One of my pet peeves when phoning local shops is to have them interrupt our conversation “because someone else is calling.” It’s frustrating for the other customer, too. Does “Hi thanksforcalling canyouholdplease?” sound familiar? It is good that the company is getting so much interest, but there’s a more professional way of dealing with the calls.

Enter the Call Queues function of the Business Central 200. It provides a better experience for your customers, because their calls are answered and processed in an efficient manner. It’s better for your employees too, as they don’t have to interrupt their existing conversations to put people on hold, and they can help callers in the order they are received.

When you’re on the phone, Call Queues will answer any incoming calls, play your message, and put them on hold until you’re done with your original caller. It will then connect the person on hold and let you take care of business. It’s just like having a checkout line in a store – first come, first served.

Call Queue has been added as another call destination, like auto attendants, voicemail boxes, or telephones. Here’s how to set it up. Log in to your BC200 using your Administrator password , and select the ‘Call Routing’ menu. At the top there’s a tab for ‘Call Queues, which is where we’ll be working today.

Select ‘Create’ to make a new queue. The ‘General’ tab on the right side is where we can set various parameters, the ‘Queue Menu’ assigns actions to keys that the callers can press while waiting, and the ‘Users’ tab shows which workspaces use the queue. The ‘Clips’ menu allows you to engage your customers with advertising messages, play hold music, or simply tell them their place in line. Save your changes, and you’re set up!

As a suggestion, here’s a setup that we’re using here for testing. When a customer calls our Sales number, the Auto Attendant answers them and plays our welcome message. The caller has the option to press ’0′ to leave a message for the Sales workspace, but if they don’t, they are automatically put into the call queue for Sales. As the workers in Sales finish their calls and hang up, the BC200 connects the next caller in the line to them. If nobody answers within the timeout limit, (two minutes in this case) they are automatically sent to the Sales voicemail.

This is in beta testing, and will be available in the next update.

Yours, patiently in the queue,

Dave.

Did you know that Business Central can be found in a wide variety of small businesses, from franchises to non-profit organizations, and each with their own requirements of IT and communications? Recently, SUTUS has been collecting a series of success stories from different industries that use the Business Central product line to save themselves time, money, and hassle. They’ve published a variety of these to show the flexibility and adaptability of the SUTUS solution. Start learning about ways that SUTUS can help you in your industry specifically by clicking here.

There are a few common themes to these stories, however. Business Central is scalable to meet your needs, so it will be ready for your future growth. Also, SUTUS is ready to work with other retail hardware that you may have, including security cameras and point-of-sale devices. If that wasn’t enough,the cost savings of standardization between franchises, offices or branches will keep your bottom line low.

If you have a story of how the SUTUS solution helped your small business, please tell us.

Thanks,

-Dave.

I’m pleased to announce that the newest version of Business Central Manager (1.7.2) increases the maximum quota for email storage from 4Gb to 16Gb. That’s more than twice as much as Gmail and more than 3 times as much as Hotmail!

This provides administrators with a method of changing work processes. A small file size limit will encourage employees to post files on the local file server, and a large limit will allow users to store a copy of a file from a remote location, just to name two examples.

This release is out, so if you haven’t installed it, what are you waiting for? Your email inbox will thank you.

-Dave.

After the release of Business Central Manager 1.7.2, I noticed that the amount of spam I receive suddenly decreased. I looked into it, and found that SUTUS has included a 30-day trial of their new Business Central Email Security suite with this release.

It’s simple to use and administrate, as it runs in the background, and any changes are automatically applied to all users. When there are updates, they are made automatically, thus keeping you safe from new threats. Log in to your BC200 using your Administrator password, and select ‘Email Service.’ Choose the ‘Email Security’ tab, and then ‘Edit Settings’ to set it all up.

The Business Central Email Security suite is sold as a one-year license, and there are discounts available depending on the number of users you have.

Click this link to go to the purchase page.

When you’re not at work, you post a ‘closed’ sign on the door, right? It’s just good manners, and smart business sense as well. So why do so many companies not do the equivalent for their phone or email services?

Expanding on last week’s post about Auto Attendants, let’s take a look at how the workspace availability (also called ‘presence’) can help out the car dealership. I mentioned that they could set up one auto attendant and call flow combination for when they are open and a different one for when they are closed. We can manually or automatically switch between the two call flows, so let’s find out how.

Using your administrator password, log in to your BC200, and click on the ‘Manage Workspaces’ tab on the left. Then highlight the workspace you want to edit, select ‘Edit Properties,’ and then click on the ‘Availability’ tab. Choose a day by clicking on it, and then you can change the availability schedules. Changing the call flow or email services can be selected under the availability schedule.

