Here’s a feature that’s as simple as it sounds. The RingMe button gives your customers the ability to contact you directly from your website with a simple click of their mouse, free of charge. Put a RingCentral RingMe button on your blog, website—even your Microsoft Outlook® email signature—with minimal effort. Here’s how:

1) Log in to your RingCentral account

2) Click RingMe Options under CALL SETTINGS

3) Choose your settings

Choose from a variety of button sizes and styles. Configure your RingMe options to route calls to your company greeting, specific extensions, or department queues. Once you’ve configured your options, just copy the code and paste it onto your site or wherever you want customers to see it.

Once your customers click, they’ll be asked to provide their number. And like magic, RingCentral will connect you to automatically.

Want to learn more? Check out this short video showing the power of Ringme.

Most people get a local number when they start their business and don’t realize until much later that they should have gotten a toll free number. The signs are there, but most businesspeople don’t recognize them.

Take this short survey to help you decide if it is time to make the switch.

Y/N Question 1. Are the majority of my customers outside of my area code? 2. Does my company have multiple departments? 3. Is my local number hard to remember? 4. Does I sell products or services online? 5. Do I get many customer support calls? 6. Do I have offices or employees across the country? 7. Would my customers call more often if I had a toll free number?

 

If you answered yes to 1-3 questions, you may not need a toll free number, but might want to look into it.
If you answered yes to 4-5 questions, you are on the borderline and may benefit by getting a toll free number. If you said yes to 6-7 questions, then you definitely need a toll free number. This will give a new dimension to your business.

Photo by Leo Reynolds

When you decide to form a small- to medium-sized business, the first steps are obvious: think of something people want, get a DBA, hire employees, etc. After you have created the company, then it is time to get to work, right? Not necessarily. In today’s technology age, there are several steps that you should do now.

1) The Business Plan

Developing a business plan is a must, but it doesn’t need to be complex. A few pages outlining your business overview, industry background, product or service, business model, strategy & team provides the foundation of your plan. Having a solid business plan is a requirement to get SBA (Small Business Administration) loans. For guidance, take a look at Score’s business plan template.

2) Raise Capital

It’s not an easy time to raise capital for a new business. Many larger institutions have reduced lending programs for small businesses and venture capital has seen a downturn over the last couple years. The bright spot in local small business lending seems to currently be with local credit unions. Able to more intimately assess risk in their local markets, some credit unions have still been actively underwriting SBA loans.

3) Legal Structure

If you plan on bringing on partners or investors or will be signing contracts, you’ll want to set up a legal structure and incorporate your company. Your main options setting up as Sole Proprietorship, Partnership, or Corporation. Each structure has its advantages & benefits. Services such as LegalZoom provide cost-effective online tools to help guide you through this process.

4) Protect Your Company’s Name

Securing your brand identity is important, and becomes increasingly so as time goes by. The USPTO website has a section for trademarks where one can conduct a search to see if another business has an existing name similar to yours, and if they are in your industry.

5) Establish a Web Presence

Creating a website is essential these days. Your website needs to be much more than a postcard on the web if it’s going to be a lead generation machine. The cost of choosing a domain and hosting your site has come down dramatically over the last few years. Not to be ignored are social media options like Facebook, Twitter and a blog. These can give you a huge boost to your Google visibility.

6) Phone System

The telephone will be the primary means of sales, support and business relations for your new enterprise. Choosing a toll free number (such as 1-800-Widgets) will allow you to take calls from across the country. You’ll want to consider getting a virtual pbx which will provide the power and functionality of a Fortune 500 phone system, but with no hardware to buy or maintain. Even if your company has only one employee, you can also take advantage of multiple extensions. You can create virtual departments, make announcements and route calls from any extension to any number—your home, office, or cell.

7) Create Your Business Identity

Customizing your own letterhead, business cards, and even e-mail signature with your company name and logo helps establish credibility and brand recognition. It also helps spread the word. Once you create a company logo, use it everywhere; on business cards, brochures, letterhead, your website, even in your e-mail signature.

If you do these seven steps before you open for business, it will save you a lot of time in the long run and make your business run smoother from the get-go. And make sure to join us on Facebook, where we are growing our online conversation with our customers. Find out the latest updates, ask questions, learn tips, and stay connected.

Photos by Rachel from Cupcakes Take the Cake

When a business converts to faxing over the internet, they suddenly have a problem with their old fax machine. This bulky machine is taking up space in the office that could be used for a bigger printer, shelving for reams of paper or even left empty to make the office look cleaner. However, simply throwing it into the garbage bin is not environmentally friendly. Here are three easy and low-cost options that will get rid of that machine and make Mother Earth smile.

