Zultys Announces Blackberry Integration

Zultys announced the arrival of the new software package for its IP Telephony phone system. This new package boasts some pretty great features to build upon the feature set previously available.

With the new package, users can now integrate directly with their Blackberry Smartphone. It is in the works to roll the deployment out to Windows Mobile, Droid Moblie, and the iPhone in the Future.

Blackberry users can now update their presence from the Blackberry screen as to meetings, availability, etc. This will allow them better communication with the office so that all users know their status. We can also use the Blackberry device to integrate into the Instant Messaging package. This will allow instant messaging from users on the Zultys system, outside of the Zultys system, and Blackberry users to communicate as if they were all together.

In the previous releases, we have had the ability to allow cellular or home phones to be extensions off of the system, but now we can offer even more features from remote phones.

This is the new trend in the industry, it is called Fixed to Mobile convergence. In the last round of convergence, we integrated the phones and computers, in this round we will be converging the wired and wireless networks to allow your employees even more freedom to communicate when they want and how they want. The terms are really left up to each individual. This allows your communications system to become an even more powerful tool by allowing your customers better access to your staff.

Imagine the ability of your customers not to have to call the offices, then the cell, etc. This convergence will allow your users to dial one number and have the system track them down on pre-determined events, such as:

• User status (in a meeting, available, or unavailable)
• Calling phone number (certain numbers will ring out, while others may not)
• Time of Day (we will ring calls out based on time of day to allow users downtime if they wish)
• Day of week (some users may not want calls on their days off.)
• Once you start to see the power of this system, you can really see how this will enhance your customer support and increase your bottom line. If you would like to see how we can help you, please call us today.

Staying Ahead of Your Competition

As I sit in the airport waiting for a flight to take off, I notice how all of the other waiting passengers are doing the same things. Calling loved ones to let them know their status, sending out important Emails to co-workers and clients, listening to music on their IPODs, and playing video games on their portable game consoles.

You may be wondering: how this has anything to do with staying ahead of the compeition? Well technology has changed the way life is lived today. If you do not adopt the technology, you may well be out of business. For example, if you do not subscribe to mobile Email service, and your competition does, your customer may leave your business for your competitor because they have decreased the amount of time it takes to get information back to them.

If your competitor has automated their delivery process, they may entice some of your customers to come to them because of their streamlined delivery processes.

If your competition has an e-commerce website that allows their customers to order products and services quicker, faster, and easier they could use that as a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

If your competition is using technology to track their advertising dollars for effectiveness, they may be able to put more money into the most effective advertising that will allow them to communicate with potential clients for less money than you can.

So this brings me to my point. Whether or not you want to invest in the technology, you may be forced to. We all know that technology implementations take time to install, tweek, and train. So, don't wait until after your competition has already implemented the technology, beat them to the punch. This gives you the time to get the technology working in your business before them and gives your business the competitive advantage in your marketplace.

This is where The Connect Group can help. We help our clients procure, install, and train your employees on the new technology. Best of all, let us show you how it won't cost you a dime, with our Current Technology Assurance Plan. If our way of buying technology makes sense to you, please give us a call today.

Going Paperless can Increase your Bottom Line

Have you noticed the green movement going on around us? I have seen it happening in almost every industry. We are focusing on making cars more efficient, windows more efficient. We send letters electronically instead of printing them and mailing them. This saves money, energy and time. I think the green movement is not only good for the environment, but good for the bottom line as well. One quick and easy way for your business to feel the impact of going green is to investigate how your business can move information through your business without paper.

It is actually not expensive to start this process. You will need a couple of things you probably already own: a scanner and a computer.

If you cannot move the information through electronically, maybe you can investigate how to just archive your documents electronically. You could just scan your paper documents in after they are finished and then store them on a hard disk.

One advantage to this is one hard drive can store the same amount of information as thousands of file cabinets, while taking up hardly any space at all. Another advantage to this is you can create backups of the information very easily, you can keep two identical copies of the data in two locations to ensure that physical disaster cannot take away your data.

Searching for archived data is also much faster when it is in electronic form. You don't have to comb through stacks of banker boxes in the back or storage unit to find old documents filed years earlier. Can you imagine the labor savings if you could find your documents easier?

If your business is located in multiple locations, this can be even better. Imagine if you scan a document into the system and can instantly access that document from another physical office, your home, or hotel room.

