Small Business Communications
Large corporations hire specialists that study business communications and it's fine points. They use what they learn to fine tune their information lifelines. Small businesses do not have this luxury and hence they handle their communications by trial and error. Frequently their communications facilities try the patience of both their employees and customers. The errors are measured in lost sales and customers. The large corporations make mistakes too, but they have the staff with expertise to help quickly determine the problems and fix them.
With the changes in the telecommunications industry that began with the competition brought on by the formation of MCI and the breakup of AT&T the user is on his own. Not that it was better before, AT&T and the local companies would help you but they had a "take what we have or leave it" attitude. The only way the user can survive is with help, generally they get it from a brother-in-law who knows nothing about telecom but sounds good. There are good telecom consultants available, they cost money, but often they can save the business more in a few months than they cost.
The large corporations also have an another advantage, they make large purchases of communications facilities and thus enjoy discounts that are not given to the small business. These include Tariff 12 rates that allow these corporations to pay only a fraction of the cost the home user pays for toll calls. But let's not paint so bleak a picture. There are economies available to the small business if they take advantage of them.
Too many small businesses start out with a home phone line and use it for both home and business calls. Generally if the number of business calls is small and the family can exercise restraint on the non-business use of the phone, this will appear to work. But if this breaks down the business suffers without the owner being aware. Customers who don't get through easily just go elsewhere. The businessman never knows he is loosing customers until the sales begin to sag. Most small business owners can delude themselves for months that this is a downturn in sales, a seasonal trend, before they realize their customers are getting busy signals. The business may even fail before this is known. When customers get busy signals the business is no longer busy. If the business has regular clients it may become aware of the problem because someone that needs more of the product or service calls till they get through. By then they are angry enough to complain. If this fails they begin to look elsewhere. Advertising is expensive, but spending the money to advertise and then alienating the prospects it generates is just plain stupid. It is akin to burning money.
One of the earliest investments a small business needs to make is a phone line for the business. If it is listed as a business, many phone companies charge a premium. Be sure to check the ramifications of calling it a business line before installing the phone. It can later be changed to a business line but it is difficult to convince the phone company it is not a business line once it installed as such. Make sure you do not make your home line a business line, this just adds more cost. Of course, if your line is to a store front that has a business sign the telephone company will not believe it is a non-business line. Remember too, there is a tradeoff, for this extra cost you get a business listing in the white pages of the phone book. This may or may not be worth the added cost. Yellow pages listings are almost always extra and expensive, usually $30 a month for a very small, minimum size ad. Unless your business is going to benefit, you may be better off to spend the $300 a year for some other advertising. The price of ads goes up with size. Determine the value of the ad, then determine the size. I'm told the back page of the phone book in our area costs about $100,000 a year. Ego sometimes drives business decisions that increase cost, if a Yellow Pages ad will not generate business, don't spend the money. The plant I worked for cancelled its Yellow Pages ad, we sold only to plants within our company, the ad did not generate business. Costs for ads vary greatly, I am using values for my area. A second phone line, if not a business line, generally is not more than $20 a month, even with some features. The business line may be up to $60 a month. Choose carefully features you may need. It is easy to buy features you do not use or miss features that would benefit your business. Some features are definitely not of value to the business.
Tone Dial -- Here is a feature that costs the phone company LESS to provide, but you pay for it. Tone dial takes lower cost equipment and less time but because of government regulations it costs more! This is almost a must for a business. You can get phones that pulse dial but they take longer to make calls. Your time wasted is probably worth more than the cost, usually less than a dollar a month. Having a pulse dial is a handicap in accessing any automated systems, you will have to remember to keep flipping the switch on the phone. Modems can be set up to use pulse but it is not the standard, again we have a non-standard configuration that will cause problems.
Call waiting - This feature has no use on a business line. Nobody in their right mind is going to put one client on hold to pick up what might be another telephone credit card salesman. It is better to give the second caller the busy signal. There are better ways to handle the busy line. See telephone company answering services. This service also creates problems if the line is to be used for data transmission (modems or FAX).
Call forwarding - This allows each call to be forwarded to another phone. This relatively inexpensive feature can be used to give the business coverage when nobody can be home. If you have a cellular phone that has free weekends you can forward calls to it to provide coverage. This means you can answer your calls from wherever you are in your cellular home area, FREE. Don't use this if you are going to be out of your home area unless your calls are really worth the cellular rate. If you have another small business owner that will cover for you for like consideration, you can cross forward to give each other weekends or days free without your business suffering or an employee can cover from home. Remember that if the forwarding call is a toll call from your home or you are forwarding to a cellular (except as above) you will pay the toll or air time charges.
