A Better Virtual – USA Virtual Offices

What’s in the little Red Box? All the organizational support you need, according to Emma Crabtree. She’s the owner of Red Box Virtual Office in, of all places, Portugal.

Crabtree wants you and your associates to think of them as your personal assistant, administrator and office manager all rolled into one. They can handle everything from general correspondence and e-mail management to transcriptions and faxes to event organizing and travel planning to web sites and blogs. They’ve even done voice over work!

“My experience has been garnered mainly in not-for-profit organizations and small, private enterprises. Roles have included office management, PA to directors and partners, team coordinator and administrator, and have involved working with between two and 250 people,” Crabtree says. “Red Box provides virtual assistant services and solutions for individuals and businesses that may not want the associated costs of hiring an employee.”

I thought the day in the life of a virtual assistant blog posting was cute. It gives you an idea of what Crabtree deals with on her clients’ behalf every day. I also poked around the “Kind Words” section of the Web site and found more than just testimonials for this virtual assistant company—I found their real life photos. The FAQ section was a nice touch.

Red Box is doing more than just offering virtual assistant services—they are offering compelling reasons why you should use a virtual assistant with an educational spin to the site that even much larger companies haven’t take the time to spell out.

What’s it going to cost you? Red Box charges €20/hour. That’s nearly $25 an hour in U.S. dollar at today’s conversion rate. Not too bad compared to other services that charge as much as $35 an hour or more. Crabtree says you can get even better prices with a retainer deal.

“As a client, you can expect my focus and dedication to your on-going needs, attention to detail in all work that is carried out for you, a willingness to learn and appreciate your way of working and an ability to be proactive and take the initiative where appropriate,” Crabtree says.

There’s a lot of talk about Regus in the serviced office world, but when it comes to virtual office space Davinci Virtual is giving Regus a run for its money.

“We are looking forward to completing the build out of our new North American Headquarters in Salt Lake City. We designed the new work space with productive employee interaction and with the latest technologies in mind,” says Bill Grodnik, CEO of Davinci Virtual. “The new facilities will allow us to triple the size of our company.”

Davinci Virtual is preparing for exponential growth with new corporate headquarters under construction. On Tuesday, Davinci Virtual announced its on schedule to complete construction of its new North American headquarters in Salt Lake City, Utah by October 1, 2010. The company first announced plans to build the virtual office headquarters in December 2009.

Davinci Virtual is already known for its modern operations, but the new virtual office headquarters kicks it up a few notches to accommodate growth and set the stage for rapid expansion plans. With 25,000 square feet, Davinci Virtual is more than doubling the size of its current headquarters.

What’s more, Davinci Virtual is further streamlining virtual office operations with internal organization. Here’s the structure of the new virtual office headquarters, with space designated for:

• Four state-of-the-art virtual support center areas
• Management department
• Sales department
• Customer care department
• Partner relations department
• Finance department
• Davincimeetingrooms.com department
• New technology hub

Grodnik said the new facilities would allow Davinci Virtual to triple the size of the company. That’s almost mindboggling, considering that the company already boasts more than 750 virtual office locations in major metros like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Miami. In all, Davinci Virtual says it serves more than 7,000 companies and entrepreneurs around the world. Can you imagine tripling that number?

VoiceShot. The company bills itself as “Your Do It Yourself Online Call Center.”

It’s a clever name. It reminds me of being in “earshot”—and I that’s just what VoiceShot wants to do. The company offers a virtual receptionist services that works to keep your clients within earshot any time they call into your virtual PBX phone system.

VoiceShot offers a fully customizable virtual receptionist that greets callers, takes messages and seamlessly routes calls. You can set up an unlimited number of voice prompts and menus, as well as unlimited voicemail boxes and extensions—and you manage it all with a web-based account management system and visual call designer.

One interesting feature of VoiceShot is the ability to create, design, start and stop marketing campaigns. You can assign toll free numbers to specific campaigns quickly and easily so you can track how effective a particular marketing campaign was. This is an especially useful feature, especially for direct mail marketers.

