I’ve been lucky enough to be involved with beta testing recently, and I’m pretty excited about some new product that will really make customer management easier. Interested? Read on…

First things first. This application lives in your Windows toolbar and works with both your Outlook and your Polycom phone. There are also plans to have it integrate with some common database systems (CRMs), so you can log call numbers and times, customer support information, and case notes from your workers.

It makes all your dialing as simple as typing part of a person’s name. It’s actually just like having all of your contacts on speed dial! When you receive a call, your computer uses the CallerID number to find and display the Outlook contact information, so you will know exactly who it is. It can also flash up a window with the contact’s details when you receive a call, which will let your customer support workers greet each caller in a well-prepared fashion. It’s also only one click to call people back!

Also, it can interact, work, and integrate with Google Maps. If you enter contact info that is not in Outlook, you can perform a search without opening your browser. Once you choose the correct hit, you can call them with only one click. When you’re done, you can create a new Outlook contact, including a clickable link to Google Maps, which will autofill to save time and effort.

The plan is to make this available upon request within the next month. Just email the Sutus sales team and they’ll contact you when it goes live!

-Dave.

So, how does this work? All you’ll need are two or more offices with an Internet connection and a BC200 at each location. Setting it up is pretty easy – the BC200′s wizard walks you through it.

Our screenshot below shows that our home office is San Francisco. We’re directly connected to the BC200s in Vancouver, Chicago, and Boston, and we have a local telephone line available too. Via Boston, we can also reach Toronto and New York.

This allows for flexibility in call routing too. With this example, we could allow anyone from any office to place a call to the 604 or 778 area codes, regardless of their physical location. Conversely, a customer in San Francisco can call our 778 number and be seamlessly forwarded to our corporate main offices in Toronto, all with no long distance charges. And the San Francisco office doesn’t even need to be open!

Imagine this scenario: Customer Jane, in Boston, wants to talk to the Sutus sales team, but it’s 7:30pm, and her local office is closed. In the past, she’d have to do several steps.

1. find out where other Sutus offices are located
2. figure out the time difference
3. find their phone numbers, and
4. pay for the long distance call.

With Interoffice Calling and an optimized call flow, however, she just has one step:

1. call her local office.

Their BC200 takes care of the rest.
Her call will be forwarded to Vancouver where they are still open and able to take care of her. No research, time calculations or phone charges needed.

Customers saving their money is great, but we at the office like saving too. Especially the finance department! Imagine that I’m in New York, and I need to call our importer in Toronto. I could call long distance, but that’s going to become expensive. Instead, I can use the Toronto phone line. My BC200 routes my call to Toronto, where their BC200 sends it out to the phone network. Success!

Send us a line if you have any questions – our new website has all our contact details. If you’re already a reseller, click here. If you’re an end user who is interested in the Business Central solution, click here.

That’s it for this week. Talk to you soon!

-Dave.

Something new this week! Sutus has released their newest software update (version 1.7.1 available upon request starting today), and I heard about a few new features that seem promising. I’ll be sending out some articles on these over the next while, but today I’m going to introduce Distinctive Ringtones.

I can hear the groans already. “But we can already choose the ringtones on our phones! Why is this news?” Actually, this is much better than just selecting a distinctive ring for your own phone. It’s more like audible CallerID – any call for a specific workspace will ring with the same ringtone, regardless of which physical phone it is.

It’s simple to use. Let’s go into Business Central Manager and get to work. Once you’ve entered your password, click on the “Manage Workspaces,” then highlight the name of the workspace to modify, click on “Edit Properties,” then “Phone Service,” and lastly “Incoming Call Flow.” You can select the ringtone under the “Ring Type” dropdown menu. The default is to use the ring type selected on the phone, but this can override that selection. Also, I can change my own settings as well as the settings for groups that I’m in.

This works in tandem with the Call Flow feature to ‘announce’ the destination of a call, whether it is for a specific person or a specific department. Sometimes a caller wants to speak to Jill, and sometimes they want to speak to someone in Support. We can ring the same physical phone with a different tone for each of these situations.

Imagine a room used for planning and design. There might be 5 or 6 phones in the room, and lets say that they are in the call flows for personal workspaces as well as shared ones. When a phone rings, everyone needs to check to see if it is their phone, and they also need to see if it is a call that concerns them. Running back and forth to check the call display can really disrupt the creativity of this team! However, if there is a different ring for each of the people or teams present, those not concerned with the call can just ignore it.

As you can see, this makes it pretty easy to find out who the call is for when you are close to, but not looking at, the phone. I should warn you, though, that this only works with Polycom phones, not the Handy-Tone or softphones.

This is available as a limited release, so if you’re interested, just drop a line to the Sutus Support team at support@sutus.com

-Dave.

We’ve just started our Webmail beta trial, and we’re pleased to offer this opportunity to try out our new service. If you’re interested in a free, secure, Sutus-branded webmail address, head on over to the sign-up page.