Congratulations – you have started your new business.
Now you have started your business, it’s important to make it easy for your customers to contact you by e-mail and phone, and to ‘look’ like you are a well-established and serious player – rather than just another start-up. Having a mobile phone number and an e-mail address ending in e.g. @btconnect.co.uk on your website, may not give customers the confidence they need to see that you are serious.
Foxhall Solutions can help you in the following ways, as your business grows …
Day one …
Let’s get your e-mail sorted out first. We’ll register your unique domain name and set up an account on Microsoft’s Office 365 Cloud Servers, to give you access to your e-mail from your tablet, and/or mobile phone.
Your mobile is going to be with you all the time, and it’s not going to be convenient to have a fixed-line telephone. So – we set up a Direct Dial telephone number for you, and divert that to your mobile phone. That gives you a geographical contact number (or numbers), that you can put on your website and business card, and it’s operational within hours.
As an enhancement of this, we can provide a ‘soft-phone’ app’ for your mobile that will accept VoIP calls through WiFi Internet and mobile data networks. Calls come directly to your mobile, without you needing to pay call-diversion charges. This also provides you with an account that allows for an office desk-phone – which is the next step …
The next step …
Your business grows and you move off the kitchen table and set up a home office. Rather than diverting every caller off to your mobile, we’ll provide you with a desk-phone for your office – ringing on that same Direct Dial number. That phone doesn’t need a BT line, it just needs to plug into your broadband router. A divert placed on the phone will push calls on to your mobile when you are out visiting customers.
You get a laptop or PC for your office, and your Office 365 e-mail account can be accessed on these either through a Web browser, or Microsoft Outlook. e-Mail is fully synchronised between your devices, so that mail sent and received on one is seen at the others.
I’ve got too much to do! …
You decide to bring people into your business. We’ll add another desk-phone at their home-office (on their broadband) and make a ‘call-group’ so that calls to your business number ring on all your phones. We can also set up another Office 365 e-mail address on your account for new staff.
If you want to move that person to your home office, then you just bring them and their phone to your office and plug it into your broadband router. Phones and e-mail follow you to wherever you access the Internet.
We need a bigger office! …
Your business is getting too big for the home office, and you need space for staff and stock etc. Talk to us about the property options that you have, and we can provide you with a report on the ‘health’ of broadband at those sites. Internet is vital for modern business, and access to it should be a major factor in the choice of your business premises.
Foxhall can provide you with broadband services, including any fibre or lines required to deliver it. We can also cable the new premises and create a data network to support your phones and computers, printers etc.
Again, those existing e-mail accounts, phones and numbers can be literally picked up and moved to the new office. You may need to change your address details on your website, but your e-mail and phone number don’t change.
We need more phones …
So far, we have talked about ‘hosted VoIP’ … Your phones are connected back through the Internet to a server that routes your calls and provides extension features. This is convenient and cost-effective when you have just a few phones, but as you grow, the per-extension rental model will make your phones expensive to run!
Unless you are running a call centre, it’s well known that you need fewer lines than you have phones! Therefore, it makes [common & financial] sense to move to an on-site phone system that uses ‘SIP Trunks’ as lines to make and take calls. SIP Trunks are virtual lines in your broadband service, and therefore need no additional ‘physical’ lines, and are a whole lot cheaper than analogue or ISDN lines. When you take this step, you purchase a phone system to support your existing (and new), phone-sets, and subsequent monthly ‘service rental’ costs reduce considerably! All the phone numbers that you have are still current and routed through to the phones and groups as before.
Even if you are running a call centre, it’s still more cost-effective to use your own telephone system connected to SIP Trunks.
e-Mail accounts can be added along with staff and phones. Office 365 accounts can be upgraded to include the Microsoft Office software suite as new PC’s and laptops are purchased.
We’re setting up another office in a different county …
Again, we set up a broadband service into the new office, and make sure that there is a network installed to support computers and telephones. However, the big difference is that we don’t need to set up a phone system at this site. We simply set up the phones there as ‘remote extensions’ off the system at your head office. Phone numbers for the Branch-office can be ported from an existing business – or issued as new, with appropriate UK area codes. Cost-Centre based invoicing can split call billing if needed.
We’ve purchased a building …
Congratulations – you are now in the corner office on the 25th floor of ‘MyBusiness’ Towers, your e-mail has got there with you, and your phone (now the Exec’ model with colour screen), still rings on that phone number we generated for you on day-one when your business started.
We’re proud to have used our comprehensive skills and partners to provide you with a cost-effective solution that has evolved with your business to meet staff and location needs …
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