Favorite Virtual Phone System May 26, 2007
Posted by essentialadmin in General Tips, REALTOR Tips, RV VA Tips, Virtual Assistant Tips.add a comment
Whether you’re a Virtual Assistant, REALTOR working with a VA or VA team, or RV remote professional, one of the “staples” of your business will be a virtual phone system. What is a virtual phone system? It’s a virtual PBX … it combines a toll-free or local number with an autoattendant, Internet fax, call forwarding, voicemail, call screening, “click-to-call me” feature, and more.
I’ve used several different systems, including FreedomVoice, Onebox, UReach, and a host of others for whom I can’t even remember their names. But, my all time favorite, and the one I use and recommend to clients, is RingCentral.com (BTW, they were voted “Best for Toll Free Numbers” by Inc. Magazine).
They have everything you could possibly want:
- Toll free numbers and the ability to “port over” your existing toll free number (in most cases) for free
- Local numbers in some areas
- Really affordable ($9.99/month)
- Faxing, both receiving via email attachments or web access, and sending out
- Really important for the RV Professional — Internet voice recording/uploads. Many systems don’t offer this and when you’re a full-time RVer you don’t have a clear landline … and when you record greetings (especially for clients), you need a clear line. With RingCentral, you can use the mic on your computer and their control panel (no extra software needed) to record your greetings.
- Numerous extensions ($9.99 plan has 5). This is great for the REALTOR working with a Virtual team. Each person has their own extension, own recording and own call forwarding settings. When they send out communications (i.e., letters, emails, their signature block, etc.), they represent themselves as a part of your team … your clients don’t even need to know they are virtual (and perhaps not even in the same state!). If your team grows, you also have the ability to add on additional extensions for just $2.99 each.
- Same with faxes. You can setup the fax extension (which isn’t one of the 5) to email each person who should see the faxes that come into the “virtual office”. Since the faxes (and voicemails) come into the specified email, they can be filed for future reference, or included in the client file.
- There is a “whisper” feature for the call recipient’s convenience. This whisper announces the caller’s name as well as the phone account it’s coming in from. This is especially important for the Virtual Assistant who services multiple clients. For example, say I provide services for Jane Doe, REALTOR, as well as John Brown, REALTOR. When my office phone rings and I answer, the “whisper” feature will announce, “You have a call for [Amber Drake, Jane Doe Team], press 1 to accept the call”. Immediately, I know which “hat” I’m wearing. Additionally, if my doorbell rings and the UPS man is delivering a package (and the neighborhood canine patrols are barking), I know that isn’t the best time to answer the call. If most appropriate, I can let the call go to voicemail and in a matter of seconds, I’ll have the voicemail delivered to my email box, and can return the caller’s message in just a few moments. Note: if you choose not to have callers “announce themselves”, this is also available as part of the control panel setup.
- They also offer International Calling options. My husband currently travels weekly to Canada hauling RVs. To call him from my office or home phone (even though I have unlimited long distance), I’m charged about .60/minute for a call to Canada. Calling him on his cell phone isn’t really an option either, as Canada is considered roaming and those calls are about $1.00/minute. I can pick-up office phone, cell phone or a pay phone if I’m out and about, and dial through my RingCentral line for a fraction of the cost at .05 cents per minute.
- Easy billing. Keep a card in your profile and set it up to autopurchase mintues. You’ll never run out of minutes while you’re on a call!
- They have lots of free minutes included. On the $9.99 plan, it includes 100 minutes per month, but they also give you a free bank of 100 roll-over minutes. For example, say you use 110 minutes the first month. They would first subtract from your 100 monthly minutes, and then they will subtract 10 minutes from your roll-over bank. This free bank is good to use anytime in a 12 month period.
- They don’t double leg bill! Here’s an overview of this. Say a caller calls you and the system forwards the call to your designated number(s) (i.e., your office phone). A forwarded call consists of two connections, an inbound call to your virtual number and an outbound connection to the phone you used to answer the call. Other companies charge for each of these connections separately and charge you twice their published rate for each minute. For example, a company advertising 2.9¢/min would actually charge you 5.8¢ for every minute of talk time or 58¢ for a 10 minute conversation. At RingCentral, they only bill for one minute of a connected domestic call. This is a very important question to ask when evaluating a provider.
