Employee cell phones are killing your business

Business correspondence with employee cell phone and email addresses on them. Very bad practice.

I see a lot of smaller businesses doing this trying to save money and then practically failing soon after their best or only sales or service person leaves the company. Guess who all the customers are calling and emailing with their sales or service questions? The same former employee you just paid to be your competition. They’re calling and emailing the addresses on the stationary you paid for!

How to prevent this?

1. Email Address – Go to GoDaddy.com or 1&1.com and register a domain for your business.  Get a hosting plan that includes email accounts. They’re cheap, less than $10 a month. Create an email account for each of your employees. They can access email through the web or you can have instructions printed out for Outlook or accessing on their email on their phone. You can set up “forwards” if you really feel emails need to be sent to a certain mailbox at Yahoo, Gmail, etc.
2. Phone system – Spend the extra dollars and get a good PBX or hosted phone system with “Follow Me”  and/or “call forwarding” capabilities.  You can forward DID’s (Direct In Dials) if needed too. Better systems have the ability to take a call at your main office and forward an office extension or DID to any telephone number. We sell and service the Grandstream PBX systems that will do this and there are a few others out there that will do it too.

Now that you have a company email address and phone number you can print this on the employee’s business cards. Leave the cell phone out and let them know you’re doing it to save them from getting robo-calls (Auto-Attendant’s “dial 1 for service, etc” tend to defeat robo-calls). Make sure they use your business number instead of their cell phone in any correspondence.

You’re now, “in the loop” so if your employee leaves you can re-direct email and re-direct phone calls to you or their replacement. Sure it costs a little bit, but it could be the best business decisions you’ve made if you lose a key employee.