The convenience of a softphone app, simply explained

Calling and receiving calls with an (inter)national VoIP number.

In addition to calling via your usual mobile subscription, you can also make incoming and outgoing calls via an app on your smartphone. This is especially useful for business conversation. Via a so-called softphone, you can configure any business VoIP number on your smartphone and you only need an internal connection to use it. How exactly does it work?

Step 1; Activate your VoIP numbers
Working from home means that it must be possible to make incoming and outgoing business calls outside the office location, preferably on everyone’s own smartphone. For this, the company must have VoIP numbers, also called virtual landline numbers. These have a lot smart advantages anyway that are clearly explained in this animation.

Step 2; Install your softphone app*
Employees need to install a softphone app on their smartphone. These softphone apps are available for both Adroid and IOS and are often free to download. In the installed softphone app you can quickly and easily configure any (inter)national business VoIP number.

Limitless incoming and outgoing business conversations

The softphone simply only needs a mobile internet connection, or a local Wi-Fi connection to be online. Regardless of your location, you can now make international calls using the softphone app without restrictions and the recipient will see your business VoIP number shown in the display. On every (inter)national VoIP number installed, you can be reached on your smartphone anytime and everywhere.

What about the cost?

Transferring incoming calls to the softphone app are free of charge from national networks of the VoIP numbers, however there are transfer costs when you cross the border. Following situations are applicable;

• Receiving national calls: if you have a VoIP number in London, than forwarding all incoming calls within the United Kingdom to your smartphone is free at any location you are in the UK
• Being called internationally: if you receive calls on the London VoIP number from abroad, for example from a German caller, the forwarding costs will be charged for this
• Outgoing calls: outgoing calls on your VoIP number are calculated based on the destination you are calling to and whether you’re calling a landline or mobile number.

Finally a tip!

It’s beneficial for internationally operating organizations to have local VoIP numbers active in all countries where they do business as it improves local-to-local business conversation ensuring recurring business.

Curious about what is possible in your situation? TeleForwarding is happy to help you with your (inter)national accessibility or improving your current set of phone numbers.

* Free versions of Softphone apps usually link one VoIP number, in premium versions more than one VoIP number can be linked.

The most obvious way to keep your customers happy is to simply be available and easily accessible to them. In reality, not everyone chooses to do so which leads to far too many third-party companies offering services directing callers to a paid call forwarding service to find and connect them to the company that calling customers are looking for.

A recent Dutch study about this phenomenon found that three out of four calling customers have no idea that they are actually paying to call a call forwarding service. Moreover, an estimated USD 1.50 was spent per household on a paid call forwarding service in 2020.

Make sure your website builder posts your 800 number visibly!

When you hire a website builder for your company’s domestic and international sites, make sure you offer easy and quick access to a local 800 number. This shows you care about your website visitors and that you are a bonafide webshop in a sea of malafide webshops – a distinction that has led to more and more countries requiring webshops to provide easy access to their contact numbers and/or chat functions.

Your website builder should have the skills to build a site for each country where you have visitor and/or clients and, preferably, present a domestic 800 number that is clearly stated in the footer of on your contact page. With a clearly published 800 number, your customers won’t be forced to make use of a call forwarding service anymore.

Finally, high customer satisfaction and great client loyalty will result by making your company better and more easily accessible providing a domestic 800 number per country. Your domestic and foreign clients will close deals faster and your company could take advantage of cross- and upsell opportunities offering free of charge access for your happy clients who will come back for more.

TeleForwarding can help you make this happen with an one-stop shop telecom provider for business phone numbers in over 100 countries, all under one contract and without needing foreign addresses. We’ll make sure your customers’ experience is hassle-free, by connecting global business to local people!

It’s now just over a year that we’ve been living through the coronavirus pandemic; the largest health crisis to have affected the world, well, ever. The exponential speed at which this virus continues to grow and affect us in every corner of the world is unprecedented, and now more than ever, there is a need to have quick, efficient, and reliable lines for crisis communication. The speed of this has created a demand for a corona hotline in every country and within every organization.