1. Recycling Most big cities have places that will accept old fax machines and either fully recycle them and/or refurbish them for resale. Find a recycling company near you at the Environmental Protection Agency.
2. Nation-wide Donations If your town doesn’t have an office equipment recycling company, consider donating it to the Salvation Army or Goodwill. Earth911.com has a great list of recycling options that accept mailed office equipment for recycling. An important note with fax machines is that you should recycle the machine and the ink/toner separately. There is a good list of national charities that accept recycled office equipment at UsedComputer.com.
3. Charitable Donations Also, consider donating your machine to a local charity. If you belong to a church, ask them if they have an employee who could use a personal fax machine. Is there a school in your neighborhood? Non-profit groups often have financial limitations, so donations help them considerably. What’s more, your donation may even be tax deductable. States usually have a recycling program on their website that might include Charities. (For instance, Massachusetts has a page set up on their site: http://www.epa.gov/osw/conserve/materials/ecycling/live.htm.) Go to your state website and see what they have listed online.

Do you have any other ways that you recycle your old office equipment that you can share? Let us know! Photo by Abhisek Sarda

It’s a complicated term used to describe a variety of paradigms and whose historical time line is still hotly debated.

In the world of IT, the industry seems abuzz with the phrase “Cloud Computing”. In 2007, Dell tried to trademark the term (it was rejected by the USPTO) and Larry Ellison of Oracle said, “It’s what we’ve been doing all along.”

So if it’s not new and not novel enough to be granted a trademark to an individual company, what is it?

For businesses, cloud computing means that they will be able to afford and deploy enterprise-level software and hardware applications that were previously cost or time prohibitive except for the largest of companies.

For consumers, it means that social networking, rich phone applications, and video games will all be more readily available and ultimately, open up consumer wallets for the micro-payment economies that cloud computing enables. That means the trend of people buying applications from iTunes, ringtones, and “virtual goods” on games such as Farmville and World of Warcraft will increase – dramatically over the next 5 years.

For the economy, it means that both businesses and consumers can expect a dizzying speed of pace in new online services, ideas, and industries.
In a technical jargon nutshell, cloud computing is leveraging the power of a network of computers (the internet or intranet) and delivering it to the end user as a service. This falls into three main categories of cloud computing scenarios:

1. Software as a Service (SaaS): It used to be that enterprise software came on a CD with a serial or license number to authenticate the validity of the user. The software rested on the user’s machine and used that computer to process the code that was necessary to deliver the feature functionality to said user. Essentially, the user’s computer was both the Server (processing the code) and the Client (requesting and receiving the computational requests).
   • The SaaS model means that these computers sit in a co-location facility or data center and computational requests and processes are done by the (Server) computer and delivered via a “Thick Client” (web browser) to the end user. In this manner, a single server in a single location could deliver software features and functionality to a wide array of users spread across multiple geographic locations.
   • In order for SaaS to exist, it had to first wait for a common thick client (the first being Netscape’s browser) and the ability for software to be “multi-tenant” or rather the software had to be written (from scratch) to have multiple instances of the application running within a single server.
   • While Saas is touted by some as being a relatively new industry (Salesforce.com being the brand leader in this space), a company called ADP had been doing it for decades (even before the rise of the internet) by providing its users telnet gateways as Clients (otherwise known as dumb-terminals).
2. Software Development Platforms as a Service (PaaS): A few years ago, the clever folks at Google released an API (Application Programming Interface) that granted a “developer token” by Google which gave them access. The 3rd party developers were then able to use a massive amount of servers on an application development framework that allowed engineers to “rent” these resources to create new applications.
   • In the current climate, each of the development frameworks (Cloud Platforms) are distinct; there are no standardized APIs, and building an application for one Platform does not mean you can carry it over to another platform.
3. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): While there has been a lot of coverage for Amazon’s decision to allow third parties to rent their own servers and data storage devices, managed hosting companies have also been doing this for quite some time. Co-location space rentals, MeetMe Rooms, Managed Hosting and even Dedicated Virtual Hosting means the physical infrastructure of servers, electricity, data storage units and even disaster proofing could be managed by one entity and rented out to another. Anyone can have a “cage” in a secure, costly data center by renting its resources virtually over the internet. On a holistic level, one could then create a Platform as a Service (PaaS) framework, rent a co-location’s resources to host it and then use this platform to create an SaaS application to run on this platform.

Like how this example ties it all together? Think of it this way – we can now build a startup by creating a PaaS framework which allows developers to create software applications. We then take this framework and place it onto servers and resources we rent (not buy) at a co-location facility so we can have Hardware as a Service (HaaS). Using our own PaaS framework which sits on our rented HaaS infrastructure, we can build an SaaS application that delivers feature functionality to end clients. Voila! All three major types of Cloud Computing in one single scenario!

We couldn’t have done it without the support of our loyal base of users and technologists worldwide. Thank You.

