Starting Your Own Voice Mail Service Bureau
VoiceStamp voice packages allow entrepreneurs to offer their clients a variety of personal, entrepreneurial, corporate voicemail, and fax on demand services. This kind of business venture can yield it's owners a clear profit of several thousand dollars a month with a little effort. All you need is a Windows NT/2000 computer, VoiceStamp's software application, a few telephone lines, and a list of clients. Over the past decade, the number of home-based and part-time businesses has grown, creating a huge demand for low cost voice messaging/faxing and order taking. This is an excellent opportunity for you to make a lot of money as well as play an important part in the growth of someone else's business. VoiceStamp software can be tailored to meet the needs of almost any client. Examples of some features you can offer: transferring a call automatically to a cellular telephone, 24-hour order taking, offering customer support by touchtone, dating hotlines, talking yellow pages, time and weather and much more. If you want to operate your service bureau in a small town or community, each customer will be assigned the same local telephone number with his own box and personal pass code. The system will answer with a generic voice greeting until a touch-tone chooses the desired mailbox. Then recordings may be left for that party, causing the respective pocket pager to be alerted or home phone number dialed to deliver personal messages.
DID It is possible for your clients to have their own phone numbers, although it costs more for you to install this option. This service is called DID (direct inward dialing) and involves a special signal provided by your local telephone company and some extra hardware which is placed inside your computer. The phone company will bill you directly for about $1000.00 for installation plus several hundred dollars a month in fees for special lines called DID trunks. However, each client phone number or DID will cost you about $1 which you can remarket to your clients for anywhere from $10 to $20 per month. Not a bad profit for you!
T-1, E-1 DNIS, ANI T-1 (called E-1 in many countries outside the U.S.) is a viable alternative to regular phone lines, if you plan on having a lot of lines. T-1's are 24 line digital trunk lines. In some areas, it is possible to get T-1 service (clear digital lines vs. older analog lines) and begin by using a portion of the entire 24 lines. These are often called 'fractional T-1's'. So, you could start your business with 12 lines (1/2 a T-1), then expand to the full 24 lines later, after you have built up your business. Many T-1's offer the DNIS number - the number the customer called to reach you - as touchtones that the voice program can read. You can then route the caller based on the number they dialed.
PAGERS Pagers can be another lucrative source of monthly income for your business. A pager typically rents for about $5 to $7/month including all air-time. For every 25 to 30 client mailboxes activated, you should allocate at least one actual telephone line. However, we suggest that you install a minimum of 4 telephone lines for your system to manage all the personal voice messages left, client mail retrievals, and notification calls to pagers or home phone numbers. Depending upon the type of client, usage may vary. For example, a real estate agent or outside salesperson is more likely to consume large amounts of time than a full time student. Note that with VoiceStamp's new voice to email feature, client messages can be sent via email to avoid the need for calling into the voice system for retrievals. That will limit inbound calls only to their customers.
NUMBER OF VOICE PORTS Once you begin full scale voicemail operation, you should ask the local phone company to run a traffic analysis to determine your peak inbound call load. Remember that if your clients get a busy signal when they dial in to retrieve their messages, they'll probably assume that their customers are hearing them too, and not renew your services again. Never assume that a paying client or a caller will dial back later. Poor customer service is certainly the beginning of the end for any business!
STORAGE REQUIREMENTS Service bureaus require a considerable amount of hard disk space because voicemail messages consume a minimum of 200,000 bytes a minute or 12 megabytes an hour. Suppose you have 100 subscribers and each receives (10) 1 minute messages each day. That would mean that your system would need to have a 200 megabyte capacity (10x100x200,000) to record today's inbound call transactions. Higher quality recordings use twice the space. With today's large hard drives, having enough space is rarely an issue but it is still a consideration. A backup medium such as a tape drive, zip drive, or re-write CD is also suggested for any service bureau or high traffic voice system. This would not be used to backup voice messages, since they would change each day, but for the client database itself with billing addresses, telephone numbers, and accounting information.
Throughout the day some of your clients will retrieve and delete their messages promptly while others let them accumulate. The next business day, another load of messages will consume even more hard disk space. You can easily see how it can all add up. That's why we have created an internal message purge program to delete old messages and keep your system at peak operating performance.
MARKETING Get customers by implementing a marketing plan. We suggest using a combination of methods, including ads in your local newspaper and magazines, sending out brochures to a mailing list and doing a little Public Relations, perhaps by donating mailboxes to your local church, community center or non-profit civic group. Make sure to issue press releases to get this written up. In no time at all your phone will be ringing. The sample advertising materials and marketing tips in Appendix G will give you some ideas and let you see what other entrepreneurs and businesses have accomplished.
To collect money, you need to decide upon a pricing structure and invoice customers regularly. There are several ways to accomplish this. You can charge clients a flat rate, per recorded message, per page, or any combination. Assuming that you do not offer the optional DID service, you are really only renting space on your hard disk, so the fees imposed on clients flow directly into your own pocket. Your bottom line in offering these type of communication services is next to nothing.