In this article, TeleForwarding highlights the use and importance of a corona hotline for testing providers, testing locations, and clinical research, as well as custom corona hotline and messaging solutions exclusive to TeleForwarding. Take advantage of our expertise and experience within the clinical research and healthcare sector to help you streamline your crisis communications.

Corona hotline for testing providers and locations

Testing providers: We have clients with large influxes of coronavirus related inbound calls who have implemented a toll free number to scale-up their services nationally. This type of number can be an asset to your company, too. Having a corona hotline that is designated for questions and orders for your specialized testing kits and related products and/or services that are in high demand during this crisis, having a specific corona hotline allows you to cater to the large influx of calls without disrupting your telephone traffic on a regular business day. Alternatively, with the global scaling of your testing locations, you can set up a unique corona hotline for each country where you offer sales, service and support for your products. When it comes to questions, you can save even more time by creating custom voice recorded answers to the most frequently asked questions about pricing and distribution, among other things.

Testing locations: From scheduling and/or changing appointments, to discussing results and next steps, a coronavirus hotline is a huge and perhaps necessary asset for your testing location. Having a local virtual phone number for testing locations in different cities not only emphasises your proximity to clients, but also helps to scale your inbound and outbound coronavirus related calls. Alternatively, you can set up a single coronavirus hotline that gets redirected to the location of your caller’s choice, having one central number that you can advertise in all of your crisis communications, from marketing materials to e-mail signatures. Alternatively, you can set up a coronavirus hotline for each independent testing location so as to keep things simple for local callers and call agents responsible for handling call traffic in-house.

Corona hotline for clinical research

As it’s important to track participants experiences, potential side effects, needs, and results in wide-scale clinical research of various treatments for acute and ‘long covid’, having a coronavirus hotline is an imperative tool for your research team. You can use a coronavirus hotline for various steps and uses in your research: sign up and intake interviews, new/increased/decreased symptom reporting, follow-up appointments and surveys, and the list goes on. Due to the unpredictable nature of clinical research, the implementation of a flexible and reliable corona hotline is no doubt the simplest step to scaling your research across state, province, or country borders.

Custom corona hotline solutions

Are you looking for customised solutions for your corona hotline and crisis communications needs? TeleForwarding understands the need and is experienced with the set-up and maintenance of services for global service-windows enabling your organisation to be available 24/7 to offer your communities, customers, and employees with accurate and easy to access information. We can help you provide telephonic solutions for enquiries about business hours, visiting hours, appointment scheduling, as well as helping you offer them answers to the questions that might be keeping them up all night in relation to the current global health crisis. With the probability of your callers asking the same questions, we can offer custom solutions allowing you to create voice recordings to answer your most frequently asked questions at the press of a button using our voice response platform. Not to mention the fact that we have thorough and broad experience working with our clinical research and healthcare sector clients to create voice response from the callers’ side, giving them the autonomy to leave a message at their leisure rather dealing with long hold times. These are just examples of the types of customisable solutions we have offered clients when it comes to crisis communication, but our sales support team is always happy to think with you to create solutions that fit your specific needs.

Why TeleForwarding?

As you have read in this article, this question has actually already been answered. Specialized knowledge and skills for quick delivery of flexible, reliable, high quality connection to all countries on all continents; these are the core values upon which we pride ourselves at  TeleForwarding, especially in this extended period of the covid-19 pandemic. Our team of specialists with a combined multiple decades years of experience in the field of telecommunications understand the urgency for reliable, low cost solutions. It is our pleasure to contribute our international telecom services and to be a pillar of support for those who are directly involved in the fight against covid-19.

You might ask yourself What is number porting? Well, it’s a process that allows you to switch your provider and keep your current business phone numbers! TeleForwarding makes porting a phone number simple. With the help of our trusted specialists, the number porting process is a seamless transition with minimum efforts, no volume thresholds, and maximum impact!

In the video below, we explain the number porting process in 4 simple steps.

Are you always dealing with recurring issues with your Telecom provider, tired of unexpected changes in your account management, and struggling to get new routing in place for your toll free numbers and geographical phone numbers?