What if your people in the field could document their sales without having to FedEX a package back to main office? What if you logistics department could start assembling the order the minute the sale was made? What if your invoices arrived at their office 3 days earlier? Would getting paid three days earlier change the cash flow in your business? Would going green be easier if it increased your bottom line at the same time?If you would like to explore how going green can increase your bottom line, give us a call.

Calendar Sharing

Have you noticed how busy everyone has become? It seems like even the people we work in the same office with we don't have time to talk to. I think that the trend we are getting into is getting more busy, rather than less.

This latest bump in the road with the economy has forced most companies to do more with less. So this brings me to my point. As we continue to try and do more with less, we need to collaborate better using the technology tools we have. Shared calendaring is something that almost every business has, but just doesn't use. If you have a Microsoft Exchange server, you can already do this.

We have the ability to schedule an appointment and see the availability of other staff members within our organization. If we are the supervisor, we can actually see schedule detail. What appointments our direct reports have and with whom.

This will allow us to better manage our employees without causing them extra work and paperwork.

Shared calendaring also has other valuable applications, such as scheduling of company resources, such as: conference rooms, vehicles, tools, etc. We can create a calendar visible by all the staff so we can make sure and not double book those resources.

If you would like to see how shared calendaring can streamline your staff collaboration, give one of our representatives a call today.

Who are your Customers?

In theory this is an easy question to answer, but we sometimes forget about the internal customers within our organizations.

When we are part of a team, we need to understand that we have internal customers to think about. Our other departments, co-workers and partners. These "customers" also need our highest level of service. After all, we are all on the same team and if we do not work together, that is a recipe for disaster.

Sometimes the people we know the best, we feel the most comfortable telling them "no", the danger in that is all employees are necessary to carry out the mission of the organization. After all, if they were not necessary, they wouldn't be there.

IT, accounting and administration departments need to support the operations and sales departments. The reason these departments exist is to support the actual operations and help them carry out their mission quicker, faster and easier.

Accounting ensures that the operations and sales departments have the financial resources to carry out their missions.

IT ensures that the process of doing the business is as efficient as possible.

Administration keeps the process on track to ensure customers move smoothly through the lifecycle of delivery.

Sometimes I think we all think our job is the most important, but the reality is that all the jobs within a company are equally important if the business is to be truly successful.

So the next time you get to feeling like you are on an island all alone, take a minute to thank your "internal" customers for helping you carry out your mission.

Physical vs. Virtual Connection

It is not fun to say that I have been in this business for over 20 years now, but that is the reality. I cannot believe how much it has changed since I first got into the business. As with most progress, overall it has been good, but it also creates more challenges.

In the early days of Telephony, every connection was physical. When someone wanted to make a call, there needed to be a physical connection from one phone to another. This was usually facilitated by the operator who sat at the "switchboard" waiting for a call to come in and then would physically connect one phone to another.

Then came the electronic systems that would automatically make a physical connection from one phone to another.

The next phase in the natural evolution was the digital systems. These systems had a combination of physical connections and virtual connections to accomplish a connection between two different phones.

Now we have made the transformation into IP systems. These systems have virtually no physical connections, they use the "Virtual" technology to connect two phones.

The advantages to these systems are they allow us to virtually eliminate geographic boundaries. This is the technology that allows us to sit in a hotel room, our home office, or be on our mobile phone and function just as we would if we were at the office. Our companies can transfer calls, leave voicemail messages, or dial us directly without having any idea of where we are at. The best part about this is we do not have to tell the system where we are going to be. This makes it much more useable than the older feature of call forwarding.

We now have the ability to expand our potential labor pool to anywhere within the world while using technology to "re-locate" the person rather than physically re-locating people and families. This is especially useful for companies as they expand across the state, the country, or even the world for that matter.

These virtual connections can also help us with disaster recovery procedures. We can place employees in multiple locations and allow the locations to answer calls for each other in the event of emergencies, lunch breaks, or sick days.

Companies that have the need to service multiple languages and dialects can also benefit from these features. Imagine having employees in South America on staff to talk to your Spanish speaking clients, employees in China to speak to your Chinese speaking clients, or maybe just having employees all over the globe to service the hours of operation of your clients. Instead of trying to hire and manage graveyard shifts, your employees all work normal business hours.

In short, the "Virtual" connections of phone systems have certainly removed some of the previous restrictions with phone systems.

As with all progress, there are some drawbacks. The first is that problems, especially intermittent ones, are harder to troubleshoot. In the old days we could verify the physical connections to find the problem; where as now the connections literally have millions of possibilities, so finding the one that caused the problem can be a challenge. The second is that the systems are now more software based, as opposed to hardware based in the old days. This means upgrades, patches, and shorter life spans.

