Customer Service From Top To Bottom

Wednesday, January 9th, 2013 at 8:47 PM EST

As the Director of Customer Service for Phone.com I am very much accustomed to receiving both positive and negative feedback from a variety of customers in a variety of ways about a variety of employees.  One of the most common ways we collect feedback is through the customer satisfaction survey we send out after a customer contacts support.

On one particular day I was going through the comments and came across one from a customer that said “Joel Maloff is wonderful to work with. He’s responsive and easy to communicate with.”  Normally I wouldn’t think much of this except for the fact that Joel is Phone.com’s Vice President for Channel Development and he doesn’t typically spend a lot of time interacting with customers.

I use this story to illustrate a key point.  A company does not become a customer centered company by chance.  From top to bottom of any organization it is critical that all employees care deeply for customers and understand that the customers are the life blood of the organization.  While some employees never interact directly with customers, they can provide excellent service to the people interacting with the customers.  They can also understand the way their work touches customers and do it to the best of their ability.

I am here to tell you that Phone.com is such an organization.  This example of great feedback about Joel is one of many from the leadership at Phone.com.  I can name countless times when I have asked upper management to interact with a customer and in all cases I’m met with extreme willingness.  They understand that if Phone.com is going to be successful, it starts with amazing customer service.

Jeremy Watkin is the Director of Customer Service for Phone.com and co-founder of CommunicateBetterBlog.com  (and on Twitter: @commbetterblog ); a blog dedicated to learning about good and bad customer service with the intent of providing amazing customer service for Phone.com.

Free In-Network

Tuesday, January 8th, 2013 at 2:17 PM EST

Free In-Network Calling allows all Phone.com customers to talk to each other for free.  Meaning if you have 10 extensions on your account everyone can call each other within the company at no charge.  My friends office has grown so much they are in 4 separate office spaces in the same building, they have a lot of square footage and it’s not reasonable to walk the entire floor just to ask a few questions so they call each other all the time.

This is a huge benefit for companies that may be in multiple locations, different cities or spread across the world.  It’s also a savings if you know another company uses Phone.com as well because you can call them for free.  Saving money is always good so call your coworkers to your hearts content.

Free In-Network Calling is just one of the many features Phone.com offers our customers.  Here’s  our Features page, take a look and see what else you may like.  Always remember if you’re interested in Phone.com we offer and 30 day free trial.

Do Not Forget the Fax

Tuesday, January 8th, 2013 at 12:43 PM EST

By Stuart Zipper

In ancient times – I don’t mean B.C., I mean B.E. or ‘before e-Mail” – I used to have a fax machine sitting by my desk. In fact (or should I say in fax), I was using fax transmission way back in the early 1970s, via a clever contraption with what I think was a one pixel sensor on a rapidly twirling arm, scanning bit by bit as the document being faxed was very, very slowly pulled through a tube. Some 20 years later I of course had far more modern equipment, with higher data transmission rates and capable of scanning or spewing out several pages per minute.

But these days fax has become a rarity in the United States. I haven’t needed to send or receive a fax in well over a year. I got rid of my last dedicated fax machine something like a decade ago.

So I was somewhat shocked when I was suddenly required to fax a document this week. It seems that customer service at the Hospital Corp of America (HCA), which bought our local hospital some years back, can’t get e-Mail. They demand fax or snail mail.  Having put my life on the line at that hospital, I can say that their medical expertise is top notch, even if their customer service is in the telecommunications stone age. Indeed I bet they’re even still using traditional phone service, rather than far less expensive business VoIP.

But back to the fax.

Yes, I do have a business-class multifunction printer that can be used as a fax. All I have to do is plug it into my Phone.com VoIP line, and be sure to remember to set to machine not to answer incoming calls. Or alternately, if I really needed fax, I could buy another phone number and use that exclusively for fax. Indeed Phone.com’s basic Virtual Office business plan includes two phone numbers even for its entry price of $14.88 a month, and a small business could use one of those for voice and the other for fax. Alternately, for $4.88 a month a business could add another line, just for fax.

But even though I do have such a multifunction printer, I have a better solution: Phone.com’s Internet Fax, a feature I think many have forgotten about. But it is right there to use, both on the dashboard in the upper right hand corner once you log in to either your extension or to the main account, and on the list of functions on the left of the screen when you’re logged into your extension.

In this case I simply scanned the document into a PDF file, and sent it by logging onto my Phone.com account. And the fact is, had I been using my printer as a fax machine, it would have been the exact same electronic scan, so the refusal to accept a file via e-Mail is even more puzzling. After all, my scan scan was a PDF file, which would be identical whether e-mailed and printed, or whether printed locally via fax. An added bonus – the scan is now stored on my computer, just in case I ever need to send the document again.

And indeed I did need it again … thankfully Phone.com’s Internet Fax service sends you a confirmation e-mail that your fax was received, or if not why. In my case, it seems I had set the fax to high quality, thinking that I was being nice in making it easier to read. Bad choice – it seems HCA’s fax machines can’t receive high quality transmission, so I had to resend it at a lower quality, easily done when using Internet Fax.

And … there’s no outrageous fee involved in sending a Phone.com Internet Fax. Just check out what a hotel charges for a fax on your next business trip ($1 per page is not uncommon), or what the local supermarket or office store might similarly charge per page.