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Communications Tips

Digital PCS cell phones and internet email. Did you know that you can send email to your digital PCS cell phone?

If you have service with Voicestream, your phone's email address is the area code and phone number @vsmessage.com. For example: 2085551212@vsmessage.com. If you have service with AT&T, your phone's email address would look like: 2085551212@mobile.att.net. The phone will receive only the first 160 characters of the message, so you will have to educate the sender to provide a very concise summary in the first sentence!

If the sender sends the message to your normal email address and sends a copy to the phone, it can serve as an alert that you should check your email.

Paragon software, FoneSync. Do you own a PCS cell phone? Are you annoyed at how hard it is to type names and phone numbers into the phone? Are you even more annoyed that you already added that stuff to a PIM on your PC, and now you have to retype it all again? Are you aggravated that when a phone number changes, you have to enter it in two places, the PIM and the phone? Are you like me, and just don't bother, so you have a phone with either no numbers in it, or crammed full of out-of-date numbers?

Paragon Software has the answer. FoneSync will transfer names and phone numbers from several PC PIMs (Lotus Organizer, Lotus Notes, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Outlook Express, Microsoft Schedule+, GoldMine and Symantec ACT!) to a variety of digital PCS cell phones (Nokia, Ericsson and others) with drag-'n-drop simplicity. If you want to get your money's worth from your fancy digital phone, you owe it to yourself to check out FoneSync. You can visit them on the web at http://www.paragonsoftware.com

Have you noticed the proliferation of pagers, voicemail, answering machines, cell phones and faxes? They're supposed to make your life easier. More importantly, they're supposed to make it easy for your customers to do business with you. You might want to stop for a moment and put yourself in your customer's shoes. Is your technology making their life any easier?

I once tried to do business with a real estate agent who had two pagers, a car phone, a cell phone, a business office phone, a business office fax, a home office phone and a home office fax. I was given explicit instructions to contact him on certain devices during various hours of the day on different days of the week. After four failed attempts to reach him, I gave up. I think it's fair to say that his fancy (not to mention expensive) technology did him more harm than good, at least with impatient customers like myself.

The moral of the story is, keep it simple for your customers. The less numbers they have to remember, the better. One simple and inexpensive way to do this is with a device called a Page Out. The Page Out gives you the functionality of a pager with voicemail, without the monthly expense of a voicemail contract. It connects to your answering machine, and calls your inexpensive numeric pager with a pre-arranged code whenever someone leaves you a message. In my experience, I would be paged within 60-90 seconds of someone leaving a message on my answering machine. For the small business person on a strict budget, this is a very inexpensive way to get a voicemail system, and simplify life for their customers in the bargain.

Reach out and email someone.

Communications Tips

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