- Call logs are available. This may be important to a REALTOR hosting the virtual office for his/her virtual team so he/she feels comfortable regarding its usage.
So, what this looks like for the:
VA: You now have the ability to post a toll-free number on your website and marketing and present a more professional presence. Your calls are announced to you when you pick-up the phone, allowing you to decide if it’s the most appropriate time to field the call. It’s affordable at only $9.99/month . You can get rid of your Internet fax service as this takes care of that need as well. Call forwarding to your office and/or cell (and/or any other numbers) assures you don’t miss a call.
REALTOR: Offers the perfect virtual office solution for your vitual (or not so virtual) team. Can also be used for a team of agents and/or in-house assistant(s). Can usually port over an existing toll free number for free so you don’t have to change existing print and internet marketing materials. Provides call logs so you may monitor its usage.
RV Remote Professional: It’s simply a must have! It gives you the ability to have your calls forwarded to your cell phone wherever you are. Gives you a fax in and fax out solution without a fax machine or phone lines (a scanner is helpful, but you probably already have that!). Greetings and account setup can all be done online … no need to find a landline to record a clear, professional greeting or waste cell minutes stepping through a system’s voice prompt for setup.
They also have a free trial, so I encourage you to check them out.
So ….. who’s your favorite Virtual Phone Provider and why? I invite you to post your reviews here.
Join “An Overview of Listing Coordination” Teleconference 6/5 May 25, 2007
Posted by essentialadmin in Virtual Assistant Tips.add a comment
An Overview of Listing Coordination
Join IREAA member and guest expert, Amber Drake of Essential Admin on June 5th at 1pm Pacific / 4pm Eastern, as she discusses Listing Coordination.
This class is ideal for assistants looking to specialize in this highly sought after field. Amber will provide a general overview of the field as well as discuss vendor options and resources for supporting this important role.
This is a free teleclass. Membership is not required to participate.
Click here to register now!
See you there!
Advanced Access Fiasco May 25, 2007
Posted by essentialadmin in REALTOR Tips, Virtual Assistant Tips.1 comment so far
Now that most of us have recovered from the Advanced Access Fiasco earlier this week, I wanted to offer some insight regarding a couple items, primarily:
- What to do if your host’s service goes down and your site is inaccessible (which generally also means email is also inaccessible/bouncing)
- How to manually back-up a hosted/template site such as Advanced Access just in case the ultimate nightmare should occur …. data is unrecoverable and your site must be rebuilt from scratch.
For those of you unfamiliar with the issue that brought down something like 10,000 REALTOR sites, in a nutshell, this past Monday morning all sites (including Advanced Access’s own sales site) went down. Phones weren’t being answered, voicemail boxes were full, people were panicking. I personally was attempting every departmental and personal extension I had on file with no luck. They finally posted on the ActiveRain.com blog very late Monday evening (actually, it’s timestamped 12:10am Tues), “At this time, Advanced Access is having significant power issues at our offices and all services are currently down ….”. They had anticipated having sites back up Tuesday morning; however, that did not happen until late in the day for some, and others reporting still being down the next morning.
So … if something like this were to ever happen again with AA (or any other vendor-based website), what do we do in a pinch … and how do we best prepare ourselves going forward?
First, as you’re reading along here … if your head begins to spin with the technical tasks presented, just remember, you don’t have to know how to do this stuff. There are Virtual Assistants out there that can do all this for you!
Second, for ease of illustration since this is all going to be fairly technical as it is, I’ll pretend my site is hosted by Advanced Access (which I’ll refer to as AA). I’ll also pretend my actual domain was purchased and is managed by GoDaddy since they’re my preferred domain vendor).
Third, let me begin with a couple clarifications. When I refer to a “vendor-hosted website”, I’m referring to those sites like AdvancedAccess, Homestead, iHouse, PropertyMinder, etc. These are sites that are not “portable”; meaning you built the site using their proprietary site-builder tools and not a program like Dreamweaver or FrontPage. When I refer to a “custom site”, I’m referring to those sites built more from scratch using HTML, Dreamweaver, FrontPage or the like.
One other item to note. The average REALTOR will sign-up for a vendor-hosted website and part of that package will include the vendor securing the domain name (i.e., www.amber-realtor.com) [not a real site]. Generally, when the vendor secures/hosts/renews the domain name, it is at a higher cost than an independent domain registrar, such as GoDaddy. Additionally, the client loses virtually all control over that domain, and there are less features (such as the number of email addresses) available than if the domain were purchased through a registrar such as GoDaddy.
