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I spent a few minutes with Siamak Taghaddos, CEO and founder of GotVMail for a recent episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. GotVMail is a virtual phone service provider that targets small entrepreneurial firms.
Virtual phone services, meaning online services that take the place of the old PBX phone system, are great for small to mid size companies. A lot of the chatter around these types of services is that they allow you to act bigger than you are, but that’s sort of silly because the smallness of small business is a great selling tool. What a menu type answering system that forwards calls to the appropriate mailbox does is allow the smallest of companies to put forward a more professional front door.
- Most of these types of system can also:
- route calls to various numbers until a call is answered
- rotate incoming calls to different sales agents
- allow virtual teams to work together under one phone number
- provide options for fax on demand or even full blown recorded presentations
In short, virtual phone systems can make you more accessible, provide faster access to information and keep your sales folks closer to the prospect - all good marketing things. There are lots of options to choose from and you can expect to pay anywhere from $10-30 per month depending on plans. - look also at VirtuVoice and VirtualPBX
In the spirit of full disclosure - I use GotVMail and I serve on their advisory board.
Comments
This entry was posted on Monday, September 24th, 2007 at Sep 24, 07 | 10:14 am and is filed under GotVMail, Small Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
John,
Great informative content. My blog readers at Marketing Ease, could benefit from your blog and knowledge. Thank you for your expertise!
Krista
I just switched to a similar service for one of my companies. The promise of convenience, ease of use, email deliver ability of Fax and Voicemail is pretty cool!
Funny. i used to hate getting voicemails, but I don’t mind getting VM over Email. This will also make it easier to outsource some customer service to a virtual assistant.
John,
I checked into GotVMail several months ago and was excited by what they said on their website but some things were not clear so I called the customer service. They were not able to answer my questions (which I considered basic regarding pricing) and were unwilling to try to get the information I needed. They ended up hanging up on me! I was very dissapointed and have not looked into another service of this type since. It may have been an isolated incident of one agent but I didn’t want to take the chance by pursuing it any further.
Vicki,
Obviously that’s not a good thing - my experience has been good to date but I think customer phone support is an area that many companies really struggle with.
I recently had an issue with AT&T and the person I got on the phone was downright hostile. I simply hung up, called back in and got another rep who was great - in fact, if I have another child I may name her after this lady - you just never know.
John, I had a similar “wonderful rep” at AT&T… after being dropped from three calls after a 20 minute hold on Monday and Tuesday, I called back Friday Evening, and had the most courteous, helpful, happy representative. I think her name was Debbie. She was so nice I almost re-considered canceling my service… but then I thought back to Monday & Tuesday.
I’m much happier with “Virtual PBX” or whatever it is they call it.
I tried GotVmail. Easy to use and had the basic features, but then I got my first bill. Whoa! They charge 7.4 cents a minute. My bill was nearly $300. I checked out Virtual PBX but went with CallButler http://www.callbutler.com. Easy to use, many more features than GotVmail or Virtual PBX and a one-time $250 license. Also, great customer support.