VoiceShot isn’t a fly by night operation. The company won some awards for its virtual receptionist services in 2007, and has since added a slew of services:

• Outbound calls lets you send interactive voice messages
• IVR developer lets you add voice and text messaging to your apps
• Urgent Alert offers rapid delivery of emergency alert notification calls and texts
• Group texting lets you send text messages to any size group

You don’t hear as much about VoiceShot as you do some of the larger virtual PBX players. But this company is solid, offers plenty of bells and whistles, and comes with value package pricing. The Lite package starts at just $25 a month, which includes 275 monthly minutes, free live call transfer, unlimited extensions and menus, one mailbox, and 15 minutes of voicemail storage. The packages go all the way up to a Call Center level. For $350 a month you get 10,000 minutes and unlimited use of all other features.

Not only does VoiceShot offer a free trial, the virtual receptionist company also offers 200 delivered calls for free to new customers. I also like the fact that they don’t charge for transferring your existing toll free number, and they offer free real time call reporting, caller ID reporting and e-mail notification. You can’t lose by trying this company. You can get set up in an instant and begin tapping into these cool features within minutes.

I’ve taken a much too long hiatus from my weekly virtual office wrap up, partially from laziness, partially from focusing on other things and partially from trying and failing to find interesting things to write about. It drives me crazy that half the google alerts for “virtual office” are spam blogs and article writing sites. Hopefully, A Better Virtual will start showing on Google’s alerts consistently to bring some high quality, original articles to the alerts.

First, in case you haven’t checked out Office Pioneer, you should go take a look. They’ve got a nice take of the executive suite version of the virtual office model, with the added virtual accounting services. I’m sure it will take them a while to get some traction, as it does most new entities, but I believe they’re in it for the long haul.

If you’re looking for a virtual PBX, there are a number of good comparison sites. All of them are affiliates, so they’re making money if you actually end up buying from the PBX they refer. But you can trust them to a certain degree because all of the PBX options will typically be affiliates so they’re not necessarily trying to push one over the others. Here are a few:

• http://www.virtualphonesystemreviews.com/
• http://www.pbxcompare.com/

Cloud Virtual Offices is a new site in the virtual office market. It’s a company that’s an affiliate of the highly regarded Pacific Business Centers group. The site is nice looking and quite comprehensive. I’ve been watching it over time and they’ve really done a nice job of making improvements. The business behind it is solid, so if you’re a company looking for a virtual office, and especially if you’re in the Bay area, definitely give them a call. Check them out on Twitter and on their blog.

Apparently my1voice isn’t content with winning an award for its service. No, the virtual phone service isn’t resting on its laurels while the competition innovates.

my1voice just announced several enhancements to its service. These new customer feedback-driven features make using the virtual phone service even easier than before, the company says.

What’s new? Plenty. For starters, small businesses can now choose to have their caller ID display the my1voice extension the caller chose before answering a call. Why is that a big deal? Because if you can see which extension the caller dialed—101 for customer service, 102 for sales and so on—then you can answer the phone accordingly. You’ll know in advance why the person is calling, so you can switch up your greeting according to the department they called. That gives you a customer service edge.

“One of the most precious commodities in a small business is time,” says Steve Adams, vice president of marketing for Protus, the provider of my1voice. “When it comes to answering customer calls, a few minutes saved here and there really add up. Our customers have told us what we need to do to help them with this challenge and we’ve responded. It’s a great example of ‘crowdsourcing’ from a very involved crowd.”

my1voice also added more flexibility to its auto-attendant feature. Users can now specify how many times the auto-attendant message plays (from one to five times) before an action such as hanging up or going to an informational message occurs. Finally, my1voice now gives you the option to select a ring time up to two minutes. So if you are so busy with call volume that it takes you more than 60 seconds to get to the phone, my1voice gives you a little more time before the call goes to voicemail.

You can try my1voice free for 30 days. Features such as a virtual receptionist, a toll free number, dial by name directory, professional greetings, and customized extensions give small businesses the presence of a large company.

If you want to look at a mover and shaker in the virtual receptionist world, look no further than AnswerFirst Communications. This company is moving on Twitter, shaking on YouTube, and is now launching microsites to address particular service niches.

More than a virtual receptionist company, AnswerFirst Communications offers telephone answering service, customer service solutions, messaging services, and contact center solutions. And the company just announced the launch of a new Web site that features information about their telephone answering services. A virtual receptionist site is to follow.

