Face to face meetings are not the only option when conducting business, especially during a possible pandemic. Here’s how you can continue to maintain collegial and client relationships, without travel.

Teleconferencing with International Colleagues and Clients

We need to keep up our workflows and maintain communication with our (international) partners. It is imperative if we want to maintain our economy. Now is the perfect time to (re-)implement the teleconference in your daily meetings.

Instead of cancelling already scheduled international meetings, set up a +800 number or local phone numbers so your colleagues and clients can dial-in to your conference calls. This will allow you to keep doing business as usual, despite travel and potential health restrictions.

In a local setting, it allows you to maintain communication with your direct colleagues. Perhaps your company advises to work from home. Or that only 2 people can sit together in a meeting room at the same time. The implementation of a virtual phone number allows business to continue as usual in the face of these types of decisions.

Your One-Stop-Shop Solution is… Right Here!

At TeleForwarding, we have the resources to implement free domestic or international hotline numbers and toll free phone numbers, and local phone numbers.

Our trusted specialists are happy to talk through costs and best features for the number(s) you want to implement in the wake of this Covid-19 outbreak.

There are a number of additional features available:

• Interactive Voice Response (IVR) is a pre-recorded voice menu, allowing your callers to make a selection using the keypad (“Press 1 for symptom disclosure”).
• Do you receive a large volume of simultaneous incoming calls ? The Call Queue feature allows efficient call routing, especially during busy periods. You can even add targeted messages and hold music for high volume call times.
• With Sequential Ringing you can forward your incoming calls in a certain order to different destination numbers. Is employee 1 not available? Then the call will be forwarded to employee 2, or to a standardized announcement text.

Interested in setting up a number today? Contact us with your business information and we’ll make it happen ASAP.

Check out our other articles about how hotline phone numbers, toll free numbers, and/or virtual local phone numbers can help your business through a global health crisis: Hotline Numbers for Public Health Information and Communications amidst the Coronavirus Outbreak.

Amidst the struggles of the current corona virus pandemic, your trusted telecoms specialists at TeleForwarding wanted to send out a simple reminder: in uncertain times your comms policy is important. In this article, we highlight employee comms and inventory coms.

Internal Comms: Employees

Larger companies can set up a free hotline for their employees to anonymously disclose their proximity to and/or symptoms of the novel coronavirus. This helps to keep HR and compliance teams up to date with the health of their staff. Hotline numbers can also give the option for employees to listen to a prerecorded message (via an IVR menu). Messages can have the most up to date information about health and safety policies, for instance. Or to disclose potential employee exposure to Covid-19. Global operating multinationals can have the same sort of international hotline. Extra options could include cancellation details about upcoming trainings or conferences.

External Comms: Inventory

Brands and manufacturers can also set up a hotline number for their distributors for information about expected restocking. With mass panic comes unnecessary “panic shopping”, leaving stores unprepared and out of stock. Products like non-perishable food items, medication, cleaning products, even toilet paper are the most common to sell out quickly. Having a hotline for inventory allows distributors to give the correct information to the stores they stock. Consequently, these stores can relay the information to customers looking for certain products.

Your One-Stop-Shop Solution is… Right Here!

At TeleForwarding, we have the resources to implement free domestic or international hotline numbers and toll free phone numbers, and local phone numbers.

Our trusted specialists are happy to talk through costs and best features for the number(s) you want to implement in the wake of this Covid-19 outbreak.

There are a number of additional features available:

• Interactive Voice Response (IVR) is a pre-recorded voice menu, allowing your callers to make a selection using the keypad (“Press 1 for symptom disclosure”).
• Do you receive a large volume of simultaneous incoming calls ? The Call Queue feature allows efficient call routing, especially during busy periods. You can even add targeted messages and hold music for high volume call times.
• With Sequential Ringing you can forward your incoming calls in a certain order to different destination numbers. Is employee 1 not available? Then the call will be forwarded to employee 2, or to a standardized announcement text.

Interested in setting up a number today? Contact us with your business information and we’ll make it happen ASAP.

Check out our other articles about how hotline phone numbers, toll free numbers, and/or virtual landline numbers can help your business through a global health crisis: Hotline Numbers for Public Health Information.

On the home front

Municipal Symptom Disclosure Municipalities can set up free emergency hotlines to ensure that residents can anonymously call in and notify officials when they have symptoms of Covid-19. Call agents can direct residents to self-quarantine and/or go to the closest testing facility, for instance.

