TMCnews Featured Article

Many years ago, I started a small Web development business. It was just me and a friend, but to secure accounts we needed to project large and inspire confidence in our potential clients both that we would be around for awhile and that we were professional enough to do the work that they expected. One of the first steps when we started our business was setting up a toll-free number and an auto-attendant system so clients and potential clients would hear the same sort of professional phone response they expected from much larger companies.

I’m not alone in realizing the advantage of having an auto-attendant for my business phone.

"It is very important to me that I am accessible without giving out my personal cell phone number,” explained Josh Holowicki in a recent blog post on the 8x8 (News - Alert) blog, president at Steinas Systems, a lighting and stage equipment solutions provider. “My 8x8 business service with auto attendant is my answer," he said. "Clients can reach myself, or any of my key team members, by dialing our main number. From there, 8x8 takes care of the rest. The client has no idea if they are talking to us as we sit behind a desk, or in an airport waiting for a plane."

Holowicki uses business voice-over-IP provider 8x8 for its business telephone service. Although I didn’t know about the 8x8 solutions when I set up my business storefront many years ago, 8x8 offers a particularly full-featured and easy to use auto attendant service that comes free with its business phone service.

For those who are not familiar with the term “auto attendants,” they are the pre-recorded messages that play when you call a business, the one that gives you a greeting and asks you to press 1 for the corporate directory, 2 for sales, et cetera. The 8x8 Auto Attendant gives businesses a far more personalized and efficient service than routing every missed call into a general voicemail box, and it sure is more full-featured than the old auto-attendant system I used for my business many years ago.

Aside from helping small businesses project large and thereby level the playing field a bit, as I’ve mentioned, two other good reasons for an auto attendant include using the auto attendant as a backup when a company’s receptionist is away, and setting up intelligent after-hours call routing. With 8x8’s Auto Attendant feature, companies can route calls to the appropriate person or team for a faster response. Its voicemail-to-email feature is particularly useful for those of us who live by our email inboxes.

“What I love most about 8x8 is the ability to customize the auto attendant to our business hours and the flexibility to customize each day of the week,” noted Yvonne Roberts of Vista Village Pediatrics on the 8x8 blog. “I also love the ability to make exceptions to our business hours whenever we need. And the most lovable part is being able to access our auto attendant from home, work or on the road!”

Amen. While the auto attendant I set up many years ago was nice, those offered today by solution providers such as 8x8 are even more crazy useful.