With my clients, I always recommend the domain be hosted with GoDaddy because:
- It’s less than $10/year
- The client retains complete control over functionality (more on this in a bit)
- The account includes 100 alias email addresses and 1 POP3 address, with the ability to purchase more at a very reasonable rate
So, my first recommendation is to make sure you transfer your domain to an independent registrar like GoDaddy. After it’s transferred, you’ll need to update your nameservers (your website hosting company can give these to you) in the account control panel. At the same time you do this, you’ll need to email some “MX Record” information to your host so you retain your email on the GoDaddy servers. GoDaddy has complete instructions on this … just call their customer service and they can walk you through it … they’ll even send you the email that you forward to the website host. Note … during these processes there will be some short downtimes … a small price to pay for keeping control over your business’s web presence.
After this is complete, my second recommendation is to prepare & familiarize yourself with these emergency procedures in case your website host goes down and you need your email and a temporary web presence.
If your website goes down for an unacceptable length of time, you’ll want to do the following:
The first priority is your email:
- Login to your GoDaddy control panel and set the nameservers back to the GoDaddy defaults (customer service can tell you what those are). This does not happen instantly … it can take hours for it to update.
- Once this occurs, your emails will start coming through again.
The second priority is getting your web presence up again.
- If you have a secondary website, you would now “forward” your domain to that website via your account control panel. You can also utilize the “masking” feature … when you mask a website this is what happens: a person types in www.amber-realtor.com and even though it’s forwarded to www.ambersothersite.com the browser’s address bar reads www.amber-realtor.com. It’s “masked”.
- If you don’t have a secondary website, perhaps forward it to your blog, your franchise “free agent site” (I know Keller Williams offers these), your virtual tour inventory page (i.e., http://www.tourfactory.com/ offers a great looking agent inventory page), your Homes & Land webpage they gave you when you placed that ad, or any other webpage that markets you and your listings … think through all the marketing you’ve done, and all those companies who included a web presence (that you never use) with the product or ad you ordered — let’s face it, at this point, any of these pages are better than a “page cannot be displayed error”.
In preparation … in case you have to implement the above procedures, after you have in mind the website you’d most likely forward your domain in a pinch, write the URL down or keep it in a computer file you can access later.
My third recommendation is to backup your vendor-hosted website. Depending on your site, this may be a bit of a feat … but it will certainly be less of a feat than having nothing and starting from scratch if the unthinkable ever happens.
I am a FrontPage person myself, so I would complete this tasked based on the use of FrontPage. A Dreamweaver expert will know how to do this in Dreamweaver. The key is having a web design product like one of these that enables a person to “open” a live webpage and save it locally. When this occurs, all elements won’t save (i.e., images or other host specific elements like slideshows, featured property modules, search modules, form submission elements) as these types of elements will display on the page when the site is online (it pulls from the file online); however, but if the site were to go down, those “links” would be broken. So what is the benefit? I have a client who has invested hundreds of hours customizing his AA site. We’ve put together relocation pages, buyer specific pages, seller specific pages, client pages, team pages, community pages, a ton of custom written text, etc. I have all the custom images already on file. The most time consuming part of recreating his website would be the custom verbiage and design of the actual layout. If we had all the verbiage on file, and the general page layouts, it would save countless hours if we had to recreate the site. You could hire a reputable web design virtual assistant for a one-time project of “backing-up” your site. At least that way you wouldn’t have to start from scratch.
Even despite this really really bad fiasco with Advanced Access … I have to say, they’re still my favorite of all the REALTOR specific vendor-based websites out there. I love their Intellicards, the ability to almost 100% customize the site, unlimited pages, and they’ve done a phenomenal job with their premier marketing for one of my clients … he is always ranked on the first page (and generally in the top 3) on Google and Yahoo for his (very competitive) areas in organic search results.
But, as a precaution, I have backed-up the majority of his core pages and suggest you do the same ;o).
Happy Thursday!