National Information Hotlines Free hotline numbers can also be implemented for residents to call in and acquire the most up to date information available from municipal, state, and federal governments about how the outbreak is being handled. Implement these hotlines for information such as risk level and in the event of a (city) lockdown.

Big Pharma, Manufacturing, and Distribution

Pharmaceutical companies can first set up Freephone numbers for their distributors to disclose any changes or delays in product import/export, since manufacturers may be in highly effected countries such as Singapore or China.

Moreover, a free hotline number for coronavirus can be set up for pharmacies to call and ask about distribution delays. Having this information is beneficial to customers asking when their (regular) medications will be available to pick up.

Your One-Stop-Shop Solution is… Right Here!

At TeleForwarding, we have the resources to implement free domestic or international hotline numbers and toll free phone numbers, and local phone numbers.

Our trusted specialists are happy to talk through costs and best features for the number(s) you want to implement in the wake of this Covid-19 outbreak.

There are a number of additional features available:

• Interactive Voice Response (IVR) is a pre-recorded voice menu, allowing your callers to make a selection using the keypad (“Press 1 for symptom disclosure”).
• Do you receive a large volume of simultaneous incoming calls ? The Call Queue feature allows efficient call routing, especially during busy periods. You can even add targeted messages and hold music for high volume call times.
• With Sequential Ringing you can forward your incoming calls in a certain order to different destination numbers. Is employee 1 not available? Then the call will be forwarded to employee 2, or to a standardized announcement text.

Interested in setting up a number today? Contact us with your business information and we’ll make it happen ASAP.

In the last month, we explained what causes stress at work and the symptoms of burnout. We hope that knowing more about what causes burnout will help you to mitigate this problem within your businesses.

Workplace stress happens when employees are feeling overworked and not properly supported. Feelings of anxiety, depression take a toll on one’s physical health. Employees with too much stress are often considered to have job burnout: where they are too overwhelmed by their responsibilities and their health declines.

In this series, we outlined one of the biggest workplace stressors: the amount of time and energy spent on e-mails.

How can our telephony services help you solve this problem?

Our telecommunication services can help your employees reduce stress and facilitate their work life by various means. Here are some examples:

Teleconferencing

Implement conference calls with your in- and out-of-office employees. Interactive project management, interoffice consulting, progress updates, fine-tuning and finalizing can all be done quickly and effectively over the phone. Deals can be done quicker in a conference call than having cross-country meetings. This can be done easily by setting up local numbers for everyone involved in a project’s process.

Making the most of virtual PBX

By shifting the time spent on sending e-mails to phone calls and narrowcasting within your company’s virtual PBX phone system, you can help to destress your employees. Voice recorded messages can help to unburden colleagues and employees from the overload of e-mails and instant messages they receive on an hourly basis.

• Offer a pre-recorded message at the start of each week for employees to phone in and listen to when it is convenient for them. In time-sensitive situations, record a message to be accessed only by those who need the information. This helps both the creator of the voice message who does not have to write a long email as well as the receiver who doesn’t have to deal with another e-mail.
• Even more, give your employees the freedom to create their own, clear boundaries around their availability when connected to the virtual PBX system. This can be done through time-date routing, where employees can leave pre-recorded messages to re-route phone calls if they are working on a particularly important project.

We can help you set up conference call, local phone numbers and a PBX system to make this happen company-wide, or even by department or team. Contact us today and let us know what issues you’re facing with your internal communications, and let us help you find the perfect solution!

For more information, read up on our Series on Stress and Mental Health to learn more about how your employees might be affected by stress in the workplace and what symptoms stress may cause.

We’ve all experienced the technical difficulties when trying to put together a video conference call with more than one other party. Of course, the preferred alternative would be face-to-face meetings, but with ongoing globalization and employees sometimes being thousands of kilometers away from each other, making cross-country or cross-continent meetings can be a hassle. 

Instead, we’ve moved to doing almost everything through email. But we all know the struggles of having important conversations through email chains. Reply? Reply All? Who should I CC:? Or should I use BCC:?

With the almost invasive presence of email in the business sphere, we tend to forget that, sometimes, the better (perhaps even best) option is to have a good, old fashioned conference call.

Closing (international) spaces

Globalization means that many of us have colleagues and/or clients in different cities, and some on different continents. While it is occasionally possible to get together for business meetings with the right amount of notice, it’s not always the case. 

