Telephone answering service – a telephone answering service helps a business phone line by offering a corporate identity as the first point of contact when a customer calls in.  First impressions go a long way, and having a human ‘gatekeeper’ (so to speak) to direct calls to appropriate personnel increases the level of prestige and impression of quality to the public. A telephone answering service involves a receptionist who can give information, take messages, forward calls to any number (even internationally), book appointments or register callers for an event.

Callers never know their call is being transferred to another location and it always seems as if they have called your ‘actual’ office. Often a telephone answering service comes with a business mailing address and mail handling as well.  Companies who offer telephone answering services usually also encompass enhanced virtual office services which are basically à la carte administrative support tasks to handle as much, or as little, as your company might need.

Call centre service – when you receive a call from someone asking you to participate in a survey, you can be sure that person is calling from a call centre.  Same goes for when you call a major service provider’s customer support line to ask questions about your bill.  Telemarketers, payment collectors, support lines, customer service lines – they all operate in call centres, and no, they are not limited to ‘big businesses’ only.  A call center is a much less intimate way of handling your customer’s calls.  Any one of hundreds of employees (sometimes located in another country) could be picking up the phone for every call your customer makes to that number.  No voices are recognized and no one who answers the phone really knows the owner of the company or how they prefer their messages to be taken.

Often the call answerers are not knowledgeable about the company the caller is inquiring about because they are actually part of an outsourced service and work externally.  Nowadays, it is more and more common that the ‘customer service representative’ is not even able to call a customer back if the phone line were to disconnect.  Though the representative has heard the client’s story and understands the situation, if the client calls back, they have to repeat their story all over again to the new representative who randomly picked up their call ‘this time.’  And, as many of us have experienced, every person who answers the phone on behalf of that company seems to obey a completely different set of rules than the last person, causing us often to ask, “Can I speak to your manager?” (who of course isn’t there, but will surely call you back within 48 hours).

In short, a call centre can be a frustration to customer service.  However, that is not to say that call centres are not useful for other purposes.  For example, your small business may find it beneficial to hire a telemarketing service, or your non-profit may seek out donations or surveys through call centre services.  This method of marketing may work for some businesses.  However, a business working hard on its first impression could turn off a lot of potential new customers, if their phone calls are not being consistently answered by a friendly, clear voice handling the line in a professional manner.

While it’s true that cutbacks are necessary, and a re-evaluation of company spending habits is always wise, there are ways to cut back without compromising away too much.  Though often unconsidered, an office is a great place to start with cutbacks that will seem invisible.

Partnering with the right executive suite or business centre can save not only time and money, but it can make your workplace even more dynamic, effective and fun to be in.  For example, moving into a shared office centre will allow for the following savings:

Lease commitments: what if one day your company just can’t afford to make its lease payment on conventional office space?  Shared office centres are designed with flexibility in mind, adding to its reputation for being a “smart” way to run a business.  Organizations of all sizes are finding the value in cost effective office solutions that just so happen to be a hallway apart from other like-minded businesses.

Photocopier, furniture and mail machine leases: In a packaged office centre, things like these are part of the deal when you sign up.  You don’t have to worry about finding or moving in your own furniture – a cost in addition to the actual product you buy at the end.  The executive suite company takes care of it all, providing you access to a photocopy room, boardroom, fax machine, scanner and even handling your mail with their mail machine, saving you the expense and precious time of having to buy and manually stamp envelopes.  They not only put the postage on, but they’ll ensure that it’s at the correct amount, plus deliver it to the mailbox for you!

Kitchen and coffee space: Believe it or not, offices use a lot of coffee, and that means increments in office budget that add up over the year.  In a shared office centre, when you rent a beautifully furnished office, it comes complete with coffee and tea!  Not only that, the microwave, fridge, dishes and other kitchen utilities are also all taken care of – right down to the hand soap and paper towels.

Security and cleaning: Since you’re a renter of a shared office centre, included in your office rental fee is the security and cleaning.  You no longer need to worry about any of this – it’s all included in your monthly rent.