This is the Parts department of the car dealership from last week. They are available on a varying schedule – Monday to Thursdays 7:00 to 3:00, Friday from 7:00 to 1:00, and a half-day on Saturday. If a call comes in outside of these times, it will follow the ‘Unavailable’  call flow.

That’s not all, though. This feature is available for all workspaces, personal and shared, and they can all follow different schedules. For example, one of their sales team, Dustin, recently went on a holiday, and he wanted his customers to be handled correctly. He manually set his workspace to ‘unavailable,’ and then set his account to do the following:

1. Forward his email to an external account,
2. Auto-reply, letting his customers know when he’ll be back, and
3. Re-route his calls to the receptionist, who can then pass the caller to another sales agent or to his voicemail.

This is a screenshot of Dustin’s auto-reply setup. Of course, he can change the message to say what he wants it to!

It actually took less time for him to set up his availability schedule than it did for me to write this and grab the screenshots, and I’m sure that you’ll be able to do it just as quickly. He was able to do these changes without getting an administrator, because the BC200 lets people change aspects of their own workspace as well as details of any shared workspaces they are members of.

If you need help, or just want to learn all the details, just search for ‘availability’ in the BC200′s Help section. The BC200 does synchronize itself automatically with internet time servers, so it will always have the correct time.

-Dave.

It’s been a while, but I have some good news. SUTUS has recently released their newest software version, and I’m pleased to tell you about part of it – configurable Auto Attendants. (Auto Attendants are sometimes called IVRs – Interactive Voice Response.) I’ve been involved with testing this, and this will definitely make it easier for your customers to reach the departments they want.

There are four differences. Now, we can:

• make a different Auto Attendant greeting for each department,
• have one greeting for open hours and one for closed,
• map single phone buttons to direct callers to voicemail boxes, workspaces, or workgroups
• make simple phone trees.

Let’s go under the hood. Log in to your BC200 with your administrator password. From the list on the left, select Call Routing. From there, select the Auto Attendants tab, and you’re in. You can see which auto-attendants are assigned, who is using them, and, by clicking on one of them, you can see what keys are mapped to which actions.

I was involved with setting this up and testing it. It’s a pretty good demonstration of how your BC200 can route customers’ calls more efficiently.

Here’s an example: At our local car dealership, they had a full-time receptionist to answer and connect their phone calls. Customers complained of lengthy hold times, and the receptionist was under stress trying to keep up with the volume of calls! A quick survey showed that only a few calls were for specific people, as most of the calls were people looking to speak with someone in either the sales or the parts departments. They decided to filter these calls out with an auto attendant before the BC200 rings a Reception phone, and let the receptionist deal with the calls for specific people.

Their receptionist recorded an auto attendant greeting describing the options for callers. They then assigned the keys as follows:

’1′ key connects to the Sales Dept. workspace

’2′ key connects to the Parts Dept. workspace

’3′ key connects to the Reception workspace

Now the callers can bypass the receptionist, thus freeing them up to speak to people who need guidance. My Managing Call Flows blog article has some tips that might be helpful when setting this up.

They also created a second auto attendant to use when the dealership was closed, which was set up on the Reception Availability tab. This allowed them to have another message and to add the option 9 to reach off-hours support. Before, all off-hours callers had to leave messages with Reception, and she would transcribe and email those messages to their intended recipients when she arrived in the morning. How tedious! Now, using the same key assignments as above, callers can leave a voicemail with a specific department. They also added ’9′, and they assigned it to call (123) 456-7890, which is their after-hours emergency contact number. Calls that come to the Reception workspace are sent to the appropriate auto attendant depending on the time of day.

Before multiple auto attendants, callers were subject to lengthy hold times even before they spoke to the receptionist, the receptionist was stressed out and unable to keep up with the number of calls, and customers were unhappy. By setting multiple auto attendants, customers can reach the people they want more efficiently, and the receptionist can concentrate on calls for specific people, rather than those for general departments.

This is included in the version 1.7.2 release of the Business Central software. If you’d like more information, just search for ‘Attendant’ in Business Central Manager’s Help.

-Dave.

I’ve been lucky enough to be involved with beta testing recently, and I’m pretty excited about some new product that will really make customer management easier. Interested? Read on…

First things first. This application lives in your Windows toolbar and works with both your Outlook and your Polycom phone. There are also plans to have it integrate with some common database systems (CRMs), so you can log call numbers and times, customer support information, and case notes from your workers.