Three way calling (Conference calling) - Don't waste money on this feature unless you really need to be able to talk to two persons at a time. If you have to schedule meetings with two people at one time, this is very valuable but there is limited use. For example, if you are scheduling an installation and you need to talk to the customer and the installer at the same time to coordinate activities, this is very useful. Remember you will have to pay for both calls if they are toll calls, but the time saved in toll calls may reduce the phone bill more than the cost of the feature, not to mention the value of your time.
Caller ID - There are several flavors of this feature but they all supply the phone number of the caller to a display on the phone. The phone company has hyped this feature but for the business it generally has little value with one exception. If you are running a home delivery service, like a pizza delivery, this can be a protection against pranks. Unless you are going to use it to screen calls, it has little value. Handling crank calls or threat calls is better left to call trace, noted below.
Call Block - This allows the user to block calls from a specific number. Again this feature is hyped by the phone company. The only valid use of this is if you are having significant problems with specific callers. This is better handled by the call trace feature below.
Call Trace - This feature usually involves the user dialing a specific number after receiving a "nuisence call". This politically correct term is what phone companies call anything from death threats and bomb scares to hang-ups in the night. I have successfully dealt with these calls in both my personal and professional life. I recommend call trace and vigorous prosecution as the solution. Call block and caller ID are not the answer. See dealing with nuisence calls.
Dual (or multiple) Ring -- This feature has a lot of names, what it does allows one phone line to have two or more numbers. The ring is different for different numbers. This allows you to hook a FAX machine and a phone on the same line, each with a different number. There are boxes that will "listen" to the ring and pass the call to the right device. This keeps your customers happier with a cost of about $5 a month and a cost of the box of about $130. There are many suppliers of these boxes, Black Box Corporation is a good supplier. The maximum number of phone numbers on a line depends on the phone company equipment. Do not take the word of the sales person on the phone if the answer is less than you need. Ask for a supervisor to be sure. This is true any time you get a "no" from the phone company. Most of these "customer service representatives" know little of the services except the ones they sell regularly. Phone companies are content with this, so it continues.
Long Distance Carrier - If you have a significant toll call bill, the choice of the LD Carrier is critical. Get past the hype and the pretty girls with the headsets on TV, there is a difference in Long Distance Carriers, but not a large one. Reliability and service are not significantly different if you stay with one of the established companies. If you have a toll call cost of less than $30 a month this is probably not worth a lengthy exercise. AT&T, MCI, World Com, LDS, and Sprint hype aside, the cost differential is generally less than 25%. If your bill is $30 a month a change has a maximum savings of $7.50, not worth the effort unless you have time to burn. If the bill is larger, break down at least two bills into lists showing each area code, the number of calls and the duration of the calls. Contact two carriers and have each carrier cost the calls and give you an estimate. Do not give the name of your current carrier or the cost from your present carrier. Make sure they are costing at regular rates, not "this month discounts" that will go away. This business is as cut-throat as any. Ask for a discount when you make the change. Remind them this will cost money on your local carrier bill, at minimum see what discounts they offer to get your business. They will not be offered unless you ask. Watch out for checks in the mail. One tactic used is to send you a check that has the authorization for the company issuing the check to become your long distance provider printed on the back above the place for your signature. If you cash the check you now have a new long distance carrier. Your local phone company must make the change and will most likely charge you between 5 and 10 dollars for this change. Destroy these checks unless you really want to change carriers. This activity once was confined to the no-name companies but recently I saw a check for $75 from AT&T.
800/888 numbers -- Until this year all toll free numbers were area code 800 but there are only so many numbers in an area and in late 1995 we were nearly out of them. Enter the 888 area. It is functionally the same as 800 but there is still a stigma because a significant number of people do not recognize this as toll free. This will change with time but for now, all other things being equal, take the 800 number if you get the choice. Remember if you get an 800/888 number you pay the toll on each call. I have a personal 800 number, it cost about $5 a month and its per minute rate was competitive. My son used it during college, it generally cost less for him to call us on the MCI 800 line than to dial direct on his AT&T college phone. My guess right now is the 888 area code will be full by the year 2002.