“Previously, we were using one main Web site to feature information about all of our services but it was a lot of information to pack into a single Web site because we offer a wide array of services including basic answering services, call center solutions, technical support, customer care, appointment scheduling, order entry and voice mail solutions and more,” explains Jim Smith, AnswerFirst’s Director of Inside Sales.

The company figured featuring each service on its own site would help customers navigate each option—or find the specific service they needed more quickly. With the microsite strategy, for example, customers who want a virtual receptionist can get detailed information on virtual receptionist services, features and pricing without wading through information about contact center solutions.

This is brilliant for another reason: AnswerFirst can optimize its virtual receptionist site—and all the other microsites—to rank high for search terms that are related to the service that is featured on that particular site. Smith says this method of optimization will make it easier for potential clients to find information about the services that they are shopping for.

“The first site we’ve developed focuses on our core service, telephone answering service, and was developed under the domain name www.answeringservice.org,” Smith says. “We’ve retained our corporate site for providing a basic overview of our services and in-depth information about our business so clients can still access information about AnswerFirst at our main domain.”

This should give AnswerFirst an advantage. Of course, other virtual receptionist companies can play copycat. The difference is most virtual receptionist companies are already offering a Web site that focuses just on that service, because most of them aren’t offering the breadth of solutions AnswerFirst is offering. So, if anything, I expect AnswerFirst to gain some ground on the virtual receptionist front by segmenting out virtual receptionist information for potential clients.

MyFax and my1voice are getting winning the attention of customers—and winning the attention of industry trade magazines.

Protus, the parent company of both services, announced that two of its products won the 2009 Product of the Year Award from Communications Solutions magazine. The Communications Solutions Product of the Year Award recognizes the vision, leadership, and thoroughness in communications products.

“Protus has been recognized with a 2009 Product of the Year Award for the company’s admirable efforts in the advancement of voice and data communications,” says Rich Tehrani, CEO of TMC, the publisher of Communications Solutions. “Both MyFax and my1voice provide clear benefits for their customers, resulting in solid ROI for the companies using these products. Congratulations to the entire team at Protus.”

MyFax is an Internet fax service that lets you manage your fax communication and document management workflow. MyFax promises to save you time and money with its service. MyFax is a Software-as-a-Service tool, which means you don’t actually buy the software. You rent a hosted solution. This is a convenient alternative for many companies.

The digital fax service works hand in hand with a virtual receptionist service known as my1voice. My1voice is a feature-rich virtual receptionist service that works to help you improve communications with clients and would-be clients. My1voice also offers smart call forwarding and other features that were once reserved for large enterprises with expensive phone systems.

“We are thrilled to receive this award for a sixth consecutive year,” says Joseph Nour, CEO of Protus, which also offers an e-mail marketing service called Campaigner.  “Protus is committed to providing the most innovative products for small business, and this honor reinforces our mission to provide tools that make small business daily operations more efficient and cost-effective.”

Congratulations to Protus. Winning this award so many times makes it clear that my1voice is a contender in the virtual receptionist market.

Congratulations to RingCentral. The cloud-based business phone system company has walked away with a major award in its field that should make its rivals jealous indeed.

RingCentral won the Product of the Year Award from Communications Solutions Magazine for its newest product called RingCentral Office. RingCentral Office is a complete cloud-based VoIP business phone system. When you rent this hosted solution, it eliminates expensive on-premise equipment. RingCentral Office includes ready-to-use phones, and offers enterprise-class functionality.

Let’s hear straight from TMC’s CEO about why the company chose RingCentral Office as this year’s winner:

“RingCentral has been recognized with a 2009 Product of the Year Award for their admirable efforts in the advancement of voice communications with RingCentral Office,” says Rich Tehrani, CEO of TMC. “The cloud computing-based business phone service has shown benefits for its customers and provides ROI for the companies that use it. Congratulations to the entire team at RingCentral. I look forward to more innovative solutions from them in the coming year.”

RingCentral Office combines a hosted multi-extension business phone system with auto-receptionist, advanced voice and fax functionality, unlimited calling and full-featured phones that arrive pre-configured and ready for use. RingCentral Office is available for flat, fixed monthly fee. There’s no set up fees, no contracts, and instant activation.