If so, you should know that there is a better solution within reach. It’s called ‘porting’. There are several good reasons to switch providers and port your toll free numbers and geographical phone numbers to TeleForwarding realizing maximum impact and – even better with minimum effort.

You can simply keep your phone numbers but switch the underlying service from a process-driven, Telecom provider to TeleForwarding. A customer-driven niche specialist who smartly bundles the services of well-known Tier 1 providers. With TeleForwarding, you get a one-stop shop solution across all lines & countries from one transparent contract, to one invoice with one currency and one Service Level Agreement. This is amplified by the best in class experience provided by trusted specialists who really stay on top of things.

The four-step process to switch your toll free numbers and geographical phone numbers is super simple, effortless for you, and ensures 100% line continuity. That’s the expertise we bring to you

1.Just start by requesting your porting proposal today!
2.You will receive a competitive price proposition within 48 hours.
3.Read it over thoroughly, then simply sign the contract; that gives us permission to port all numbers on your behalf.
4.Once your numbers are live with TeleForwarding, you’ll receive a notification from us.

So why wait? Request your porting proposal today!

–About TeleForwarding International—

TeleForwarding is an international telecom provider with 25+ years of experience in the field. Our trusted specialists provide personalized support to ensure the best in class experience. TeleForwarding is a one-stop-shop for all your telecoms needs.

Switch to TeleForwarding today and transform your life:

• Guaranteed lower prices (up to 40% cost savings)
• No cost switching
• Guaranteed service continuity (99.999% availability!)

E-mails, e-mails, e-mails!

It’s no secret that many of us end up answering emails hours before we arrive at the office, and hours after we leave. This is detrimental to our health as it heightens anxiety, contributes to workplace stress and takes time away from our friends and family .

One way to start the process of dealing with stress at work is to look at your emailing habits. How much time do you really lose on emails? The average employee sends and receives more than 120 emails per day . One study shows that people spend up to 12 hours per week in the office and another 5 hours at home reading and responding to emails . When looking for strategies on how to deal with stress at work, e-mails are a critical factor.

Of course, e-mail communication has its benefits. But how much easier would your day to day life be if you weren’t constantly refreshing your inbox to reply to Operations, or writing, rewriting, and editing emails to your boss? Wouldn’t this facilitate managing stress at work?

Think about all of the actual work you could get done in that amount of time! More research shows that spending less time in your inbox and replies will lead to stress relief . Which is probably why some companies have even banned after hours e-mailing due to the added work stress .

Leave Your Work at Work

The easiest way for stress management in the workplace seems so obvious, leave work at the office, including your e-mails! So many of us have our work e-mails set up to our smartphones, we don’t think twice about it – neither about the time wasted, nor about the additional workplace stress, or the implicated security risks. Accessing work data on unsecure WiFi at a café, or not properly secured WiFi at home, even, can lead to small (or even large) data breaches. But how often do we think about things such as work stress when work email on our smartphones just seems natural?

We thought of some stress management strategies to try out. Imagine not being available 24 hours a day via email. What if we deleted our work e-mail setup on our smartphones and gave ourselves the challenge of only checking e-mails when we are at our computers. This isn’t to say not to check your e-mails at all, sometimes it’s necessary when you have a looming deadline or leading up to important pitch meetings. Or what if you gave yourself only one hour at home to look at afterhours emails, and other than that you stayed offline? It gives you a chance to reduce workplace stress drastically while still staying up to date. Even more radically, what if one day per week you set an out-of-office email, letting people know you are only available via phone at a few specific times during the day. These “time outs” are a great possibility for stress management in the workplace.

But there is a solution for stress relief at work. Moving from constant and consistent written communication back to the basics of telephony has the potential to change not only your outlook on your work life, but reintegrate some person-to-person connection that gets lost in the digital world.But What If It’s Important?

But What If It’s Important?

You might argue that getting that email from your manager or team lead every morning is important for planning your days, albeit the increased work stress and risk for burnout. But there are other ways to do this.