FAX machines -- Resist the temptation to buy the latest/greatest. Generally an inexpensive FAX will suffice. More important than the bells and whistles on the FAX is whether the customer can get through to you. We discussed the phone lines for FAX above, these are important. One thing many businesses try is to get an intelligent FAX machine so they can use the line for voice too. This generally is a bad idea because customers get tired of the rings it takes to trigger the machine. Consider the dual ring mentioned above. PC sellers accent the use of the PC as a FAX. I do not endorse the use of a PC as a primary FAX. The PC has too many other uses that contradict this. If you have demanding FAX needs, Cannon has a FAX/PC printer that has definite possibilities for many users. This is a full function FAX machine that can function as a really good PC printer. More important, if you use a FAX to broadcast it can take phone lists from the PC and it can get the data to FAX from the PC. This sends a higher quality FAX than any scanner can provide and you can compose it on the PC. If you are making this heavy use of the FAX, consider using it at night or put it on the personal line for this use. Don't tie up your business order line for this.
Answering service -- Some phone companies can provide answering services. GTE has really good services here. Most small businesses just go out and get a cheap answering machine and avoid this service. Generally this is a good choice but there are some benefits to the phone company service. Most of them will allow a caller to leave a message if your phone is busy. This means that while you are on a call a customer will not get a busy signal, they will be able to leave a message for you. Make sure you can change your greeting, it can be a valuable advertising tool, if used for very short messages. These services also allow you to get your messages from any phone, anywhere. The password is important. If it is guessable, your house number, etc. someone else may pick up your messages or just flush them, hurting your business.
Pagers -- If your business is service, consider a pager. It is a lower cost alternative to cellular for many people. Here again, don't buy what you don't need. Sky pagers are generally not needed for small businesses. Local and regional paging companies are generally the best values if they have the coverage area you need. My personal pager is from a local firm with the unsurprising name of "BEEP". I purchased pagers for others in our company before I bought this one for myself and the research pointed me to them. They sold used pagers at low cost, not junk but the good numeric models. Their coverage area is solid, if you get paged, you get the page, and it is big. Actually it is bigger than they claim. More important, I spend most of my time in this area. We bought several other pagers for our people from other companies, BEEP's coverage area is more to the west, it favors my living pattern. One of our people lived to the east, we bought from a company that had a smaller area that went 15 miles further east. Both were the right choice for the person. Before buying a pager, get the coverage area maps from a couple of companies, if they are proud of their coverage, they will have a map and they will FAX you one. 360, the successor to Sprint Cellular offers paging services but get costs before you sign up. With most local paging services you do not pay for air time and a pager is much more convenient to carry than a cellular phone. There is a lot of hype on the newer models being more battery efficient. My pager is the older model, I use it on vibrate, which uses more battery, and a single AA lasts over a month. That's about $4 of batteries a year. It's hard to justify $50 more for the pager. Mine is on the older 170 MHZ band that the salesmen hype as less effective, I have not missed a page except when I have been out of the area in two years. I get about 5 a day.
Cellular Phones - Few small businesses (or large ones for that matter) can afford cellular unless it is used intelligently. I have seen people in offices with a wired phone talking on a cellular! Unbelievable! If you cannot exercise self discipline on phone use, don't even get a cellular. At 36 cents a minute, a typical air time rate, an hour is over $20. At a half hour a day this is $200 a month. When I follow someone in traffic talking on a cellular for twenty minutes on the way home from work I wonder. But cellular has a place when it is used to enhance the business. Valid uses is for businesses where you can serve customers quickly and the quick response is critical. Unless this is a business requirement, there are generally better places you can spend the money.
I get some questions at times, "why MCI"? The real question is why I tend to go back to MCI for service. Let me give you a couple of reasons. Several times I needed a particular service and they were the only company that would sell it to me. WHen I got my 800 number, nobody else was offering one. When I first got access from them, nobody else woud give me the access I wanted at a reasonable price. Sure they woudl sell the access to GM, but not to me personally. The big guy wasn't interested in me or the business I would generate for them.
MCI was interested.
The result has been that now I will give MCI first shot at being
the provider and unless the price is wrong, the business is theirs.
Anyone want to know if the pretty girl with the headset on the MCI TV ads was effective? That's the one who said, lighten up AT&T, I'll not get around to all of your customers for a long time.
I can answer that question. Watch for the new Sprint ad that shows a girl that could easily be the MCI gal's sister...
Imitation is the finest form of flattery. I can't tell you if she was effective, but for the money it costs to pay her imitation and put her on the air, you can bet Sprint thinks the MCI gal is good..
Coming soon...
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