It can be a very frustrating experience, to say the least, but now you can get away from voicemail entirely. Imagine this: someone calls you and gets sent to voicemail to leave a message. Instead of getting that dreaded icon on your phone telling you that there is a voicemail, you’ll get an email which contains their caller ID, an attached sound file of their message, and most importantly, a transcription of what they said.

There are many benefits from using a voicemail transcription service, including:
1. The time savings associated with reading vs. listening to the message
2. The ability to file the voice mail permanently in your email system
3. The ability to easily forward the message to anyone

There are two steps involved in doing this. First, you have to choose a transcription service provider. Then you have to set your phone to “Call forward on No answer” to the phone number the provider gives you. There may or may not be a fee for this depending on your carrier.

Voicemail transcription providers generally charge between $20 – $40/mth. PhoneTag.com and YouMail.com are two good ones.  We’ve used PhoneTag.com are quite impressed with the quality of the transcriptions.

Recently, we’ve switched from PhoneTag.com to a free provider… Google Voice. Google Voice does a lot more than voicemail transcription if you’re willing to give all of your contacts a new number to call you on. If you want to keep your current number, you can just set the Google Voice account to “do not disturb”, which sends calls straight to it’s voicemail. These can be sent to you as text messages or emails.  Be aware that currently the transcription quality isn’t as good as the paid services and it tends to take more rings to make it to voicemail (but free is free).

Try it out. And after a few weeks of massive productivity gains, feel free to take some of your cost savings and invest in some custom software development to make your business run more efficiently.

http://www.suscosolutions.com/SuscoServices.html

Have a great week!

By simply adding another monitor you can gain to up 50% productivity fairly instantly.  Here’s why:
- You won’t be constantly flipping b/n your email client and whatever you’re working on
- You can actually compare 2 things without struggling to fit them on one screen
- When needed, you can stretch one application across both

This is great for just one user, but if you have a team working for you and you get all of them using multiple monitors the hours of productivity gained will add up very quickly.

It works for anyone at a computer ranging from developers (1 screen code, 1 screen test site) to sales people (1 screen writing proposal, other looking at support material).

If you have a desktop, it’s easy, get an extra video card for $100, get a monitor for $100, and you’re good to go.  If you don’t want to mess with the inside of the computer, you can buy a USB video card instead.

If you have a laptop, it’s REALLY easy, just plug another monitor into your laptop and set the screen properties to “span screens”.

Try it out.  And after a few weeks of massive productivity gains, feel free to take some of your cost savings and contact Susco to develop an iPhone App to better connect to your customers and/or make your workforce more efficient.

http://www.suscosolutions.com/SuscoServices.html

Have a great week!

Neel