Our founder and CEO Hans Lasonder remembers a simpler time, before e-mails started taking over business communication. “Years before I started this company, I worked for a number of multinationals. I distinctly remember that in one of these positions, we had Monday morning call-ins. Monday mornings at 7 am, we were invited to dial into the weekly report with our regional director. In these morning sessions, the director would summarise the last week’s agenda and set us up for the week ahead. This made Monday morning commutes that much better for many of us, dialling into those calls made Monday starts at the office that much easier”.

By making concessions to e-mailing like this (but in favour of coping with stress at work), we save time, stress and energy that is otherwise lost in written communication. Often people use e-mails to avoid confrontation and making decisions . Think about how many times you’ve received an e-mail where you didn’t quite understand what the person was communicating. Then, instead of picking up the phone to clarify the issue, playing e-mail tag all day trying to figure it out. How much additional work stress did this cause?

Need an easy fix to help dealing with stress at work? Instead of long e-mail chains, what if you took your business back to basics and implemented that weekly conference call Hans reminisced about to make sure everyone is on the same page and can spend their weeks doing meaningful and productive work, instead of chasing down emails. It’s one of the easiest and most feasible stress management strategies at work!

We can help you with that. Get in touch for a quote for local (conference call-in) numbers for your employees near and far!

Brexit is the consequence of a 2016 referendum in the United Kingdom.

We all remember the first “official” date of Brexit – March 29^th, 2019.  After the original Brexit delay, the status of Brexit has been up in the air. The latest date: October 31^st, 2019.

The British, Europeans, and the rest of the world are more uncertain than ever about the status of Brexit and what Brexit means for them. And what about for you? It seems that Brexit is becoming an expensive game of cat and mouse.

What we do know about Brexit’s effects so far is that immediately following its announcement, stock prices dropped substantially. The power of the British Pound Sterling and the Euro have become weak. Export rates have risen. Expats working abroad are worried about their job security.

Whether we end up with a Brexit deal or no deal, it’s safe to say that the global economy will be affected.

Here’s how we can help!

Are you worried about what Brexit will mean for your current geo and toll-free numbers? In light of this uncertainty, we understand you want to be independent from these worries. That’s why we are offering a deal to port all current local and toll-free numbers from any provider to TeleForwarding without consequence.

Since our headquarters is located in Amsterdam, we have a strong globally focused team who will do what it takes to make an easy transition through Brexit. We want to help you make the transition to a post-Brexit world as easy as possible, and even save you money in the process.

Would you like to know more about what TeleForwarding can do for your phone numbers? Simply contact us and mention our promo code BREXIT19 to profit from this Brexit deal!

It’s no secret that as we push towards our career goals, some of us spend far too much time focused on our work and not enough time focused on ourselves.

In recent years, stress and burnout have become more and more critical health issues, leading to serious illness and sick leave. Work related stress is especially (but not only) problematic for those who are in the beginning of their careers, trying to make a name for themselves and prove to their superiors that they are worth this promotion or that corner office. They deal with great amounts of workplace stress without knowing how to cope with stress at work, leading to strong physical and mental exhaustion.

What are the main symptoms of burnout syndrome?

Among the main burnout symptoms, the most prevalent and subtle are the ones we deal with every day and associate with regular work-related stress. Therefore, the symptoms of burnout syndrome are the same as the work stress symptoms. According to Psychology Today, the telltale most important burnout and stress symptoms are:

• Chronic fatigue: constantly feeling like you have no energy.
• Insomnia: not being able to fall asleep, or waking up many times in the night, no matter how tired you are.
• Forgetfulness and inability to concentrate: A general sense of not being able to focus and forgetting tasks.
• Physical symptoms and increased illness: anything from chest pains to digestive issues, and since your body and mind are so tired, you find yourself catching colds more often and staying sick longer.
• Psychological symptoms: these generally begin with anxiety and turn into increased depressive tendencies, irritability, and full on anger.

What are the causes of burnout due to work stress?