Amber
The Obsolete Employee — How Businesses Succeed Without Employees – And Love It! May 25, 2007
Posted by essentialadmin in General Tips, REALTOR Tips, Virtual Assistant Tips.1 comment so far
Sunday, May 13th (repost)
How fun … I just received my copy of Michael Russer’s just published book, “The Obsolete Employee; How Businesses Succeed Without Employees – And Love It!” I had the opportunity to contribute a little tid-bit about how the VA lifestyle allowed our family to sell everything in CA, travel the country for a year in our 37′ Fifth Wheel Travel Trailer, and relocate to our exceptional new home in Idaho … see feature on pages 65-66.
Looking back to my VA journey from when I opened my virtual doors in 2001, I could easily say that Michael Russer had the single most impact on my business. It’s true … he was one of the (if not THE) first people in the Real Estate arena who recognized how much Virtual Assistants could help Real Estate Agents, and he travelled the country offering seminars, introducing the VA concept to thousands of REALTORS. In 2003, Russer hosted the “Meet the VA of Your Dreams” session at the NAR Convention in San Francisco. The venue consisted of several Real Estate Virtual Assistants hosting individual “niche” round tables, while REALTORS had an opportunity to visit a number of tables with VAs offering an overview of services available and answering questions regarding how VA/clients work together, with opportunities for the REALTORS to “Meet the VA of Their Dreams”.
I had the opportunity to host a table for my niche, Listing Marketing Coordination, and it was at this event that I received the opportunity to work with my first broker, who remains one of my largest clients today.
I firmly believe, that because of Russer’s continued international educational seminars and programs, thousands of REALTORS have stepped out and are using Virtual Assistants to grow their businesses. I’ve been at maximum client capacity myself for over a year now, and receive numerous inquiries each week with agents looking for an experienced Real Estate VA. Many have commented they’ve been to a Russer seminar or have taken his Virtual Outsourcing course. Having Michael Russer as a VA “advocate” has impacted the Virtual Assistance industry tremendously … as well as positively impacted numerous REALTORS’ businesses. There really is a special symbiosis that occurs with Virtual Assistants and REALTORS that make the business combination a win-win for both parties … I believe because both industries are based on the independent professional model. Thanks, Michael, for your vision back then and continued education today!
I’ll be starting my reading tonight and am sure I’ll learn a ton more. I’m at the stage in my own business where I need to learn how to outsource to assist more clients and multiply my “hours in the day.” If you’re looking for a bit of history on Virtual Outsourcing, how to hire, work with and manage a VA, the benefits of a VA over an employee, the differences between a Virtual Assistant and a Virtual Consultant, a forward glance at the future of Virtual Outsourcing, and a ton more, you can get your copy here (I don’t make any commissions or gain monetarily from your purchase … I just think Russer’s experience in this arena would be invaluable to any REALTOR, SOHO, Small Business, etc.). Or, for all of you who are fed up with long commutes, incompetent coworkers, and uselessly wasted hours trying to please an overbearing boss, feel free to peek under the cover, too. You can learn how to develop and succeed in a whole new lifestyle, encompassing hours you want to work, spending time with your family, and getting to do what you truly enjoy – and get paid well for it!
Michael’s been blissfully ‘employee free’ for over 13 years, and has many incredibly talented people all around the world who conduct business for him, most of whom he has never met face to face. He’s a renowned international speaker, author and columnist who specializes in helping independent professionals and businesses of all types incorporate innovative productivity strategies to achieve a higher level of personal and career fulfillment.
So … there’s my plug for the day!
And … for you Mothers out there …. Happy Mother’s Day … I hope it was spent with those you love. Mine was wonderful! I spent the afternoon at a wonderful buffet brunch enjoying some of my favorite foods: stuffed crepes with fresh fruit, chocolate dipped strawberries, jumbo shrimp, carved roast beef, eggs Benedict, and a ton more … yum. This was followed by a relaxing riverboat cruise up the Spokane River to the base of Lake Coeur d’Alene, with viewing of Osprey and beautiful riverfront homes …. I had no idea I have a 20+ million dollar estate located just down the street from my home. Turns out it was built by the family who began Amway, designed to host numerous people at a time, with plenty of room for entertainment: movie theatre, something like 12 bathrooms and 10 bedrooms, over 12,000 sq. ft., an ice rink, waterfalls and a bridge, and an aquarium that’s remotely controlled from Florida! We also found a few new public parks, biking and hiking trails and swimming spots that we’ll discover and enjoy in the near future. Definitely a wonderful day.
