The move to the new office is pretty much complete. There’s the bar to build yet, boxes to unpack…but we have desks, Internet access, carpeting, computers, printers and phones so it’s a real working office at this point.
In this move we discovered some Interesting things.
- We learned a lot about what it’s like to live inside of your disaster recovery plan. A very good lesson for everyone that will shape our recommendations and help us set expectations in the future.
- We learned that Comcast doesn’t own the phone numbers that it issues. Ouch.
That last one is a big deal. Although we only moved 5 miles, we moved out of one old Ma Bell exchange and into another. Can you believe that at the heart of our phone infrastructure is still the Lincoln Exchange? I was shocked. Because Comcast does not own the phone numbers that it provides with the business plan, we were unable to take our phone number 5 miles. A major bummer.
So we have a new phone number: 248-629-9142
Which, as a reminder, goes with our new address:
29488 Woodward Ave #450, Royal Oak, MI 48073
We have also completed installation of an actual phone system where everyone has a voicemail box and an extension. It’s a Response Point phone system. We purchased it about a year ago (maybe a bit more) and have been using it for training and demonstration. We’ve installed them for our clients and decided to put the one that we owned into production.
Cool feature list:
- Voicemail to Email. We don’t have to be in the office to get our calls anymore.
- Voice commands. People calling in don’t have to talk to a receptionist. They can simply say “Amy” and they’ll get me. Or they can say “Accounting” and they’ll get Missy. Or they can say “Diana” or “Ted”…you get the idea.
- Groups. We have a generic technician extension and this one doesn’t get you to a person but rather into a voicemail box, where we’ve set up the mail to be delivered to a group of people. So, you leave 1 voicemail and 3 people get the message delivered to their email.
- Automatic backup. Yes, we’re backing up our phone server and the voicemail it contains. It backs up to my computer. Should anything happen to our phone switch I can stick another one in there, from my PC select Restore and everything is as it was. No time consuming re-configuration.
- Integration with Outlook Contacts. When a call comes in, it will attempt to locate a matching contact in Outlook and display the incoming call along with the contact information.
- External Access. We can specify any external number as being part of our phone system. For example, I can specify a cell phone number and when they call-in, they can transfer, pick-up, check voice mail, intercom just as if they were a physical phone in the office. We can also take one of our physical office phones and put it into a remote office and it will work as if it were in the main office too.
There’s a lot more to this little easy to setup, inexpensive phone system. It amazing how far telephone technology has come in the last couple of years. Now if only Ma Bell or Ameritech or Southern Bell or AT&T or who ever it is we are all under today would update their infrastructure to reflect the mobile nature of business today, no one would ever have to update their Rolodex contact list.
Labels: Announcement