The causes of stress in the workplace are more diverse than one would expect. Next to individual personality characteristics (such as perfectionism or poor stress management strategies), a company’s poor organisational structures play an important role in producing work related stress. According to the consulting company Gallup’s study, the 5 main causes of stress at work are:

1. Being treated unfairly: due to bias, favouritism, and mistrust, among other reasons.
2. Unmanageable workloads: high performance work calls for impossible workloads.
3. Unclear role descriptions: not knowing exactly what is expected from an employee.
4. Lack of managerial communication and support: many people feel like they are not being properly informed and/or supported by their managers.
5. Unrealistic deadlines: impossible workloads with even more impossible turnaround times.

How to deal with stress at work?

There are many ways of how the causes of stress at work can be alleviated. One CNBC report offers suggestions of both learning your strengths as well as understanding your weaknesses and limits, which facilitates the challenge of dealing with stress at work. Also, good communication and making sure you have a group of supportive colleagues to go to for help when needed is important for stress relief. Lastly, finding the right managerial support to search for strategies on how to cope with stress at work together is essential.

Many articles nowadays tend to focus on these options as ways to eliminate the causes of stress in the workplace, as well as incorporating regular exercise, relaxation techniques and good sleep to your daily routine. Consequently, we thought we would take a slightly different approach on how to deal with stress at work.

In this series, focused on work stress and mental health, we will discuss the ways in which we have found the media and business travel to be significant factors in the tipping point from ‘healthy’ amounts of workplace stress to burnout leading to sick leave.

Join us in the comings weeks as we look further into how email and business travel truly affect us as workers in the modern era, and how you and/or your company can make use of our telephonic services to help everyone dealing with stress at work.

This is the last part in our series. We’ve guided you trough almost 200 years of telecommunications, from the invention of Morse code to digital telephony and smartphones. Now it’s time to take a look at what the future has in store for us, with the ever-accelerating technological developments. Since Apple kicked off the smartphone revolution we’ve embraced apps and gained easy access to tons of services that, prior to this smartphone age, would have required a lot more gadgets and resources. Our relationship with technology has fundamentally changed, and the possibilities are so endless it’s impossible to predict what the future of telecommunications will look like. But we can at least give it a try!

Gemalto, a global company in digital security, held a survey amongst 1,200 young adults (18-30) from all around the world. Respondents were evenly split between Brazil, China, France, Germany, the UK and the US. They were asked about their expectations, which resulted in some fascinating insights from the dominant consumers of the near future. We’ll provide you with the key findings of the full report – a whopping 18 pages summarized for your reading pleasure!

Trends for the future of mobile

Smartphones have lead to a massive rise in mobile data consumption. Technical advances and internet speeds have drastically altered what is possible, and the industry is constantly pushing these boundaries.

Respondents were asked what they think the future of mobile has in store for us. No less than 87% believes access to whatever content will be seamless, and 61% is sure that WiFi offloading will be common. The same goes for the trend of mobile payments, which recently took flight. Half of the respondents thinks it’ll be easy to make any kind of payment through your smartphone. Needless to say there are some cultural differences: only 19% of French respondents expect mobile payment, vs 69% of the Brazilians.

Generally, convenience is key. Issues regarding functionality will have been resolved as the frictionless nature of mobile is a big theme in the report. Another key element is unlocking. Fingerprints are rated as the most popular method in 2025, but facial recognition (44%) and retinal scanning (43%) have also surpassed the PIN/password method (40%). Almost a third thinks our smartphones will be equipped with a DNA scanner by then, with highest expectations amongst the Chinese (47%) and Brazilians (36%), vs an average of 32%.

A hyper-connected society

A lot has been said about the Internet of Things (IoT), but it seems inevitable that it will forever change the way we live our lives. From industrial innovations to an IoT that will simplify our daily routines, the potential is huge. Smart cities are the obvious product of an all-encompassing IoT, and transportation was the key focus of this part of the survey.

