At MeloTel, we pride ourselves in the incomparable products and services that we offer. Constantly working on staying ahead of the curve in this very tech-savvy world of ours, we’re happy to know that our VoIP telephone services, website design and so many other features have helped businesses all across Canada grow and prosper exponentially. Building relationships, however, is at the heart of what we do.

We realize that it doesn’t matter how great our services are, it’s the customer service that helps our company to grow. We focus strongly on developing strong relationships with our clients so that they remain loyal. In other words, we’re as much in the “making friends business” as we are in the telecom industry. And this is because we stick by a very strict set of rules. Call them the “MeloTel Rules of Thumb”.

The Customer Comes First. We design our products and services around the very specific needs of our clients. In other words, we do all we can to listen to what they have to say. Communication is a two-way street. So when our customers explain their problems, we make it our mission to resolve them through the features we offer. Our customers are the ones who truly call the shots.

Save The Customer Money. At MeloTel, we’re very well aware that our clients have choices. And quite often, people tend to work with the big name companies with the expensive commercials on television. Not only to do we outdo their customer service regimens, but we beat their prices hands down. See for yourself. Let us look at your latest phone bill and we’ll show you how we can save you money with no obligation to switch providers.

Communicate Regularly. In case you haven’t yet noticed, we believe strongly in the power of social media. That’s why we keep our Facebook and Twitter accounts quite active. You’ll notice that in addition to posting our blogs, we post pictures and other comments to engage our followers and friends. Being a “people’s company” means keeping the lines of communication open.

Be Honest With Customers. We’re here to help. And we know that it won’t help you if we either beat around the bush or just provide you with incorrect information. MeloTel is staffed with a variety of experts in various fields. Somehow, someway, we’ll get you the answers to your questions. We’re all about solving problems. We’re not about to cause you any more than you already have!

Be Accessible To Customers. One of the most popular reasons that our clients have made the switch to MeloTel is because they were dissatisfied with the service they received from their previous providers. And one of the top reasons for the dissatisfaction was inconvenient hours of operation. Many people work from 9 to 5. So if customer service lines are only available during those times, it doesn’t make for a very convenient way to get a problem solved.

At MeloTel, we make sure that we have someone available to speak with our clients on weekends and even during the holidays. It’s important for us to let our customers know that when they need us, we’ll be there for them. This falls directly in line with treating clients like friends, not just numbers. Like any good relationship, the ones we have with our customers promote open communication. Call us anytime at 1-888-MELOTEL.

Promoting your business is a key ingredient in its success. Naturally, it’s important to get the word out and have it spread about your brand if you intend on growing it. Advertising can sometimes take on some pretty strange forms. There’s inventive and then there’s crazy! And we, here at MeloTel, have recently come up with quite the crazy idea. To be honest, it sort of just started as a joke.

A week ago, our company President, John Meloche jokingly posted the following message to the MeloTel Facebook page: “Are you having a baby soon? You could earn up to $2000 by legally naming your child ‘MeloTel’. Contact us to learn more!” Intended to be one of John’s tongue-in-cheek eyebrow-raisers for fun, we were surprised at the number of responses the challenge generated!

So, we figured, why not make a full-fledged promotional campaign out of it? As you may know, John is up for having as much fun as the next guy. Probably more! And he’s never one to shy away from giving back to the community. So, with that said, let’s clarify what our brand new baby-naming promotion is all about. MeloTel will be providing one prize per category.

BABY’S FIRST NAME. MeloTel is offering ONE family the opportunity to win $2000 if they are willing to give their new child “MeloTel” as a first name. Please note that MeloTel reserves the right to approve the name and that documentation proving the legitimate naming of the child as “MeloTel” must be submitted prior to receiving the prize money.

BABY’S MIDDLE NAME. MeloTel is also willing to offer another family the opportunity to win $500 if they make “1888MELOTEL” the middle name of their new baby. Once again, MeloTel must approve the name and see legal documentation to confirm the child’s middle name before the winners receive their prize money. Sounding crazy enough?

PET’S NAME. Feeling as generous as we do adventurous this month, MeloTel has decided to also honour families who name their pets “MeloTel”. For this, you will earn $5. We know…not much. But hey, it’s not like you would be naming your kid after our great company! As mentioned earlier, what started out as a joke has become an inventive promotional campaign.

And sure, it may sound a little bit crazy. But crazier things have happened. And, at MeloTel, it’s never lost on us that having fun is a necessary part of life. Consider the many different things that people have named their children anyways. It could be a lot worse. Rock musician Frank Zappa named his daughters Moon Unit and Diva Thin Muffin!

Okay, so maybe those aren’t names of VoIP Telephone companies. But actress Gwyneth Paltrow did name her first daughter, Apple. How much do you want to bet she owns an iPod, iPad and an iPhone? We’re just saying. For more information on our new baby-naming promotion, please give us a call at 1-888-MELOTEL. Remember to have us approve the name before you sign a birth certificate! Good luck!

