There is no single sure fire way to ensure that a small business gives off a professional image. Business professionalism will come from many different sources such as consumer and corporate interaction. With a hosted PBX system from AccessDirect, businesses of any size have many tools at their disposal that can be leveraged to enhance a company’s professional image.
Tools that are particularly helpful in this regard include an advanced auto attendant feature, which answers all incoming calls with a professionally recorded greeting and a menu of options to streamline the call routing process. In addition, the automated attendant helps to keep all staff connected and on the same page so that individual team members can project the same, unified professional image.
Advanced Communication Tools
In addition, virtual business voicemail with voice-to-email functionality and AccessDirect’s fax-to-email feature are two other advanced communication tools that can have a big impact on a small business’s level of outward professionalism. These two features help to direct incoming communications from different mediums to a central location: A user’s email inbox.
Specifically, when incoming calls are missed and a voicemail message is left, the voice-to-email feature sends an immediate notification to the user’s inbox, alerting him or her that a message is waiting. Our fax-to-email feature also sends alerts to a user’s inbox when a fax has been sent and is even capable of converting fax messages into PDF files so that the fax can be accessed virtually. When all communications are streamlined in this way, employees are able to respond to everything promptly, and this gives the business’s professional image a boost through each individual interaction.
Tips for Boosting Small Business Professional Image
While advanced technological solutions for business communications enable small businesses to project a consistent, professional image, part of the responsibility will fall on the individual employees and how they represent the business in each interaction. With systems that channel communications to email, the Times of India’s Anishaa Sahijwala noted that email has risen in the ranks from a casual form of communication to the form that is most preferred by corporations. This places an added value on business email etiquette.
A recent SurePayroll article outlined a series of email etiquette tips that could be worthwhile to impress upon employees so that they are using best practices to grow the brand. One tip was to spend a bit of time on subject lines, as the wrong subject line or forgetting to include one can scare the recipient from opening the message in the first place.
SurePayroll also noted to always use formal salutations, and that using proper grammar, avoiding curse words and having a solid structure to all emails can go a long way toward cementing professionalism. Business emails should also always conclude with the senders name, title and contact information, which can be set up as a regular signature feature within an email solution. In addition, employees should never use all caps in emails because this can give a message recipient the impression that the person is shouting or even irate.
“Short and sweet is the way to go,” the SurePayroll blog stated. “There are times when you will need to send a long email. If this situation arises, don’t shy away from typing away. On the other hand, if you are able to get the point across in a succinct manner you should consider doing so. Most people don’t have a lot of time to read email, so you don’t want to be long-winded.”
