Hosted PBX Works For IT Consultants
A friend of mine is an IT consultant and he started his business from of his bedroom a few years ago. John is super smart and is a whiz bang computer geek so I knew he would do extremely well. John used to work for a large financial services company and he managed a boat load of servers and thousands of workstations. Although John had a great job and he was making great money, he was stressed out and not satisfied with working long hours for someone else. He wanted to be the man in control of his own destiny and start his own business as an IT consultant.
I am happy to say that John is doing well but when he first started out he had several challenges with managing calls from his potential customers. Sometimes even smart geeks don’t have all the technical answers. John started out on his own and all he really needed was a cell phone a website and a few business cards. This worked great when he was the only employee because all the calls would go to one central phone number and one voice mail box. Around his first year in business, John started to see a boost in prospect inquiries because of his awesome ability to deliver outstanding IT support at reasonable prices. His cell phone started to ring because of all the referral business his clients were throwing his way. When he started, John didn’t want to take on new employees but his business was growing and he needed to hire a few techs and support staff to help with customer support issues for new clients.
The challenge for John was releasing control of the customer support because John is a hands-on type of guy and he loves to solve problems for his customers. At first John tried to manage the incoming call volume using a regular POTS phone line that just forwarded calls to his cell phone whenever he was out of the office but he started getting so many calls that he was pulled in too many directions. John would constantly miss incoming calls and he was having a tough time delegating the work to his employees. So John decided to try Google voice and forward the calls to various employees depending on availability but this didn’t work out either because it was too difficult to coordinate. Then John heard about Hosted PBX solutions.
As John’s business started to grow, his phone service became a crucial business component. John’s main focus is to provide excellent customer service to his clients so actually speaking with his clients, employees and partners on demand, from anyplace, at anytime was a major priority. Prior to Hosted PBX services, there were a limited number of solutions but none of them really provided a solid communications infrastructure for John. To keep costs down, John relied on POTS lines and his cell phone to communicate but this had limitations especially when he needed to collaborate with his employees.
Hosted PBX has been the perfect solution for John’s business because he is able to manage the call flow much better. Every employee has their own direct number which acts like a virtual extension and rings to their cell phones. All the voicemail messages are sent directly to the employees email account so it’s easy to retrieve and forward from anywhere. For after hours support, John can simply login to the web portal and assign a specific on-call tech to handle the incoming support calls each week. John is happy because he is now able to focus on bigger issues and is still able to provide high quality customer service for every client. With Hosted PBX, John is now able to keep costs down, improve employee productivity and focus his time on expanding to new markets.
John is a happy customer of Spiritel Solutions and is currently helping small businesses with their ongoing IT management issues. For more information on Hosted PBX or to receive a free evaluation of your existing telecom carrier, please call Spiritel at 866-770-0300.
