March 28, 2008

The New, Confusing and Exciting World of Small Business Communication

I'm at Montclair State University (NJ) at Harry Brelsford's 3rd Annual SMB Nation East - a gathering of about 100 or so solution providers. These solution providers (or computer consultants) are Microsoft partners and sell Microsoft Small Business Server (primarily) and other solutions.

The focus of today's SMB Nation is Microsoft's relatively new Response Point telephone system. I've read quite a bit about this telephone system, and liked what I've read. I'm now seeing a full demonstration of the system and am even more impressed.

Microsoft Response point is low cost (initial cost and recurring costs), easy to use and is embedded with a number of useful features will enhance your productivity and increase the communication capabilities of your customers.

I've covered Response Point and won't cover it again here. But I encourage you to visit the Response Point site and find out how it works for yourself.

In fact as I type this Joe Schurman, a Response Point guru is demonstrating how Response Point's auto attendant works. Speech recognition is built into the auto attendant so customers can simply SPEAK the name of the person they want to speak to or say SALES (once you set it up). This is just one of the many features built into Response Point.

At SMB Nation, I met my friend Michael Klein, Computer Directions Inc. He shared with me a net concept. In the 1960's computers were very expensive and people were cheap to hire. Today computers are VERY cheap and people are more expensive.

Therefore, Michael Advises that you use technology as much as you can to do functions that a more expensive human could do. If you want to grow your business, save money and do more with less resources you MUST wisely invest in how you can use technology as a tool to grow your business. Telecommunication's is one key component of this investment.

Response Point competes head to head with Fonality, TalkSwitch, Avaya, Siemens and a number of other PBX companies.

tags: consultant , microsoft , reseller , response point , smbnation | 0 comments