You’re the Boss Blog: One Way to Simplify Phone Chaos

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Courtesy of Be Well NutritionAndie Jones

Four years ago, Andie Jones found herself overweight, out of shape and feeling generally unhealthy, thanks in large part to the demands of a high-powered career in marketing. After figuring out a new set of eating and exercise habits that got her health back on track, she started helping family, friends and colleagues do the same — and got so much satisfaction out of it that two years ago she walked away from her job for a career reboot. After taking some certification courses, she put up a shingle for Be Well Nutrition, a nutrition and weight-loss coaching service specializing in helping time-strapped business executives and parents.

A virtual shingle, that is. Because while Ms. Jones sees clients in two different Los Angeles offices (her own and one she shares with a physician), and has a home office to boot, she estimates she does about half her counseling over the phone. “A lot of my clients are in other parts of the country,” she said. “And most of the rest don’t want to fight the Los Angeles traffic. Plus I travel a lot myself to conferences and to visit family.”

But the convenience of phone-based service comes with its own set of problems. Any of the 20 or so clients who at any one time are on Be Well’s intensive three-month program can call Ms. Jones whenever they feel the need to brag about progress or confess to slippage, and any of the 150 or so clients who have completed the program can call her for a pep talk, too. Given the dicey nature of cellphone calls, Ms. Jones prefers to take the calls on land lines — but given her multiple offices and traveling, which number would she give out to clients?

One solution to this sort of mobile-home-work phone-line chaos is a “follow-me” or “virtual” phone service that lets you give out one number that can be set up to ring on whichever phone you want, or on all your phones. These services have been around for years, but the prices have come down recently — to zero, in some cases — and the features and ease of use have gone way up. The best known services offering virtual phone numbers are Skype and Google Voice (the latter being free). But one service that’s been gaining traction with small businesses is Toktumi (tok-tu-mi — get it?). And that’s the one Ms. Jones chose.

Part of the reason Ms. Jones picked Toktumi, which costs $14.95 a month, is that the service lets you set up a toll-free number, while Google Voice and some of the other services do not. But Toktumi had a range of other features. For example, it lets Ms. Jones go to a Web site to determine which clients get routed to which phone lines at what times. That way she can make sure everyone who wants to reach her can get to the right phone, or she can choose to route only clients who need special attention right to her, while the rest might get her assistant or a message. When she’s on the phone with a client, a second client calling in is asked by an automated greeting to announce his or her name to the system, so that Ms. Jones can find out who’s trying to get through and decide if she should interrupt the first client — a more reliable approach than depending on caller ID, which often fails to identify callers.

Like Skype and some other virtual phone services, Toktumi also provides a mobile app (called Line2) that essentially gives the cellphone a second phone line, allowing Ms. Jones not only to receive calls made to the virtual number on her mobile phone, but also to make calls from that number, using the cellphone’s data connection rather than over its phone connection. (Google Voice doesn’t do that — it relies on your mobile line.) She gives the incoming Line2 calls a different ring tone than her regular cellphone calls, so she can tell instantly if it’s a client calling. When she calls out on Line2, the receiving phone’s caller ID registers the call as coming from the virtual number. (Oddly, Google Voice does do that.)

Ms. Jones has one complaint: Toktumi doesn’t do videoconferencing, which she relies on for group meetings and some one-on-one consultations. For that, she relies on Skype, but she’d rather do it all through one service. “It would be a great next step for me,” she said.

As more business owners try to juggle being untethered from the office with needing to stay in close touch with customers, employees and suppliers, services like Toktumi, Skype and Google Voice are likely to become increasingly popular — and will probably keep providing more for the money. That should hold us until the day we’re really waiting for arrives: Namely, when cellphones provide such clear, reliable, full-featured, reasonably priced phone connections that we can just take all our calls on them and dump the land lines and additional services.

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Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=a85a583f3dd2b366eb090c4750008ac4