Small business secrets...

When the phone rings at your small business what happens? There are a number of scenarios that can happen such as the call is answered immediately, there is an auto attendant that directs the caller or hold music. All this is vital to the caller experience that your customers or stakeholders experience. It's important to know which one your small business is projecting day to day.

For small business owners starting out, it's common to want to use your personal mobile phone for work. It may seem convenient but the setbacks will become obvious in the future such as not being able to switch off, wondering whether every call is a personal or business and can damage your professional reputation.

Here are more reasons why using a personal mobile phone number isn't something you should be doing.

It may seem like a good starting point but using a mobile number for your small business but can be detrimental to your brand and relations with prospective callers. A study revealed that 85% of small business owners use mobile phones for business-related tasks on a regular basis. As your business grows over the years you'll soon start to feel the pain and limitations.

Here’s why it’s time to keep your personal and business number separate and move away from mobile phone use all together.

As a small business owner, you may not consider missed business calls as an issue. Given today’s emphasis on digital communication such as social media and email, it’s easy to forget that phone calls also play an important role.

Unanswered calls are more important than we may think. Here’s the real impact of missed calls on your small business.

This year’s theme is ‘choose to challenge’. This encourages us to stay alert in order to tackle unconscious gender bias and inequality.

By challenging the status quo we can choose to call out this bias and choose to seek out and celebrate women’s achievements.

In December 2020, Salisbury became the first city in the UK to gain complete access to Openreach's full fibre (FTTP) network. Over 90% of the city now has access to fast and full fibre broadband.

bOnline phone now allows your business to upload a custom professional voicemail greeting to callers.

Due to the current COVID-19 pandemic, the majority of businesses either resorted to remote working or have unfortunately shut down during lockdown. Many businesses, especially small businesses, have greatly felt the impacts of this economic crisis.

As the world is preparing to bounce back from this devastation with help of the vaccine, many small businesses will need to reface and begin a new build-up for their company and look to see how they can rebuild what was lost and continue growing with in the future.

2020 has brought a new expectation for remote work. Due to Covid-19 nearly half of the UK workforce is working remotely. While remote work has always existed it was never required in the way that it is now.

More importantly, employees have had to completely change how they communicated and collaborate while being separated. The main concerns of remote work are distractions, low productivity and lack of consistent communication. Here are tips on how to engage remote employees while still providing the level of customer service consumers expect.

For start-ups and small businesses choosing a phone number is often one of the first decisions.  After all, this will be used for reaching and keeping in contact with customers, employees, suppliers, etc. However, traditional telephony is becoming increasingly outdated leaving VoIP phone systems to take centre stage.

Here's why VoIP technology is slowly taking over the telecom space and as seen from the BT shutdown taking over traditional copper lines altogether.