If you think about the advantages of what we have mentioned above, using a shared office (aka “packaged office” or “executive suite”) can let you keep your professional image, your employee perks, and all the other advantages of having an office, without the need to cut back on the obvious things that will make your organization ‘feel’ like it’s in a depression.  Your staff will stay happy, and so will your budget.

Are you running out of places to meet clients? Coffee shops work fine when you are a one-man show starting off, networking and getting your feet wet in your market. However, as you grow, you need an image to match your size. When the big dealers come through your doors, it’s best if those doors lead to your office, and not to the corner coffee shop. Not only that, but as you may already have found, the noise and chatter around you in a café, plus the lack of high-speed Internet and tiny table space can be a barrier to working comfortably.

Do you have employees? Are you about to hire employees? While sometimes it’s great to have work-at-home employment arrangements, keep in mind that so long as your staff work remotely, you can consider them consultants. There is not much control over a team that works without a monitoring system, let alone the impact of collaboration. If you plan to outsource, consider what parts of your business should definitely remain in-house. You will find that even if your team consists largely of sales reps on the road a lot, there needs to be a touch down point of some sort. Where will they go if they need supplies? What if their computers go down, are they out of a job until they’re fixed? As an employer, you need to consider these factors and provide the right space for employees to be productive and feel like they’re part of your company.

Do you hold lots of meetings? Perhaps your company is run by partners. In that case, your meetings will only get longer as your business grows. Sitting around a coffee table in the living room won’t cut it when work needs to get done and there are children playing or other distractions keeping you from concentrating. Often it works the other way too – your living mates might find you a disturbance to their own personal life. Simply put, you need a boardroom.

Are you productive working at home? You can answer this question for yourself honestly and truthfully. When your work is separate from your home environment, do you get more done? This is a personality trait that can go either way for different people. Even if you have a home office, if the answer for you is “no”, then be sure that as your business demands more from you, an office space will be a requirement.

Do you get walk by traffic or in-person drop-offs? If so, this should be a red alert to you – you need a professional space where clients, customers and potential business can find you, and not your house. Running out of a home as a mortgage broker, accountant or similar service where meeting with clients is necessary (maybe not daily, but certainly often), then be sure that sometimes you’ll get an expected visitor who thought they could just stop by to get something to you instead of mailing it. Even worse, if you use a post office box that is not labeled as “PO Box”, your customers will feel severely inconvenienced. It makes a difference to have a “just in case” space for your professional image. Even if you need to utilize a virtual office for now, take this point seriously.

If you answered yes to any of the above questions, you are likely a prime candidate for an office space. Don’t feel like an office space will be a drain on your budget – if anything it should be considered an investment. It will not only help you, it will benefit your clients and your staff, and thus your business overall.

Here are some guidelines to follow and tips about technologies you can use to stay in touch virtually.

Keep a centralized phone number for all your clients.

Having different area codes and different methods of reaching business personnel will show a lack of unity in front of your customers and prospects. The best thing to do is to make it easy for everyone involved by having one phone number at a central location, preferably where your head office is located. Once callers get through to the main line, they can be re-routed to whomever they need to speak to, or whatever department can be of help to them. This can be done either with an automated, pre-recorded answering system, or even better with a live virtual receptionist with the technology to seamlessly transfer calls to any number after speaking to the caller and finding out who or which department your customer is truly looking for.

Use conferencing equipment.

Even if you are a start up and don’t have a physical office space yet, it is important to make sure you conduct and participate in regular business meetings or risk losing vital communication between the parties involved in running the business. Teleconferencing and videoconferencing equipment is available for rent by the hour or day at business centres in most major cities across the world. If you find such a service in one city, be sure to ask them for a good referral in another city, since their networks can be large. The equipment can be set up in a boardroom so you can have many attendants, or in a private office, so you can hold confidential discussions with the key players at your company. With the excellent visual clarity available now, videoconferencing is the next best thing to a face-to-face meeting.

Use admin support at one location.

The most critical part about running a business with remotely located partners is communication. It counts in the big things as well as the little things. With important documents such as company databases, document files, or even simple things like the company letterhead and font used, it is best if they are handled in one place, with one overseer who can act as the communicating channel to everyone else connecting to the ‘hub’. We’re not saying that one person has control over the activities, but that certainly there needs to be a central coordination of the administrative support services so that documents are not misplaced, and instructions are always clearly followed, however menial the task may be. If you are concerned about a conflict of interest, seriously consider outsourcing administrative support to a third-party, such as a virtual assistance company.