RingCentral First to Offer True Enterprise-Class PBX “in the Cloud”

Cloud computing has become the new buzz word. One sees it being bounced around as often as “information superhighway” and “Web 2.0″ once were. But in the world of enterprise telephony, (not an accurate definition… this means self–provisioning by the user from the credit card order screen.) From a vendor perspective, customer self-provisioning and automated account and DID setup equates to lower operating costs which, in turn, translates to lower prices for customers. In July 2009 RingCentral Office launched, offering a true cloud computing PBX service.

iPhone Becomes Business-Class

Recognizing that many small to medium-sized business owners are using iPhones as their primary business communication tool, RingCentral built an iPhone application that many say finally makes the iPhone truly a business-class Smartphone. Visual voicemail, send and receive faxes and the fact that my business number now shows up in Caller ID, even though I’m using my personal phone, has made my life so much easier. All business calls that come from my RingCentral desk phone have their unique ring-tone on my iPhone. Can I tell you how much easier this has made my life?

RingCentral Launches in England

RingCentral launched its award winning PBX service in the United Kingdom, home to the best curry-chips and accents on the planet. Now, our friends across the pond can get a Freephone 0800, 0845 or local number for their UK business.

CallerID in Our Control

We can now enter the name of ourselves or our business within the RingCentral console to insert into the Caller ID field of our call recipients. Many have been requesting this feature for quite some time (including me) and it’s great to see that it’s finally here. For inside sales teams to high-level B2B phone calls, this feature is invaluable for making sure that each outbound call has the highest chance of getting picked up.

It’s a new year for your business – time to save money, be more productive, and advertise smarter.

1) I Will Test the Office Phone System

Old toll free numbers can get lost, employees can move or switch titles and cubes and old numbers may lead to dead extensions. It’s not uncommon for a small business to lose anywhere from 2% to 15% of its potential sales and customer retention simply by not checking to see that their phone system turns every single extension into the proper employee and that each number has a voicemail box that is checked. Promotions, new titles, new departments, and even old employee business cards should be checked by actually calling these extensions.

One exercise that we like to do to test voicemail systems is to wait after hours, then call the phone extensions with this message:

“Hi, this is ______,

I’m testing our phone system and was wondering if you could let me know that you’ve gotten this voicemail by sending me an e-mail to ____@___.com and leaving me your extension and phone number where you reached this voicemail. This will ensure that our customers can always reach us, thanks!”

While this can be time consuming, it’s a critical (but critically boring) task that is one of the easiest ways for the office manager to boost customer sales & retention. We don’t mention this often enough, but how your customers get presented with your voice mail greetings and the ease of your employee directory (if you have one) is one of the first impressions of your company and brand.

2) I Will Follow, Comment, then Tweet

2010 can be the year your business finally launches on Twitter. But be forewarned – success on this social media juggernaut won’t have a “if you build it, they will come” strategy.

If you’re a B2B business, a common way to build your Twitter “presence” is to find the influential KOLs (Key Opinion Leaders) on Twitter and follow their “tweets”. Comment and contribute to their posts and let them know that you appreciate their content. Over time a certain portion of these folks will follow you as well, and they in turn will become your conduit for information about new products and company PR. Because followers of tweets can “retweet” (repost your tweet to their own network of followers), one message about e.g. a new break-through skin cream to a few dozen dermatologists can spread like wildfire.

If you’re a retail or consumer oriented business, a commonly used method for getting Twitter followers is to offer specials, coupons, and rebates to those that follow your tweets. This is commonly done by making such offers “time sensitive”. The real-time nature of Twitter allows such offers to be made as “coupon alerts” to an increasingly wider array of people.

Remember, Twitter marketing is a continued investment whose ROI will increase over time as your followers increase in size and relevancy.

3) I Will Finally Start Tracking My Marketing Spend

According to Google, only about 5% of AdWords customers use Conversion Counter, much less track the phone calls their online ads generate. There’s a famous saying amongst professional marketers, “I know I’m wasting half my advertising dollars, I just don’t know which half”. But that can be easily solved by buying low cost toll free numbers that can be tied to specific marketing campaigns and lead generation drives.

For example: Having a Google AdWords ad list a new trackable toll free number means that you can not only track the ROI of your ad spend by the click, but by the actual number of phone call inquiries these ads produced. Same goes for Yellow Page ads, print ads in magazines and even brochures and flyers.

These low cost toll free numbers are easy to get and easy to track call activity online, so why not order several and tie them to specific marketing campaigns and track the productivity of each? It sounds cumbersome, but virtual office providers make it so easy to order such toll free numbers and track the call activity online. Your CEO will be amazed at how much you can say about what advertising investments are producing and which should be cut.

How much did that $5,000 YellowPages ad produce in sales or sales leads last year? A trackable toll free number can answer that and more in 2010. Seriously, it’s time.

