Supposing someone were to give you the chance to have a single phone number that would reach you wherever you were? So if someone wanted to fax you they'd dial it up and it would know it was receiving a fax; if they called you and you were in a meeting it would take a message, and if you were staying at your mother's place it would direct the call there without a problem?
Actually, services like that are easy to come by on the internet, and many are free to the customer. The snag is that the freebies tend to cost your customers a lot of money, since this is how the companies providing the services make their money.
The smaller business selling to similarly sized organisations, sole traders and consumers are unlikely to want to risk alienating customers by using premium rate numbers. A useful service which costs only a few pounds per month, depending on the level of service required, is the former jFax - now calling itself j2 and found at www.j2.com. Customers send a fax to the j2 number or call it; it distinguishes between a fax and a voice message and forwards them to a pre-selected email address. For an additional cost there is also the option to call in for voicemails, and indeed to have faxes read out electronically so they can be received without the need for a computer.
A useful option with j2 is the possibility of having more than one number, internationally, so if you opt for a New York number in addition to your local number in the UK, customers in the US won't have to pay for an international call. The drawback is that although the numbers on offer look like and attract the same costs as an ordinary landline-based telephone number, not every local code is covered and this can lead to a little confusion.
The author of this article had an 0181 telephone number and an 0171 fax number for several years as a result, and although the delivery of the faxes was faultless the number of customers who quite understandably assumed one of the numbers was a typing error and therefore failed to get through was high.
Businesses who are less concerned with costing their clients a little extra per call might consider services from YAC or Hitoori. Both are free to the customer, and the caller will always pay as if they were calling a mobile phone. This won't suit everyone and there are those customers who will turn away from a high-rate phone call, but the advantages to the business are clear - zero overheads and maximum availability.
YAC, which stands for You're Always Connected, is the longer-established of the two and it offers call forwarding as well as voicemail services. In other words when someone calls an 07092 YAC number, their call can be forwarded either to a mailbox where the caller leaves a message, which gets forwarded to an email account or which can be picked up from a mobile phone.
The YAC customer chooses a few numbers for forwarding when setting up the service, usually home, work, mobile and "other", and then selects the order in which the service should try ringing them. These can be changed anytime. The same number is used for faxes, which can be forwarded to any email box - as before, the system distinguishes between voice and fax automatically.
Hitoori has a similar charging structure to YAC: the Hitoori customer pays nothing and the caller pays as if they are dialling a mobile number. The difference in the case of Hitoori is that the customer can also have his or her emails delivered to a Hitoori web-based email page, so all messages really are held centrally. The option to have voicemails delivered to a mobile phone and indeed to have faxes and emails read out automatically is in the Hitoori service, so it can be used comfortably by people without immediate access to a computer wherever they might be. They can also dictate a reply over the phone.
Hitoori also boasts web paging, an agent that notifies the customer of messages when they have arrived, the prospect of integration with other telephony devices and SMS (short messaging services, the little text messages that arrive on a mobile phone).
There are other people on the market as well; Virtual Plus offers unified messaging and Wap services as do Telepost, BT, Onebox, Vivao, Coms.com and Redstone. Others offer elements of the above; you might not want to trust all of your messaging to a single company from whom you can't even ask for a refund if things go wrong.
Various companies offer a web email service, and there are various companies offering fax only - Efax offers similar services to the jFax system, and Easyfax delivers faxes to a web page rather than to an email address. Only a few basics are needed to take full advantage of any of these services. People who haven't looked at the jFax system for a while might like to know you no longer need the company's own software to view and print out the faxes: standard imaging software will handle it. YAC also offers faxes in Adobe Acrobat form, which can lead to a higher quality image if that matters particularly.
Of course, for the voicemails it's essential to have a sound-capable computer, which means any modern system but which might stump customers with systems five or more years old. For any application involving sound and images, the faster the internet connection the better.
Selecting the right option is largely a matter of assessing whether a business wants to pay for its messages, what level of integration between phone calls, faxes and emails is required and whether the customer will be willing to chip in by paying for premium rate numbers. But given a realistic assessment of the options on offer there's no reason a business operative shouldn't be reachable the whole time, regardless of geography. Which may or may not be a good thing.
Short Messaging Service (SMS)
What is it? The capability to send and receive short text messages to and from your mobile phone. Does every mobile have it? Yes, and these days it can also work across mobile networks, so that if, say, your phone is on the Orange network you can "text" phones on the Vodafone network. You can also send messages to mobiles from the web for free - Lycos and SMSBoy.
Is SMS used much? Quite a bit. According to GSM World there were 12bn short messages sent last month alone. They expect 15bn to be sent in December. That is the equivalent of 30 SMS messages for every GSM mobile phone user in the world.
Three companies, one in-tray
When Tim Harris was looking for a messaging system he had some fairly complex criteria. The objective, to get all messages coming into the office into the one in-tray, was straightforward enough; the backdrop, in which Harris owns two businesses and works for a third as well, was less so. "We wanted a virtual office, with real staff, completely flexible, with the ability to respond to our customers." After checking out some of the alternative web-based offerings, he plumped for Hitoori's messaging service so that calls, emails and faxes could be routed as required.
Hitoori offers the customer the chance to specify several numbers that will be called in the customer's chosen order before the voicemail system kicks in - so Harris selected his mobile number and two of his colleagues' numbers. "Customers always get a response now," he says. "There's never a message giving them another number to call or saying there's no one available, and we never have to worry about whether there's going to be someone in the office at 8.30 or whenever they're likely to call."
Receiving messages in a timely manner is important in any business, but in Harris's debt collection service, Capital Collect Ltd, it is vital. His recycling organisation, Inkas (Remanufacturers) also requires a prompt response, although the third business, Redhouse Antiques, does more work through the web at www.staffordshirefigures.co.uk than by phone. Redirecting messages to different people can be done easily when there's a change in circumstances, which can mean anything from staff absence to someone nipping into a meeting for half an hour: this is done by logging on to the website and choosing a new number or changing the order of the numbers to which calls should be forwarded. The changes take place immediately.
The message service is also simple to operate; they all arrive in the Hitoori mailbox and it's clear at a glance whether they're emails, voice messages or a fax. "It all looks like just one in-tray as far as I'm concerned, so it's very easy to use," says Harris. He also uses the forwarding service for one of the companies to send to a fax machine. For time-sensitive faxes the idea that his mobile phone bleeps to inform him that a fax has arrived is a considerable help. All of this and it's free - there has to be a catch somewhere and it's in the charge to the caller, who has to pay as if he or she were phoning or faxing a mobile phone every time. This hasn't been an issue yet, probably because of the profile of the customers: "People just need to get in touch, there hasn't been anyone asking us to call back or anything like you used to get with mobile phones," he says.
Learning the system was simple: there was a learning curve to go through but Hitoori talked Harris through all of the procedures and went as far as setting up the first of the numbers for him. Support calls were answered so efficiently that Harris still remembers the support staff by name.
The benefits to Harris's businesses are clear: every customer gets a response, while previously some had messages taken or had an engaged signal; the companies can create an "instant office" regardless of where the staff are at any given time since the calls can be forwarded to any number, and this means no time has to be spent on planning communications. "We are able to be completely flexible in the way we organise our movements. We no longer have to think about communications, using the time for other tasks."
