization that will likely change the very nature of your company. In this situation, you would have to discard inventory, facilities and perhaps even let go of people associated with the unprofitable components of your company. A good business turnaround plan requires that you focus on what produces positive cash flow and discard what doesn't.

There is no economic reason to maintain the divisions of your company that do not generate positive capital. They are a drain on your resources and on the parts of your company that do make money. A business turnaround plan must include the changes necessary to make your company profitable, focus on what works, and discard or at least make significant alterations to the rest.

Take Costs Cutting Measures

Of course, there are other changes you can make for your business to become more profitable. Not only do you need to reorganize your business around its profitable core, but also you should look into how best to cut costs, which your business turnaround plan should discuss. Wages, supplies, inventory, and rent are the four biggest costs a company faces, and they understandably cut into a company's profits. Regarding wages, it may be to your advantage to institute a wages freeze in order to save on costs.

You may have a fixed rate for supplies and other inventory; however, there may be a way to renegotiate those contracts to a lower rate or even begin looking for another supplier with lower costs. Finally, the rent you pay for a building can be negotiable should you realize that its simply too high, or above fair market value, or you can find another building in another location for a cheaper price.

Business turnaround plans only work if your company becomes profitable, and sometimes you have to cut your own costs rather than sell more product or services to make that happen. If you really want to increase your profit margins, then you must take all of these factors into consideration. After all, lower costs equal higher profits.


About the Author:
Thayne Carper spent 4 years of college competing in student business plan competitions. He's never won a business plan competition and was dropped from his college's entrepreneurial program for lacking potential. Today, he is one of the youngest published experts on the topic of business turnarounds and cost reduction. Visit his website lower supply costs up to 30% for a copy of his report "The Definitive Guide to Doubling Your Profits in less than 6 Months" and learn how you can easily lower supply and service costs up to 30% without hiring a consultant. Learn more: http://www.ThayneCarper.com/


Read more of Thayne Carper's articles.

5 Great Ways to Save Time with Enterprise VoIP Integration

Article Presented by:
Copyright © 2010 Alexander Anoshin


The 3 main goals of today's business are

effective client service;

higher employee productivity;

lower costs for telecommunications, network maintenance, etc.

Here you can learn 5 savvy ways to achieve these goals by integrating IP telephony in your enterprise IT infrastructure.

1. Process Your Client Requests Timely With Maximum Effectiveness

A) Would you like to receive messages from all possible sources (emails, faxes, voice messages, instant messages etc.) in a single inbox available 24x7 from both your e-mail client and by phone?

A unified messaging and voice mail service, integrated with your e-mail client and fax-server, is a solution that you need to:

reduce your time wasted checking multiple sources;

process client requests timely regardless of a chosen way to send them.

B) If you have to answer too many calls a day, and some client calls even stay unanswered, then you can improve your customer servicing with queuing/skill-based routing (SBR) software or a software-based attendant console, integrated of with your CRM and ERP solutions.

This approach will permit you to:

put calls in a queue and route them automatically to an appropriate employee when he/she becomes available (an operator, who processed a caller's requests last time, a manager, who usually works with a calling client etc.);

provide your staff with information about a calling client from your CRM database and thus speed up a conversation.

You can also automate up to 80% of your client request processing with a voice portal or an IVR service, integrated with CRM and ERP software. This way, you'll

save your client time spend for getting the desired information/managing their personal accounts;

release your staff for more complicated tasks.

2. Reduce Your VoIP Network Maintenance Efforts And Expenses

Enterprise VoIP network chores are rather simple, but because of the standard user interface complicity, you have to entrust these tasks to highly skilled administrators. A VoIP network management solution, integrated in your IT infrastructure, will provide you with:

easy-to-use GUI to simplify and speed up daily network management tasks - you'll need one, not necessarily experienced employee to fulfill them;

connectors to your inventory software - you'll use it to manage phone inventory at all company sites from a single workplace, and thus both streamline phone inventory daily tasks and save your employee time wasted searching for a lost item;

connectors/plug-ins to the existing/purchased network components to overcome compatibility restrictions and save on network upgrade/extension/merging with purchasing inexpensive 3rd party software/hardware components.

3. Save Your Staff Time On Inner Communications

By integrating HRM software with your corporate address-book you can automate phone number management and address book update processes. Thus your address book will always contain actual contact data, and you'll save your staff time wasted searching for it. You can also implement an address-book IP phone application to make contact data available right from employee IP phones.

Moreover, you can deploy a presence XML-service that will allow your staff to manage their own status and check the others availability before making a call. This way you'll accelerate your employee daily communications too.

4. Speed Up Call-Accounting Daily Tasks And Cut Telecom Costs

With integration of a call-accounting solution with your accounting/billing software you can:

automate phone bill processing;

provide timely reports on user phone expenses/balances;

allocate telecom costs to appropriate budgets (departments/cost centers/clients).

So you'll get a tool to improve productivity of your accounting staff and reduce employee telecom costs.

