Thursday, January 28th, 2010 at 12:48 PM EST

Is your business day annoyingly and repeatedly interrupted by unsolicited sales or “cold calls” from other businesses or industry suppliers? Have you ever calculated how much time your business loses every week answering the phone for useless callers? It can add up fast. Since these calls often originate at the same place, but are made by different people, telling them to stop calling often doesn’t work. Unfortunately, Do Not Call lists are also often ineffective.

Consider using Phone.com’s features to reduce the number and amount of time you and your employees waste each week. First, if unsolicited sales calls are a real problem, consider creating a fictitious “Purchasing Department” and make it one of the options on your main menu. Many sales calls directed at getting your company to purchase goods or services will try this department first. Have all calls to this department routed to a specific phone number in your Virtual Office account which goes to voice mail automatically. At your convenience, review the voice mail and block all unsolicited, unwanted sales calls to any or all of your numbers in the future. In Virtual Office, you can globally block incoming calls from a specific caller to all numbers in the account by using the Call Blocking feature. If the unwanted caller does not go for the Purchasing Department option and gets through to a person, the call blocking feature can either be activated during a call by pressing [*9] or by using the control panel.

For your convenience, Virtual Office keeps a short list of the most recent callers and the most frequent callers. When you know that calls from these numbers are unwanted, you can easily keep them from wasting your time in the future. Select any of those numbers by pressing the Block button near the number and the number will enter the Spam Callers List of blocked numbers. You can also block surcharged calls from other countries or from pay phones. You can even block all unknown callers to specific numbers to keep key employees free of these nuisance calls.