Think about emergencies which need to be dealt with ASAP – sometimes quicker than the time it takes to fly from one end of the country to the other, let alone overseas! 

Our geo- and toll-free numbers can help you make fast meetings happens. Using our numbers to make conference calls will take the stress away from cross-country and cross-continental emergencies.

Fussing over language barriers

Some issues that can come about when having contact with colleagues and/or clients in different countries are based on language. In an email with someone who doesn’t share your native language, certain turns of phrases can be miscommunicated and taken the wrong way. This can result in emails coming off as rude or condescending when they are not meant to be. Bringing the humanity back to business conversation through real-time conversation helps to eliminate this barrier. It also gives all parties the opportunity to ask questions and clarify anything that may feel unclear.

There are even technologies that are becoming more and more readily available for the real-time translation of conversations! This means that all parties in international meetings could come to the tele-meeting and speak in their own language.

Setting up local numbers for your international colleagues and clients will help you make better use of teleconferencing since everyone can come to the meeting without worrying about hiring translators, for example.

Business travel can come at many costs 

One unbelievable cost of travel is the damage done to the planet regularly. In case you missed our Series on Sustainability, we went into detail about how business travel damages our environment and contributes to global warming.

Obviously, travel also comes with a number of financial costs. Think about all of the expenses put into business travel: flights, meals, hotels. The costs saved avoiding small, unnecessary trips can be monumental for small to medium sized businesses.

While it doesn’t happen too often, any number of issues – from bad weather to mechanical issues, sometimes even a pilot being unfit to fly – can cause an airline to cancel a flight.

Likewise, it’s important to think about the physical costs of travel on those who are going back and forth for meetings. Just look at the results found in a study about people who travel often for work. Studies have found that extensive business travel can lead to obesity, alcohol dependence, and depression, among other health issues.

It is obvious that going back to the basics of simply using our voices and talking to each other over the phone and have a conference call, rather than having to deal with everything that could go wrong through text or in transit, is a serious option for many small to medium sized businesses. 

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

It’s no secret that since the dawn of the American Dream, even in Europe everyone has been looking for a way to make millions. Celebrities, people who are born into money, and Silicon Valley moguls who had the right idea at the right time make it all look so easy. There is an ever-growing dialogue of “if you just work hard enough, you can make your dreams come true”.

But reality looks different: when people earn less, often much less, than that, dreams of becoming a millionaire can be very far away. So we often use this line of thinking to justify working 18 hour days to Get Rich. But life isn’t “when we are rich”, it’s right here and right now. And what do we end up with? Stress! Lots and lots of stress!

En route to Burn Out City

It’s not uncommon to experience stress at work. Studies reveal that 46% of workplace stress is caused by workload. With big projects, deadlines, dealing with difficult clients or colleagues, this isn’t necessarily ground-breaking information. But there is a fine line between a normal and unhealthy amount of stress. A study done at Harvard found that time and productivity lost at work due to stress costs American businesses somewhere around $30 billion per year. In Europe, it was even found that stress leads to a loss of 27 productive work days per employee, per year. That’s one whole month lost per person, per year, due to stress!

Those of us who have that big, rich American dream in our sights tend to put in long hours and extra effort, but we’re never sure if it’s enough. We’re often left to our own devices with no praise or compensation for those extra things in the short term. It’s in those situations where we can be at risk for going from stress to burn out.

Possible stress symptoms

Left [un-paid-attention-to], excessive stress can lead to demotivation, constantly thinking about work, irritability, difficulty making decisions, and (lack of) sleep issues. Moreover, it can cause headaches, nausea, and even weaken our immune systems, leaving us to get sick with colds, flus, etc. more often.

Even more, putting in extra hours and effort doesn’t always lead to job security? However, job insecurity is another major stressor! Research shows that in women, this type of stress leads to higher rates of illnesses, including diabetes and chronic migraines and neck pain; in men, chest pains and hypertension, and up to two weeks taken off of work due to these issues.

Experts on the subject tend to suggest lifestyle changes, such as adding exercise and meditation to your daily routine . But when you’re already feeling bogged down by work, making these kinds of changes as your first step to relieve stress can seem overwhelming.

Telephony to reduce stress

So what if we all took that little step back to telephony? Imagine working from home with a phone number connected to your company’s virtual PBX, so you can be reached just as though you were sitting in the office, without the stress of always having to be there. Contact us for more information about virtual phone numbers worldwide.