Hold in-person meetings.

Despite technologies, and the beauty of their convenience, it goes without saying that face-to-face meetings are always best for collaboration and a sense of belonging in a partnership. In order to avoid one partner feeling left out of the loop, which can lead to business trouble down the road, it is important that all the team players make a point of meeting on a regular schedule, in-person. Inform each other about what you’ve all been doing to advance the company, and what conversations you’ve had with outsiders, or team members that will affect key decisions down the road.

Be as inclusive as possible.

Since business travel will be necessary in this scenario, the importance of a centralized phone number and virtual office service becomes even more pertinent. Renting a boardroom for a day or hour may be necessary in a meet-up city where you don’t have permanent office space. The virtual office service will also be able to send voicemails to e-mails, so you can stay in touch with business at home.

In short – don’t give up! It’s possible to stay cohesive and maintain that valuable partnership that brought your business to where it is today!

• A child screaming or pet woofing
• The sound of a confused “hello?”
• An answering machine
• An automated message saying “this voicemail box is full”
• Endless ringing . . . and ringing . . . and ringing!

It’s no wonder some business owners get frustrated when their advertising dollars don’t seem to be working for them. What they don’t realize, however, is that advertising and marketing is a two-part process (if not more), and the effort they’ve put in to get the phones ringing is only half of the pie.

Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. You shop yourself, so as a business owner, you know what it’s like to receive awkward remarks or bad service. What do you do in such instances? It’s easy — you figure, ‘that’s life’ and you move on to the next business offering the same product or service. What’s the difference? Probably none. But, if there were any superior advantages to going with the company who had the rude person on the phone line, you wouldn’t have known it, and it sure would be too late for them to prove it.

Having a professional telephone answering service can seem like an added cost, but after considering the above situations, a smart business owner knows it’s an investment – and a critical one that should follow any major spending on advertising, marketing or publicity campaigns. A publishing house holding events for the release of a new book, a start-up law firm, a tradesman on the road – any business is a qualified candidate for a virtual receptionist.

A virtual receptionist will always answer your dedicated business line in your company name, or whatever greeting you chose. The best and most professional services out there will never be caught saying, “we’re just an answering service.” If your clients need to book an appointment, leave a message or even drop something off in person, they’ll always have a warm personality to greet them and help them as a representative of your company. For smaller companies wanting to make a lasting impression for the big deal-makers, having a professional phone answering service is essential.

A virtual receptionist gives a business all the advantages of having a full-time receptionist on staff, except the cost is fractional because the idea is that the receptionist is “shared” among other businesses. This capitalizes on the dollar spent per minute on staffing costs because a business only pays for what they use. In other words, it would be senseless to pay for a full time staff person who spends a lot of the day being unproductive. With a virtual office service, telephone answering packages are always a win-win situation.

It’s time to make those advertising dollars work, and to let go of the fear that hiring someone to answer your phones will drain your budget. There is a solution for Vancouver businesses out there, and it lies in the virtual office concept.

The trouble is, however, that despite the growing acceptance of virtual employees and work-from-home employment agreements, today’s business world also expects a company to project a professional image. Certainly no high-end mover and shaker would consider meeting a potential business partner wearing pajamas and sitting over the kitchen table with the morning eggs sitting in the sink on dirty dishes.

Yes, productivity is often increased in the comfort of one’s home, but when it comes to doing business with other human beings in person, that is the time to worry about the effect a home office will have on a company.

Fortunately, there are options. For years the concept of a “virtual office” has existed, and many companies serve this type of work-at-home clientele, though admittedly the industry is not well marketed. But it should be, especially with the booming desire to telecommute among business workers.

A virtual office allows the home office to remain the home office, while appearing to be the corporate office. Technology (even before the World Wide Web, can you believe it?) allows for a call to be answered by a central receptionist in one place, while allowing the transfer of the call to be dialed out seamlessly to any phone number – even internationally.