Companies like Google and Tesla are already running elaborous tests with autonomous cars and trucks, and 63% thinks that our cars will be driverless by 2025. Of course navigation can’t stay behind: 62% thinks that 3D maps will be displayed in front of you as you drive. As cars will be autonomous and intelligent, so is public transport. Nearly 70% believes that by 2025, we’ll have high-speed connections even when travelling underground. Public transport networks will be able to gauge demand on increase of decrease the frequency of service, which will this hugely benefit the environment. Again, European respondents prove to be much more conservative than their Brazilian, Chinese and American peers.

Smart living

How about connectivity and our health? 63% thinks heart-rate monitors will eventually be able to show you a 3D display of your heart, with daily reports updating you about your status. More than 50% believes we’ll have implants for monitoring purposes. This way you’ll never forget a doctor’s or dentist’s appointment again, since your devices can make an appointment when needed and remind you as well. The Brazilians and Chinese are the most optimistic about the mind-reading potential of computers, with over 40% expecting direct brain interfaces.

Technology in 2025 will help us plan our daily lives better. By now it’s already quite normal to speak to our phones, with personal assistants (PAs) like Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana or the Google App. But in 10 years’ time our relationship with these PAs will be far more developed, and the increasing connectivity will have profound implications on every aspect of our lives. Despite these predictions it’s impossible to foresee what our lives will be like in 10 years. But one thing is for sure, and that is that Samuel Morse could have never expected all this to come from his invention.

We already told you about the rise and evolution of toll-free servive numbers and the first mobile phone. In this article you’ll learn more about the further evolution of digital telephony and mobile telephones; from large analogue machines to the intelligent smartphone as we all know it.

3 generations: 1G, 2G and 3G

When the first mobile phone appeared in the ’80s there were different mobile networks throughout the world. Frontrunner was  Japan, where the first commercial network in the world was already active in 1979. At first it was just Tokyo that was connected, but within 5 years the rest of the country had joined the capital. The USA followed soon after, and  Europe responded by setting up Global System for Mobile Communications, or GSM.

All these different networks had one thing in common: they could only be used for calls through the analogue network, but soon the 1G network made a name for itself. In 1991 the first digital mobile network was implemented in Finland by Radiolinja, what later became part of Elisa Oyj. This network was labelled 2G; the second generation of wireless telephone technology. 2G had a few advantages. Information could be transferred encrypted over the digital network, it was more efficient and 2G made it possible to send data as well – like SMS and MMS. And everything was secured digitally.

Though the mobile network evolved rapidly with the introduction of 3G in 2001 and 4G in 2014, the 2g network is still being used today in some parts of the world, but more and more countries choose to gradually shut down their 2G networks.

Digital telephony and smartphones

Already in the ’70s Theodor G. Paraskevakos developed the concept of a phone that could connect intelligence and data processing with a virtual display. This concept could be realized once 2G made it possible to send data over the network.

There are several answers to the question who introduced the first smartphone to the market. In the middle of the ’90s there were 2 devices which could be used to call, email and fax, and a digital calendar was built in as well. These were the early versions of the smartphone:

• In 1994 BellSouth introduced the Simon Personal Communicator.
• In 1996 introduced Nokia their Nokia Communicator.

The Nokia Communicator (photo on the right) had all the functionalities of a personal computer, like email, web browsing, word processing, and combined these with fax and telephony. The device costed over 800 dollar and was everything but handy and easy to use, which scared away consumers and kept them from buying one. The owner of Nokia at that time, Jorma Ollia, stated: “We had exactly the right view of what it was all about… We were about 5 years ahead.”

The first smartphones were primarily suitable for business use, because of the high prices and unpractical design. Its main use was that of personal digital assistent.

The name ‘smartphone’ was coined by Ericsson in 2000, in a campaign to increase its popularity amongst consumers as well. With the introduction of the 3G network (in 2001) and the arrival of lighter, more simple devices at the same time the smartphone finally became a hit. In 2007, the year that Apple launched the first iPhone, already 8 million people worldwide had used a smartphone to visit the internet, and in 2012 there were over 1 billion smartphone users worldwide. It’s estimated that by 2017 the number of smartphone users will approach 2,5 billion. This makes us wonder what technological developments the near future has in store for us – something we’ll discuss in the final part of this series.