RingCentral Office runs $29.99 per user per month for two users, and the payment scale slides down from there. RingCentral equips you with a variety of Polycom IP phones at discounted rates when you sign up for the service. When you sign up, RingCentral gives you a 30-day money back guarantee, so you there’s no risk to try this award-winning service.

The Communications Solutions Product of the Year Award recognizes the vision, leadership, and thoroughness that are characteristics of the prestigious industry award. The most innovative products and services brought to the market from March 2008 through March 2009 were eligible to win the award.

Stay tuned in the coming days for a look at other virtual office products that won awards from TMC’s Communications Solutions and Internet Telephony Magazines.

Text messaging isn’t just for smartphones anymore. Phone.com just announced that we can now send and receive text messages from all its local phone numbers.

That can be pretty darn convenient, especially considering it’s free! What does this virtual PBX innovation mean, practically? It means you can have your customers, colleagues and others reach you on your cell phone or your Web browser by sending you a text message—and you don’t have to actually give them your cell phone number.

In an age where consumers are on the privacy bandwagon, this could be a differentiating service for Phone.com. I don’t know about you, but I don’t necessarily want to give out my cell phone number to just anyone because, unfortunately, people tend to abuse it. I’ve had people call me at midnight from the west coast—on my personal smartphone line. At least this way, there is some buffer without sacrificing the need to send and receive text messages.

Granted, most people in business aren’t overly reliant on text messages with colleagues and customers. But it’s still a nice feature to add to the virtual PBX mix, and will probably be even more important going forward. On the other side, you can also send a text message from your Web browser if you don’t want to send it from your cell phone. That’s convenient when you are out of battery or talking on the phone already.

An interesting tidbit: Don’t text while driving. One in four (27%) American adults say they have texted while driving, the same proportion as the number of driving age teens (26%) who say they have texted while driving.  Walking might not be such a good idea either, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

Beyond driving, one in six (17%) cell-toting adults say they have been so distracted while talking or texting that they have physically bumped into another person or an object. That amounts to 14% of all American adults who have been so engrossed in talking, texting or otherwise using their cell phones that they bumped into something or someone.  So maybe you should stick to texting from your Web browser to avoid the temptation!

If you aren’t already a Phone.com customer, you can get signed up on a virtual PBX plan for as little as $4.88 a month. For some, it might be worth that fee just to keep your phone number private. If you need a more robust solution, you can opt for a Phone.com Virtual Office. Phone.com has a cadre of services that let you do business virtually. This is one of the strongest companies in the industry and worth checking out.

Are mobile workers interested in the Apple iPad? Virtual office companies must think they are. Two of the leading companies in the virtual office space are offering iPad sweepstakes.

First up, RingCentral. RingCentral is using the iPad giveaway as a way to draw people to its Facebook fan page. RingCentral is calling it the “Keep it Touch Giveaway.” The virtual PBX company is actually giving away five iPads—one every week. This contest started on June 29, so there’s still plenty of time to get in.

All you have to do is become a fan of RingCentral on Facebook by clicking the “Like” button. Then go to the sweepstakes tab and enter to win between now and August 2, 2010. RingCentral is giving away the 16GB WiFi versions of the iPad. Those typically run about $499. RingCentral also mentioned an Apple Store gift card of equivalent value as a substitute, likely because there is a shortage of iPads!

Davinci Virtual is also running an iPad sweepstakes. In fact, the virtual office company already gave one away on June 1. Davinci Virtual is giving away a second iPad on September 1. Instead of working to drive Facebook fan page members, though, Davinci is using it purely as a lead generation tool. When you click on the sweepstakes entry page, you fill out a form and agree to allow Davinci to call you.

Now, I am quite sure RingCentral is also using its iPad sweepstakes as a lead generation tool. RingCentral is using the Wildfire promotions app on Facebook to run its contest. It’s quite possible that Wildfire is collecting e-mail addresses—they ask for your e-mail address when you sign up for the sweepstakes. If so, RingCentral is getting the best of both worlds: fans and leads. If not, RingCentral can still use the Facebook fan update page to send out special messages to its fans, just like e-mail.