How an Auto Attendant Works

If you are a small company without the budget to afford a receptionist to answer your calls, or even a medium sized company who does not need a receptionist, an auto attendant can handle your calls and route them to the correct person or department easily and effectively. With an auto attendant, your company can entertain, manage, and divert calls from any of your offices to any place you want.

Using an auto attendant to manage inbound business calls can be useful in providing companies with cost reducing solutions in automating and simplifying phone network management. An auto attendant, automated attendant or digital receptionist, is a kind of phone service that efficiently transfers callers to the correct person or extension without actually going through a stand-by human operator or receptionist. The purpose of the auto attendant is to offer small businesses the opportunity to enjoy the advantage of having a more affordable phone network managing solution, which helps establish lasting business and client relations without extra costs.

An Auto Attendent Greets Your Caller

The first thing a caller hears when they are connected with your auto attendant is your companies main greeting. The main greeting will provide information and route call depending on their response to the options given to them. The main greeting or Main IVR (Intereactive Voice Response) is usually recorded by someone in the company or a professional voice talent. Once the caller chooses either an extension to be routed to, or an option, the phone system will handle the routing of the call.

Utilizing an IVR to Save Money & Increase Customer Satisfaction

IVR (Interactive Voice Response) is a phone system term that refers to the technology that automates interactions with telephone callers. Many companies are increasingly turning to IVR's to reduce the cost of common sales, service, collections, inquiry and support calls to and from their company.

An IVR can actually take the place of a full-time receptionist, or anyone who you hire to answer common questions or gather customer information.

How to Create a Professional Main Greeting

Your companies phone system main greeting is a callers first impression of your business . If it is professional and routes the caller quickly and effieciently you will certainly make a good impression. If, on the other hand, your main greeting sounds unprofessional and/or makes it difficult for a caller to get to the department or individual they need to talk to, you will most likely frustrate them and lose them as a potential customer.

Here are some tips on how to make sure you have a professional phone system company main greeting:

1. Create a 'Call Tree' that shows how a customer's call is routed. A Call Tree is invaluable when setting up your main greeting. It will show you how a caller is routed through your phone system. If they are having to go through too many options just to talk to a real person, you can see it now and can fix it. You can just jot this down on a piece of paper using arrows and boxes, or use a flow chart software. Either way, you will most likely make some changes as you see different routes you want your callers to make.

2. Don't try to relay too much information in the main greeting when you can put that information later in the call tree. For example if you want to give the caller directions to your office, offer them the option of chosing a number to dial to hear those instructions. Don't put that in the main greeting because some people might not need directions and yet they will have to listen to them everytime they call.

What is E911?

Enhanced 911, E-911 or E911 is a North American telecommunications based system that automatically associates a physical address with the calling party's telephone number, and routes the call to the most appropriate Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) for that address. The caller's address and information is displayed to the calltaker immediately upon call arrival. This provides emergency responders with the location of the emergency without the person calling for help having to provide it. This is often useful in times of fires, break-ins, kidnapping, and other events where communicating one's location is difficult or impossible.

The system only works in North America if the emergency telephone number 911 is called. Calls made to other telephone numbers, even though they may be listed as an emergency telephone number, may not permit this feature to function correctly. Outside the United States this type of facility is often called caller location, though its implementation is dependent on how the telephone network processes emergency calls.

Top 10 SEO Tips

There are lots of ways to get your website seen. You can pay for advertising, use your website address on printed material, and on your business card, or pay for PPC using Google Adwords or any of the other hundres of PPC engines.

But nothing can be more cost effective than SEO. SEO stands for Search Engine Marketing and it really is an art form that takes a while to learn. You see the search engine algorithims change quite often. Which means the rules change. And when the rules change (even though they don't tell you they have change OR what they have changed to) you have to work on your site to try and get it higher on the search engines.

The payoff is FREE advertising that is going to help you company get more business. You can't beat FREE.

So here are the Press8 VoIP PBX "Top 10 SEO Tips" that you can do now to get your site higher on the search engines:

1. Make your keyword text BOLD and use HEADERS. This means make text BOLD or specify text as a HEADER on your site when it contains the keywords you are trying to capture.