Find out more about these services and see how RingCentral compares: Employee Directories, Visual Voicemail and Toll Free Numbers.

Top 4 trends we saw in 2009 for SMBs.

1 – Social Networking at Work

No, it doesn’t mean that more people at work are spending time on Facebook and Twitter (which they probably are), but that SMB owners are actually using these sites to promote their business online.

Facebook:

While there are numerous controversies brewing about Facebook’s latest change to their privacy policy, what this means for small business owners is that placing content on your business’s Facebook fan page will not only have content seen by other Facebook users, but by the Googlebot itself. This means that Facebook pages with pictures, posts, reviews, etc. can now be indexed by Google and – gasp – show up in search results! Potentially scary if you’re a business owner that likes to post “questionable photos” on your profile, but a golden opportunity for those who want to rank higher for valuable keywords. Facebook and Search Engine Optimization – now with 30% more Google!

Twitter:

Though it had seen explosive growth amongst consumer users to keep track of what celebrities, friends and other pundits had to say about current events, in 2009 Twitter became a resource for small business owners to keep subscription lists of “followers”. Now SMB owners could easily blast promotional news, coupons, etc. in a manner that was both cheap (free) and legal (no e-mail spam complaints).

2 – Cloud Computing Takes the Throne

It’s official – what was called “hosted software” and became “virtual software” became “OnDemand software” and now (drum roll please) “Cloud Computing”. While this term can mean a multitude of different things, what it really means for small business owners is that they can now get accounting software, customer service software, their phone system (hint, hint) and Salesforce automation – all as software that is delivered over the Web, controlled by their browser and paid for in monthly installments. In fact, the last time a small business owner bought a copy of Microsoft Office for $300, twenty-five other small business owners signed up for Google Docs.

3 – Mobile Computing Continues Strong Growth

The major carriers now offer “netbook” laptops at price-leader fees meaning they are willing to lose money on the netbook in order to make it up on the 2-year commitment of wireless data fees. Combine that with the increase in use of smart-phones at loss-leader prices and the ubiquitous rise of mobile computing is here. Of course, mobile computing for small business owners wouldn’t be an exceptional phenomenon if there weren’t actual applications for SMBs. The meteoric rise of Apple’s App Store (with plenty of business applications like accounting tools and credit card payment gateways) means that mobile computing for SMBs is here to stay – and grow, grow, grow.

4 – Creative Financing & Rise of the Local Credit Union

For many small businesses, financing and credit lines are critical elements to being able to procure materials/products and invest in future growth. But the financial collapse of 2008 and 2009 have not only caused many large banks to fold, but consolidation means that there are fewer choices for small business banking. In downtown San Francisco, they saw over a dozen banks dwindle down to a handful of options. Add to that the fact that these handful of banks have pulled many of the credit lines and credit products available to small business owners and you have a conundrum indeed. Twelve banks competing with each other down to less than five and all five no longer offer new small business owners unsecured credit lines.

This is where the local credit unions have been stepping in. Operating in the shadow of their flashier, bigger national counter-parts, credit unions have recently seen more small business owners apply for loans that larger banks no longer offer. The ability for a community-based lender to asses local risk and offer a credit line is a necessary driver for SMBs and one we hope will continue to grow in 2010. In addition, credit unions have been more apt to offer SBA (Small Business Administration) loans that has received more monies recently from the Obama administration.

Call logs are a great way to monitor how business is doing. Would you like to know how many new leads you’re generating? Count up the number of incoming calls to your number. How productive are your employees? Take a look at the telephone activity for individual extensions. All the data is there for you to see.

For today’s Tuesday tip, we’ll show you how to have your company call logs delivered to you so you can get a regular snapshot of your business activity. Making adjustments based on telephone usage can go a long way to improving your overall business strategy.

To receive regular delivery of your call logs:

1. Log in
2. Select Call Log > Delivery Settings

Your delivery options are pretty self-explanatory;  you can select how often you’d like your call logs delivered (daily, weekly, monthly) and where you’d like your call logs emailed to.

That’s it! You’re now on your way to micromanaging bliss…

If you have an iPhone, have we got the treat for you—version 1.7 of the RingCentral app is out. It’s a free download that includes a host of new features like the ability to copy and paste numbers, built-in company directory, Do Not Disturb toggle on every page, and our Tuesday Tip, push notifications.

Push notifications send a message to your iPhone whenever you receive a voice or fax message on your RingCentral business phone system. They’re faster than SMS and email notifications, and let you see if you’ve received a message at a glance. To enable push notifications, simply download the RingCentral 1.7 app. Once it’s downloaded, you’ll see a notification that asks you if you’d like to receive push notifications from RingCentral. Select Yes. You can always edit your selection from Home > Settings > Notifications > RingCentral.