The Virtual Business Centre is attending the Business Startup Show 2010 at ExCel London on the 20th and 21st May respectively, at stand 319 with our sister companies Leadline Services Ltd from Worcester and The Telephone Answering Company.

This will be a great opportunity to find out first hand the benefits of having a professional call centre at your disposal without having the overheads and issues traditionally attached to such a function.

If you are going to the show, please drop by to Stand 319 and introduce yourself - we are running a small show competition draw so it might be worth your while saying hello.

If you can’t make it this week, please have a look at our website to see the services that we can provide for your business http://www.virtualbusinesscentre.com, or give us a call on 08080 510866.

Save time and resources by holding your meetings virtually using telephone conferencing.

Our state of the art telephone conferencing system can bring disparate offices, homeworkers and roaming staff together without the need for expensive travel and lost time for travel.

Call today on 08080 510866 for your conference details, prices start from £5 per conference per 30 minute period.

The Virtual Business Centre is chosen the Bria Softphone by Counterpath to provide pure workstation based telephony for the callcentre. Counterpath website

Our current technology is based around Alcatel Omnipcx and Asterisk based PBX's with Cisco 7900 series telephones.

Whilst the Cisco telephones will remain as a primary part of our infrastructure - the softphones will allow us to quickly setup new office workspaces and homeworkers for short term and emergency purposes.

Whilst the UK economy is in a recovery phase, it is important to make sure that any data being used for telemarketing and cold calling is as up to date as possible.

From a dataset prepared only 6 months ago, a greater proportion than normal will be dead contacts. Key staff may have moved on, or been re-deployed within their business with a new role and responsibility.

The Virtual Business Centre can take a dataset of any size and quickly qualify each record in preparation for a campaign.

Please drop us an email at enquiries@virtualbusinesscentre.com for more detail.

In the 5 years since The Virtual Business Centre started to use automated sms services our volume of weekly sent messages has significantly increased.

We have just passed our half a million figure, with all of these routed through our international renowned supplier PSwin.

Our custom software can submit via PSWin's API over IP, HTTPS or via email.

The automation of text message sending has ensured that our customers have always received their messages as quickly as their mobile operators can deliver them.

PSwin website

Worried about using your home address for your business, or do you want to portray a more professional image.

Starting at £35 per month, you can use our address - we can process your post - remove the junk mail and forward it on to you or you can come and collect.

Please have a look at our website here.

Call centre messages in an Instant.

There are a number of traditional means of delivering telephone messages taken by a call centre - email, fax and sms to name only three - In the telephone answering marketplace, much software development has recently been targeted at social networking and instant messaging mechanisms for transfer.

The following benefits can be observed -

• Communications are more real time, with data flowing easily between employee and call centre.
• Improved efficiencies as both parties are contactable more easily.
• Whereabouts and availability data is always up to date.

Potential Issues -

• Sensitive or critical data. Using a URL shortening service such at http://bit.ly/, a call centre can provide a link to sensitive data protected by userid/password.

Employees are more connected than ever; software clients for PDA, Network or Smartphone connect to all of the major social networking and instant messaging systems.

Whether you are a franchisee or franchisor, the Virtual Business Centre can provide telephone answering services from one central location to exactly the specification you require.

For the franchisor, the telephone answering services can be bundled for your franchisee and billed directly or indirectly with supporting documentation for you to dissemination to your franchisees.

Please give Claire a call on 01666 511340 or use our contact form.

In the current economic climate, using a call centre to take sales orders can be difficult when you have to manage stock levels very closely.

If a customer doesn't have an online web-based system, our call centre software can allow them to send via email or SFTP server their complete stocklist, pricebreaks and stock availability on a regular basis - daily, or even hourly if necessary for higher volume sales.

Operators have full visibility of stock levels whilst they are taking orders, and can advise of individual items lead times or shipping delays.

Please give Claire a call on 01666 511340 or use our contact form for more information.

When it comes to professional telephone answering, we feel we are top of the class - it's all about being clear and concise whilst engaging the caller - things have moved on a bit since this advice was issued in the August, 1906 Pacific States Telephone & Telegraph Company directory for San Francisco, California . .

How to Answer a Telephone Call:

• Remove the hand telephone from the hook and say "Here is Main 297" (or whatever your number may be).
• The party calling should say "Here is main 298," (or whatever the number may be).
• Much friction and annoyance will be avoided if this simple plan is carried out.

Source : Telephone Tribute