I talk a lot about how to market your small business so that it grows, but what happens if that actually works? Expanding small businesses can experience growing pains, from scaling up production to managing a larger workforce. And on the marketing side, you may find yourself with a rapidly-expanding budget and a new set of directives. While it's great to have these kinds of problems, it's also important to remember that you have to retain... (Read More)
Blog
06/14/2013
Customer support can be a tough, unrewarding role due to angry callers and stressful work expectations. A Wired article about efforts to improve customer service call center performance recently caught my eye, as it raised some interesting questions about how leaders can motivate employees who may be dealing with frustrated callers all day long. According to the article, many companies are implementing gamification into contact center and... (Read More)
06/12/2013
Cultivating meaningful channels of communication with business partners and clients is key to building and maintaining a robust consumer base and building your company's value over time. Contact centers are at the focal point of this initiative and business phone systems are necessary to anchor operations. We also live in a time of heightened expectations - consumers drive markets, and the perspectives of customers and business... (Read More)
06/10/2013
Some small businesses are afraid of online marketing. Instead, they turn to tried and true methods: Newspapers, local magazines, fliers in mailboxes and maybe an occasional email. But, guess what? Most of our lives are now online. If your business isn't online, you probably aren't going to reach your customers (or you're much less likely to).
There's been a lot of discussion about why small businesses don't use online marketing. It often comes... (Read More)
06/07/2013
Business leaders are constantly in presentation mode, whether we are communicating with employees internally or with clients and investors externally. And with the expansion of tools such as videoconferencing and screen share, which offer new avenues for presenting information, there's always a need for leaders to re-evaluate their approach to delivering a presentation. I recently wrote about communicating simply; a good presentation requires... (Read More)
06/05/2013
Do you know whether your phone system is making it easy for customers to do business with you? Are they never getting a busy signal, experiencing multiple transfers, or leaving several messages before getting a response?
In today's instant-gratification obsessed society, you should strive to remove every possible barrier – especially when it comes to contacting you.
Consider, for example, that 71 percent of customers have ended their... (Read More)
06/04/2013
Many companies talk about "customer experience management." This is because businesses want to make sure that their customers have a positive and consistent experience, whether it's with a product, a service or a customer service rep. Marketing messaging should also be consistent across platforms, from the website all the way through to the contact center customer service experience.
In contact centers especially, marketing managers shouldn't... (Read More)
05/31/2013
One of the oldest adages in business is that the customer is always right. Although adhering to this dogma can be frustrating at times, making sure that your organization is primed to meet customer needs is paramount for ensuring future success.
This is especially evident not just in terms of what is being sold, but also how the selling process unfolds. In particular, today's customers expect real-time information that caters... (Read More)
05/29/2013
The new Fonality.com is here.
Our newly redesigned website gives visitors a clear understanding of our available features, the deployment options and how our solutions have positively impacted our customers. Here are a few highlights of what’s new on the site.
What we do- Fonality offers phone, collaboration, and contact center solutions designed to enable small businesses to work and sound like a large enterprise, but at a price... (Read More)
05/20/2013
As you may already know, May is National Small Business Month, established to celebrate new, established and yet-to-be-formed small businesses and the people who keep them going. And the good news is that U.S. small businesses show signs of bouncing back from this sluggish economy, as SMB optimism rose in April to a six-month high!
At Fonality, we love our small business customers and provide some great business telephone communication tools to... (Read More)