5. Improve The Quality Of Your Collaboration With Long-Distance Colleagues, Clients And Partners

Audio/video conferencing software is excellent to hold meetings with multiple local and remote employees. But if you want your clients, partners and remote employees, who don't have this software, to participate in a conference session, then you need to integrate it with widespread 3rd party

VoIP software like Skype, PeerMe, iChat, etc.,

web-conferencing software like WebEx, Openmeetings, MS Live Meeting etc.

Note that, if your conferencing software is integrated with your e-mail client (IBM Lotus Notes, MS Outlook etc.), you can plan a conference call and gather the participants automatically, thus, saving your time and efforts.

Conclusion

By integrating IP telephony with your enterprise IT infrastructure, you can:

increase the effectiveness of client request processing;

reduce your VoIP network maintenance efforts and expenses;

save your staff time on daily communications and chores;

cut telecom costs;

improve collaboration with long-distance colleagues, clients and partners,

which will allow you to build your business quicker and easier.


About the Author:
You can learn how to empower your enterprise with VoIP in the book, "The Connected Enterprise", here http://bcs-it.com/books/connected-enterprise/ The free e-book, just as the article, was written by Alexander Anoshin, the CEO of BCS-IT, who specializes in VoIP integration.


Read more of Alexander Anoshin's articles.

Online Brand Building - Do You Need a Social Media Newsroom?

Article Presented by:
Copyright © 2010 Enzo F. Cesario


Curriculum vitae, work experience, references, skills inventory, resume: all describe a source of information where people can condense the vital information about themselves into a single document for interested parties to examine. The idea is giving people an overview they can sort through in order to weigh your merits and strengths against their needs, as well as to get an idea of how you present yourself.

This concept has been adopted for the web in a number of ways, but none more unique than the social media newsroom. A combination bulletin board and press collection, the SMNR is a one-stop location for people to find out critical information about you. Whether you have a new book you're promoting, a lecture tour you want to draw attention to, or a business plan you wish to propose, the SMNR is the place you gather all the information about your venture together into a clear, concise summary.

SMNR Basics

As implied in the name, a newsroom is a page where you compile relevant press (your own and others') about the relevant topic. It lists the basic information, quotations, summaries and news stories in question, but then it also goes a step beyond the basics.

In previous articles we've discussed the advantages of integrating your audience into the brand, and taking advantage of the web's powerful communication abilities to bring their influences into the picture. The SMNR doesn't just present good press, it includes communication venues for people using Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Digg and more. It includes a comments section for added communication, and options for instant messaging or blog connectivity. In short it is more than just a static page, and is an active communications hub.

Do You Need One?

Any organization interested in creating and maintaining a vital web brand will find the SMNR an incredible, vital tool toward this purpose. If you have any good press, such as a positive review or mention from a SM group, consider putting up an SMNR page to centralize further promotion efforts.

The value of the SMNR lies in its convenience for your audience. As we have discussed, the web has allowed people to develop an incredibly short and discerning attention span. If you centralize your relevant information so that people can browse easily, they will be more likely to stay and peruse your content than if they had to hunt down the information themselves. Instead of looking for reviews of your company's quality, they can find it all right at hand in your SMNR.

Which Social Media?

Given the sheer variety of social media networking sites, there is no one design of SMNR that will work in every situation. There are of course the broad guidelines already discussed, but these are not specific to any situation and for good reason. Applications such as Twitter or Digg are fairly universal, serving as conduits rather than direct sources of information. However services like Myspace and Facebook have differing user bases, and one may be more appropriate to your organization than the other. You must do the research to see what suits your business needs.

The most important piece of advice is to make your SMNR its own distinct element. We have discussed the importance of giving your online marketing efforts their own focus, rather than simply getting to them as you have time. The SMNR is no different. It will not replace the draw of a good blog or video series, just as an author's webpage does not replace the act of actually reading his books.

Instead, find the social media networks that tie most organically into your usual web branding efforts, and build from there. If you're focusing on a smaller audience, include instant messaging service so people can drop into the page chat room for quick input. If you're going for a wider audience, Twitter is still an excellent way to quickly link your newest article or bit of press.

The Press Release

An integral part of any newsroom is the press release. This is not strictly speaking a traditional news story so much as it is a formalized announcement using the news style. As an illustration of the difference, a news story is when a journalism organization covers an event and relays the information. A press release is when the organization itself gives out information they feel is important, usually through a news channel. A good press release keeps to the basic facts, and is short and punchy.

The press release is therefore an outstanding tool for any SMNR. Brief and concise, it explains why your newest venture or change in policy deserves attention. It can be linked through your preferred social media tools and disseminated quickly, bringing people to your page for the full story. From there they can be directed to other materials, and you have your audience at hand.

Extra, Extra

Once again, the focus of the SMNR is as much about drawing in user commentary as it is about distributing information. Take the time to analyze the comments and usage figures from your newsroom against your chosen metrics. Listen to what people are saying, and engage them about these comments. Many good ideas have been lost simply for lack of communication, so take advantage of the fact that your audience is literally right there, in the newsroom with you, and ready to have a dialog.


About the Author:
Enzo F. Cesario is an online brand management specialist and co-founder of Brandsplat. We are social media consultants. Make your site more findable and your brand more recognizable. For the free Brandcasting Report go to http://www.BrandSplat.com/ or visit our blog at http://www.iBrandCasting.com/


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