It makes all your dialing as simple as typing part of a person’s name. It’s actually just like having all of your contacts on speed dial! When you receive a call, your computer uses the CallerID number to find and display the Outlook contact information, so you will know exactly who it is. It can also flash up a window with the contact’s details when you receive a call, which will let your customer support workers greet each caller in a well-prepared fashion. It’s also only one click to call people back!

Also, it can interact, work, and integrate with Google Maps. If you enter contact info that is not in Outlook, you can perform a search without opening your browser. Once you choose the correct hit, you can call them with only one click. When you’re done, you can create a new Outlook contact, including a clickable link to Google Maps, which will autofill to save time and effort.

The plan is to make this available upon request within the next month. Just email the Sutus sales team and they’ll contact you when it goes live!

-Dave.

So, how does this work? All you’ll need are two or more offices with an Internet connection and a BC200 at each location. Setting it up is pretty easy – the BC200′s wizard walks you through it.

Our screenshot below shows that our home office is San Francisco. We’re directly connected to the BC200s in Vancouver, Chicago, and Boston, and we have a local telephone line available too. Via Boston, we can also reach Toronto and New York.

This allows for flexibility in call routing too. With this example, we could allow anyone from any office to place a call to the 604 or 778 area codes, regardless of their physical location. Conversely, a customer in San Francisco can call our 778 number and be seamlessly forwarded to our corporate main offices in Toronto, all with no long distance charges. And the San Francisco office doesn’t even need to be open!

Imagine this scenario: Customer Jane, in Boston, wants to talk to the Sutus sales team, but it’s 7:30pm, and her local office is closed. In the past, she’d have to do several steps.

1. find out where other Sutus offices are located
2. figure out the time difference
3. find their phone numbers, and
4. pay for the long distance call.

With Interoffice Calling and an optimized call flow, however, she just has one step:

1. call her local office.

Their BC200 takes care of the rest.
Her call will be forwarded to Vancouver where they are still open and able to take care of her. No research, time calculations or phone charges needed.

Customers saving their money is great, but we at the office like saving too. Especially the finance department! Imagine that I’m in New York, and I need to call our importer in Toronto. I could call long distance, but that’s going to become expensive. Instead, I can use the Toronto phone line. My BC200 routes my call to Toronto, where their BC200 sends it out to the phone network. Success!

Send us a line if you have any questions – our new website has all our contact details. If you’re already a reseller, click here. If you’re an end user who is interested in the Business Central solution, click here.

That’s it for this week. Talk to you soon!

-Dave.

Something new this week! Sutus has released their newest software update (version 1.7.1 available upon request starting today), and I heard about a few new features that seem promising. I’ll be sending out some articles on these over the next while, but today I’m going to introduce Distinctive Ringtones.

I can hear the groans already. “But we can already choose the ringtones on our phones! Why is this news?” Actually, this is much better than just selecting a distinctive ring for your own phone. It’s more like audible CallerID – any call for a specific workspace will ring with the same ringtone, regardless of which physical phone it is.

It’s simple to use. Let’s go into Business Central Manager and get to work. Once you’ve entered your password, click on the “Manage Workspaces,” then highlight the name of the workspace to modify, click on “Edit Properties,” then “Phone Service,” and lastly “Incoming Call Flow.” You can select the ringtone under the “Ring Type” dropdown menu. The default is to use the ring type selected on the phone, but this can override that selection. Also, I can change my own settings as well as the settings for groups that I’m in.

This works in tandem with the Call Flow feature to ‘announce’ the destination of a call, whether it is for a specific person or a specific department. Sometimes a caller wants to speak to Jill, and sometimes they want to speak to someone in Support. We can ring the same physical phone with a different tone for each of these situations.

Imagine a room used for planning and design. There might be 5 or 6 phones in the room, and lets say that they are in the call flows for personal workspaces as well as shared ones. When a phone rings, everyone needs to check to see if it is their phone, and they also need to see if it is a call that concerns them. Running back and forth to check the call display can really disrupt the creativity of this team! However, if there is a different ring for each of the people or teams present, those not concerned with the call can just ignore it.

As you can see, this makes it pretty easy to find out who the call is for when you are close to, but not looking at, the phone. I should warn you, though, that this only works with Polycom phones, not the Handy-Tone or softphones.

This is available as a limited release, so if you’re interested, just drop a line to the Sutus Support team at support@www.sutus.com

-Dave.

We’ve just started our Webmail beta trial, and we’re pleased to offer this opportunity to try out our new service. If you’re interested in a free, secure, Sutus-branded webmail address, head on over to the sign-up page.