We, at The Connect Group, have come up with some innovative solutions to take the complexity out of the system, while giving our customer the true cost of ownership. If you would like to see how going "virtual" can help your business create a competitive advantage, call, click or stop by one of our offices today.

Is Your Technology Creating Communications Barriers?

In this technology savvy world that we live in, it seems that as we create more and more tools to communicate, we actually create barriers to effective communication. I was sending emails back and forth with someone today and finally had to call them and explain to them what I was trying to ask and how we needed it to work. After he asked a couple of questions, then we were on the same page and we could move forward with the project.

So, by trying to be more efficient and send an Email rather than making a phone call, I actually took more time and energy to Email back and forth a few times and ultimately ended up making the phone call anyway.

I've heard it said that in communication, the words we use only comprise about 10% of the message and the other 90% is body language and voice intonation. If that is correct, no wonder we struggle to communicate things other than facts over Email or text messaging.

I personally know that trying to communicate a point via Email can be difficult. Sometimes what we were trying to say was interpreted differently than we intended. When we read someone's Email, we may think they are upset, when in actuality, they are just in a hurry and trying to be short, sweet, and to the point. We may interpret that as upset, irritated, or indifferent.

I have some guidelines that you may find useful to communicating via Email so that we don't communicate the wrong message:

• Do keep your Email succinct, but polite.
• Don't try and communicate sensitive, personal, or reprimands via Email.
• Do create a signature line with all of your contact information and maybe your electronic card, so people can contact you in their preferred method of communication.
• Don't try to communicate in long paragraphs. In today's mobile world, people are reading the bulk of their email on a very small screen.
• Do follow up on Emails with large attachments as they may get blocked by your Email server or the intended recipients server.
• Don't type your Emails in ALL CAPS. This can make your reader feel like you are yelling at them.
• Do use a good subject line to ensure that the recipient knows what to expect in the body of an Email.
• Don't carbon copy (CC) people unless absolutely necessary. This just adds to the amount of electronic noise in the air.

Another guideline I like to live by is that typically people have their preferred way of communication and if you are working with customers, it's always good to ask them how they prefer to communicate.

Understand that technology exists to help us communicate with our employees, customers, and vendors more efficiently. Let us make sure we do not create additional barriers.

Call Recording can Increase Customer Service

The importance of recording calls has grown in leaps and bounds during the last 4-5 years. The need for call recording has become very broad and includes quality monitoring, training, compliance, regulations, proof of call, liability recording, security and much more. Once a luxury that only enterprises could afford, call recording applications are being adopted by a lot of Small & Medium Businesses. Today there are enterprise grade recording solutions at affordable prices for SMB's, largely due to the size of the SMB market.

A number of call recording needs are driven by the following situations:

• Highly competitive markets that we are all in where quality of customer service really matters!
• High training and ramp up costs of customer facing employees.
• Changing regulatory and compliance needs.
• Phones have become such a powerful tool that a lot of transactions and commitments are made over the phone.
• Ever increasing security threats and hoax calls.

Call recording is increasingly growing into many such critical application areas. This calls for careful and close examination of your recording needs in order to select the solution that is right for you. With The Connect Group, our 19 years of experience in the telecom marketplace, we can help you evaluate your needs and propose the right solution.

Here are some of the key questions you should ask yourselves when making a decision and we will help you go over these steps:

• Does the application provide easy to use interface?
• Can it be accessed without having to go to the server room every time?
• How easy is it for me to access a recording?
• Can I search based on date, time, extension id, caller id, dialed number, duration of the call etc?
• Does the system provide a secure way to store and access recording and ensure that the recordings are tamper proof?
• Does the application scale as my business grows?
• Will the system be compatible with my future phone system upgrades and changes?
• What kind of Return on Investment (ROI) does the system provide?
• And will the solution fit my budget?

Markets are changing quickly while competition is growing. As Intel's ex-President Andy Grove wrote, only the paranoid survive. There are many Healthcare facilities, Doctor's offices, Banks & Credit Unions, Stock brokers & other financial institutions, Auto Dealerships, Call Centers, Collection Agencies, Insurance companies, Mortgage, Utility companies, Schools, Government offices, Cities & Counties, Transportation companies, Taxi cabs and many other companies recording calls for all the above mentioned reasons. Don't be left behind! Give us a call today and we will help you with your questions on call recording for your business!