The Star Sub-Feature in the Popular Phone.com Call Forwarding Suite
Mike Kolodziej, President and Founder of The Dent Doc, a mobile dent repair service for automobiles, was recently quoted in an interview as saying:
“… Caller ID Routing is one of my favorite features, besides the menu, and the auto-reception.
It displays the 9:00AM to 6:00PM hours of operation option to send calls to my cell-phone, or to my contractors, to their cell phone, 9 am to 6 pm. After 6 pm I send all calls to my Phone.com voicemail box.
So Phone.com, in a very real sense, is my back-end corporate office. It processes and organizes all my calls, which is the basis of all my revenue in the auto dent repair business, during business hours, and after.”
So here we have a case of a very successful small business whose actual business model is specifically, and successfully, based mainly on Call Forwarding and careful menu planning, and on Caller ID Routing when he chooses to use it, when he can separate who he should talk to and who is going to be a waste of his precious time.
Maybe it’s personal and it can wait. Maybe it’s a difficult customer who should be dealing with a salesman. Or perhaps it’s simply not the right kind of customer for him and should be calling a different technician at the company, or even different business entirely, which the caller will figure out when going through the crystal clear Menu.
For a man running a very active business that generates a good deal of revenue every month – his time is indeed precious, like a valued, and limited, commodity.
That is why all inbound calls to his business are handled either by standard call forwarding, going directly to his one main cell-phone, and his technicians’ cell phones – or straight through to his “Phone.com corporate office”, or, as he calls it, his “true virtual office”.
The CEO of DENT-DOC.com also adds:
“I don’t know how I’d do business without Phone.com.
The unique benefits of this system allow me to live the flexible type of life that I live. The business doesn’t consume my life because Phone.com allows me to avoid wasting time, and calls never intrude on my private life…”
So, are Call Forwarding and Caller ID Routing so popular with small business owners simply because it routes calls past a landline to a cell phone out in the field, or wherever? It provides a certain convenience, is that all it is?
Yes, and no. Yes it does, and no, that’s not all it does.
It goes much deeper than that. There is a profound, far-reaching result in play here with the call forwarding feature. Let’s go back to the interview for a second and listen to what else the business owner says about the Menu. Notice how closely he ties his Menu set up into his call forwarding usage:
“I am able to disseminate information as I see fit – structuring the menu as I wish.
Different messages, and callers, are the criteria by which I route the calls to the correct technician.
1. Press One – if your dent is smaller than the palm of your hand.
2. Press Two – if your dent is larger than the palm of your hand.
3. Press Three – if the dent is in your bumper.
So the phone menu in fact saves me tons of time not talking to customers I shouldn’t be talking to, plus tons of wasted money wasting minutes on the my cell phone.
That wasted time I never get back talking to people I can’t do business with – so wasted time is now almost completely avoided.”
So, yes call routing, or call forwarding, is important to him – but what is so critical is the fact that he is now able to avoid wasting precious hours of his time, hours of wasted phone conversations with folks he can never do business with, who aren’t a fit for his services; or, who simply should not be speaking to him, the owner operator, but a more specific technician, in this case bumper or windshield or car door dent removal specialist.
Plus, his cell phone minutes are no longer wasted and that translates into a good deal of saved money.
So you’re able to take that wasted time and energy, and hang on to it. All of a sudden it’s yours again! Like a new lease on life. Time and energy at work will never to be inappropriately dissipated again – and how many hours do we waste on the phone needlessly if we’re not careful? A lot.
This CEO’s point is that he can be generating income instead of wasting valuable time and energy on non-productive calls. And he also makes the point that in life we never get back any of those wasted hours. They are, simply, gone. Never to return.
So how do you put a price value on something like that? You can’t… But you sure do try hard to avoid repeating the same mistakes over and over again.
Business folks who use Caller ID Routing a lot, more than our friend at Dent Doc does for example, are really applying their technical resources towards shutting out nearly 99% of all wasted or misdirected calls… They even know who it is that is calling them – who he wants to pick up, and who he doesn’t. The criteria is simple, and is based on one’s Phone.com™ Virtual Office Address Book.
Small Business owners are smart to use call forwarding to vastly limit their time on the phone talking to folks they should not be wasting time talking to. It’s a matter of sheer practicality, isn’t it? Let’s face it, at the end of the day it is the owner of a small company that determines whether or not the company is successful or not. It is his or her energy and focus that drives the company properly, or not.
If the owner is wasting valuable energy and time on the phone talking needlessly, that time and energy is being misdirected, not going into things it should be going into, whether it be supervising sales more carefully, watching invoices or billing, or simply closing new partners and new business.
A person has just so much bandwidth, just do much energy and time – and then you’re on autopilot. And on autopilot, you make mistakes, and you miss things you wouldn’t have missed had your focus and energy been trained correctly in the right direction, at full capacity.
Interesting how something so ‘trite’ as wasting time on a misdirected call can so profoundly affect the fortunes of a company, isn’t it?
But it can.
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