Several years ago, when you wanted a new mattress, your only choice was an expensive spring model from one of a handful of local brick-and-mortar stores. Spring mattresses were inescapable, save for the optional topper or memory foam (each coming with an expensive premium price). Those local brick-and-mortars promised the lowest prices in town on name brands or your purchase would be FREE, but the fine print stipulated that those lowest prices were only guaranteed on specific models. And guess what — every mattress retailer gets its own exclusive SKUs on virtually the same mattresses as every other store in town. The low-price guarantee was an empty promise because of course they have the lowest prices on mattresses that they sell exclusively. And as long as everyone participated in this three-shell game, the establishment would continue to get paid and consumers would get gouged. So how does an upstart challenge establishment? It gets outside of the industry echo chamber and attacks an old pain point with a fresh perspective. A few innovative new brands introduced hard foam mattresses that were easy to ship and stripped away a bunch of the overhead. Suddenly you could get a very good mattress for half the price as old springy.
In this article, we cover:
- Making hay in the disruption game.
- How stock AT&T voicemail is fine, but your small business can do better.
- How an enterprising entrepreneur can add wow-factor to business interactions.
Maybe your small business model is on the same wavelength. You’re out to disrupt a self-serving legacy system. Good for you; there’s hay to be made in the disruption game. But consider for a moment the tools you use to conduct your business. Do you stick with conventional tools just because they’re what you’re supposed to use? Hey, if you’re going to talk the talk, why not walk the walk too?
Sure, the stock voicemail you get with AT&T is fine for managing incoming business calls. It certainly checks a box so that Ma Bell can say it has a thing that you can get from them with their wireless service. But just like any customers seeking out a better solution, surely you can do better.
So what are your basic small business voicemail expectations? When you can’t answer an interested party’s call, they are played a recording, they leave a message, and you listen to it later? Sounds simple enough. But any consumer-grade voicemail can do that. How does an enterprising entrepreneur add wow-factor?
Professional greetings
Sure, you could get your spouse to ramble off your voicemail greeting (and recording your own is an option), but “articulate” isn’t necessarily “professional.” You’re also not about to kick off a casting call. Don’t sweat it. YouMail’s Greetings Catalog is filled with thousands of pre-recorded greetings. In addition, you can assign custom voicemail greetings for specific callers, like a specific client you’d like to impress or callers who are likely to speak another language, such as Spanish. YouMail also can generate a personalized voicemail greeting to include the caller’s name, based on our massive caller ID database and your address book. Now you can come off more personal and professional on every missed call. This kind of service isn’t even a blip on AT&T’s radar.
Unified inbox
Do you juggle several lines but don’t want to manage several inboxes? No problem. With YouMail, you can unify your cell, home, and work voicemail. We will transcribe all voicemail to text across lines and deposit them into one inbox. You can maintain separate greetings for each line, and each message will be clearly identified by which number was called. All it takes to set up is a few clicks or dialing of a few simple codes. Whether you’re an office administrator, a realtor, a small business owner, or entrepreneur, by setting up all your lines to route into one inbox, your life will be easier than ever. AT&T on the other hand will sell you all the lines in the world, but you’re on your own figuring out how to efficiently retrieve messages from all of them at once.
Robocall blocking
People commonly associate robocalls with personal phone lines, but businesses are constantly attacked too. Answering spam calls has cost US small businesses 20 million hours, or about $475 million, a year. In total, 4.4 billion robocalls were placed in April 2021, 41 percent of which were categorized as scams and 24 percent of which were telemarketing. In other words, there are a ridiculous number of robocall attacks being waged each and every day — 1,700 robocall per second — and to run at maximum efficiency, a good robocall blocker such as YouMail’s can eliminate the scam and spam voicemail messages your small business receives.
Astonishingly affordable
We know that getting a small business off the ground often demands great frugality; few have the ability to fail as spectacularly as Quibi once did. That’s why YouMail offers extremely small-business-friendly rates that all come loaded not only with fantastic voicemail features that trump anything AT&T has to offer, but also a myriad of other outstanding features, such as virtual receptionist, professional call routing, call transfer, and much more.
Now, are you ready to walk the walk? Start here.
