Do you travel a lot? Staying in touch while traveling is a lot easier than it used to be. Everyone has a cell phone these days, so contacting your clients or brokers is not so difficult. But what if you are in France, sipping some wine along theSeine
River? Your cell phone use would be very expensive. How do you call back home without breaking the bank?Here are a couple of techniques that I use and may be helpful to you in the future:
- Skype is a service providing free phone calls between users over an internet connection. You can even make video calls if you have camera attached to your computer (as many laptops have today). I have our office manager keep the Skype program running in the background of her computer desktop all the time. Last week when I was in
Mexico, I had to contact her several times and all the calls were free. Now that is a price I like. She would normally just be sitting at her desk and her computer starts ringing like a telephone, she has a built in microphone so answering is a matter of clicking on a desktop icon.
- Jajah.com is another way to make free phone calls. I use it to call my daughter in
Germany. In the past you needed to be at your computer to make the calls, but they recently changed their program to allow a way to just dial a local number to reach someone in another country.
- How about your voicemail? Whenever I leave the country I always worry about missing important phone messages. AOL has a service that will forward phone calls to your computer. I have been out of the country when my computer starts ringing and I can take a phone call just as if I was in the office. The service comes with my AOL account. I have even been given a local phone number for me to give to people who want to leave a voice mail for me. The voicemail ends up in my email as an MP3 file, and I listen to it when I log onto the AOL program. Click here to learn more: AOL Voicemail
- Do you need to send or receive a fax, but no fax machine is available? Try Mongo Fax. Mongo Fax is a service that sends fax documents to your email. How convenient it is when I am out of the local area and someone needs to send me a contract but I don’t carry a fax machine with me. I subscribe to this service and when I need to I send a special fax cover sheet to a client that they can use to send email to me. The email arrives as an Adobe PDF document. I can review it for accuracy and the appropriate signatures and then forward to another client as needed. I never have to print the documents; how convenient.
There are various levels of service, from free to moderately priced. Even if you had to pay for some of this service, at times I find it priceless. If you want to try out the Skype program, call me. My Skype userid is Halper2.
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