Chances are, if you do any sort of local advertising, you’re not sure how to quantify how well it’s working. A local DID number from a hosted phone service provider can help you track the effectiveness of your ad campaigns so easily, it’ll be a small wonder how you lived without such visibility before.

These days, many small businesses are inundated with pitches from vendors promising them easy ways to get more customers, mostly from the Web. There’s so many choices it can be confusing and with more choices than ever before, even the local Yellow Pages ad reps are promising “Google Gold.”

But how can you tell if any of it’s working? And, if you feel some of it is – how do you know exactly how much you’re getting from it?

Read on…

Not having a call transfer feature makes your business look untrustworthy.

As a small business owner myself, I’ve gone from the picnic table as a conference room to taking venture capital. In the early days, it’s common to take customer calls and have to tell them,

“Actually, Jimmy does the billing now. Can you call him at 415-555-8008?”

And when the company gets bigger and buys a traditional business phone system PBX, you hear your employees ask, “How do I transfer a call on this thing?”

Our webmaster made a good point once – asking customers to dial a separate number is like asking website visitors to make extra mouse clicks. They both lower the conversion rate.

Read on…