Customers who call a company and reach the receptionist first automatically have the impression that they’re dealing with a sizeable organization, one whose business has done so well they felt the need to hire someone only to answer their phone. So it goes without saying that a receptionist will help a company’s image. Now, just because that receptionist happens to be a virtual receptionist…well, no one will know the difference! So you can keep your pajamas on.

It gets better. Virtual receptionists (often referred to as ‘virtual assistants’), when working under a credible company, are usually located in an office centre that rents out offices by the hour or day. With their complete packages you can order yourself a monthly ‘virtual office,’ which will allow you a set number of office hours to meet with clients in an executive environment.

Your company name can appear on their board listings and your business mail can all be handled at the centre as well. Your clients walk in, they are greeted by a receptionist, wait in a comfortable chair drinking complimentary coffee and then you walk out and take them to “your office.” The fact that you’re there only part time is a hidden anomaly. So now, you must take your pajamas off!

The best place to begin looking for a virtual office and telephone answering service for your company is in the city where you want your company’s presence to be. Virtual offices can be set up almost anywhere these days, and can also provide toll free numbers. If you have employees scattered in different cities, consider a local office for each of them. If you are a sole entrepreneur, then of course, look close to home, so your pajamas will not be far away!

Although anyone has the freedom to start an association of any kind, it often takes a dedicated group of individuals and a lot of work.  Here are some guidelines to starting and keeping an association organized:

1) Write a mission statement: if there’s anything you do, make sure you do this step.  This will keep you focused, and if ever there are disputes or confusions about the existence or purpose of the association, you can always go back to the mission statement.  More importantly, the mission statement will keep you motivated, and should be written in a way that members feel a need to actively contribute to the cause.

2) Create a board of directors: usually this will be the core that started the association in the first place.  However, as things get formalized, you will need to decide on pertinent matters such as by laws and voting rights.  Especially when you become registered as a non-profit and are able to issue tax receipts, you may need to comply with certain government regulations and there needs to be a clear set of responsibilities for each person to fill.

3) Hold events: without gathering together, your members will not sense they are part of an alliance and will not feel that they are making a difference. Hold meetings on a regular schedule and hold conferences annually, at least.

4) Market your association: you will find that in order to further your cause, you will need more and more manpower.  Look as professional as possible with a logo designed by a graphic designer, a Web site made by an Internet marketer and a pamphlet and all other collateral structured with the sale of memberships in mind.  You will also want to attract donations, and the better your marketing, the better your fundraising will be.

5) Delegate tasks: As mentioned above, you will find yourself at a lack of manpower over time.  When your association reaches the point that it has the funds but not the manpower (which is common, since many people have less time than money), you will need to consider outsourcing special tasks.  As the motto goes, let the experts do what they’re good at.  Go with a company or individuals that are experienced in association management and understand the ins and outs of running a membership and donation-based entity.

Following the above guidelines will ensure that your association will stay above water and keep alive.  However, the above guidelines are just that – guidelines.  As in anything, the tasks ahead are easier said than done and to run a successful organization you will need to do further research and consult with professional advisors along the way.

MPS Executive Suites is located in Vancouver, Canada, and has been specializing in Association Management Services since 1981. For more info about Association Management Services, please contact karline@officespacevancouver.com

The right office is important for you, for your employees, and for your clients. That’s where we come in. MPS Executive Suites has been around since 1981, and we’ve shared our success with countless businesses.

Our offices are located in the heart of Vancouver’s West Broadway and medical district. The view there is unparalleled, like none other in a city that’s as beautiful as they come. The moment you step off the elevator, you’ll be greeted by an unobstructed panoramic view of downtown. You’ll see the False Creek waterfront too, and all of this is painted on one of BC’s most beautiful canvases—in the distance, the majestic North Shore Mountains stand clearly and tall.

Your office will also offer convenience. You’ll be minutes from downtown and in walking distance to dozens of restaurants and banks. Everything you need is sitting right on your doorstep.

If you decide to join us, we’ll set you up in no time and take care of tedious office management details, as well. We have a professional administration team ready to handle things the way you want them to be handled.

Take a look at our website and give us a call or fire us an e-mail. We’ll be happy to answer any questions you might have. We want your business, and we want you to see firsthand what a blessing beauty and convenience can be.