Sometimes there can be too many chefs in the kitchen. And this can be a bad thing only if every chef is attempting to cook the exact same meal. There are bound to be disagreements about the ingredients that should be used and how much of each ingredient should be included in the recipe. However, if each chef specialized in his or her own type of cuisine, you may just get the most productive and taste bud-tantalizing kitchen ever!

Is the analogy making sense yet? Being a good leader means surrounding yourself with leaders. It’s nearly impossible for a business to function well if there is constant butting of heads within the office space. Yes, this is bound to happen. But it’s important to outline specific roles so that there is a “boss” for each important skill set needed at your company.

At MeloTel, we are staffed with individuals from all walks of life, each owning a level of expertise in a specific field. This is what makes the MeloTel Team such a strong one. It’s made up of several bosses who don’t generally step on each other’s toes. With everyone being given the respect they deserve when it comes to their skills, each team member is able to work with confidence.

It’s no different than fielding a professional sports team. Each player must play his or her position, right? You can’t expect one player to handle all positions. And each teammate must be able to support the other team members with their respective roles. Some of your team members may be analytical thinkers. Good with numbers, very handy with computers and technical-minded are their traits.

Other members of your team may be more creative thinkers. Good with words, articulate and outgoing are their traits. Combine these different individuals on one team and watch how strong your team will become. The key, as a business owner, is to give your staff members the freedom to shine. Micro-managing and standing over shoulders really isn’t going to help anyone.

At MeloTel, we have different bosses. (Just don’t tell company President, John Meloche that!). Actually, John has designed his company in such a way that he insists upon having experts make up his staff. It’s no fluke that Administrative Executive, Carlos Paz is not only John’s right-hand man, but an incredible computer whiz as well. The MeloTel office runs as smoothly as it does thanks to Carlos.

Do you need your website regularly updated? If you read our last blog, you’ll understand why the answer to this question should always be “yes”. Perhaps, you want to grow your search engine hits, better communicate with your target market and increase your social media presence. If so, Daniel Faraldo is your man. As MeloTel’s Editor-In-Chief, he is arguably MeloTel’s most creative team member.

Maybe you need to add a sparkling new “voice” to your brand. Need a radio ad, catchy jingle or even the perfect recorded voice operator to direct the flow of your phone traffic? Then you need Nadia Luna. Our Voice Over Production manager sings, acts and clearly knows her way around a microphone. Let us get one of our bosses working for you. Call 1-888-MELOTEL today!

“Thank you MeloTel!” the email began, “You have saved me SO many wasted hours of frustration. My computer used to take forever to complete the simplest of tasks. Thanks to your service, I’m able to get so much more work done and have such smoother, stress-free and productive days in the office. Please feel free to include my feedback in one of your blogs. I love you guys!”

Well, who are we to deny a request from of our clients? Having had what he described as “non-stop computer issues”, our client recently took advantage of MeloTel’s Service & Maintenance Plans to get his computer serviced. He complained of “incredibly slow” functionality, so he knew it was time for our MeloTel support team to take a look at his hardware.

“It takes me forever to do the simplest things,” he explained during his first phone call, “I keep getting ‘not responding’ messages whenever I click on anything. It freezes up all the time and I literally have no other recourse but to shut everything down and boot it up again. This is very time consuming and wasteful. I’m no computer expert so short of throwing it out the window, I don’t know what to do.”

Our team of experts was only too happy to help. The Service & Maintenance Plans offered by MeloTel offer maintenance and monitoring for all covered equipment, operating systems and applications. It’s our job to ensure that your business is running in tip-top shape. We know, of course, that not everyone can be a technical wizard. That’s why we employ the best “wizards” around!

In addition, once we get your office equipment up and running properly, our service plans also offer technical support to assist you with any other problems you may have going forward. And we’re able to do that remotely using our incredible Team Viewer feature. That means that you can be in your office with your computer and our technician can be in his own office with his computer.

Using Team Viewer, our MeloTel tech-expert can literally take over the controls at your desktop as if he was sitting right beside you at your desk. It’s a fascinating way to get your computer working and get you moving on to taking care of more important tasks that are integral to your business. This service provides speedy assistance without you having to lift a finger!

To assist the specific needs of our diverse client base, MeloTel offers three different service plans. We have a One-Time Support service that will utilize the Team Viewer feature to help you with computer issues you may be having. There is actually no commitment to sign on with MeloTel as a client if you need our help in this way. However, we also have packages that offer ongoing support.

Depending on your needs, you can go with either the Ongoing Support or the Support & Insurance package that do both require a one year commitment. For more information on how our tech-savvy support experts can help you with your office equipment issues, please give us a call at 1-888-MELOTEL. Let us save you time and free you from frustration. There’s no need to throw your computer through a window after all!

This week, the MeloTel Blog has been focusing on our company’s bread and butter: our Hosted Phone System. Our company’s humble beginnings saw us simply as a telephone company. And, although MeloTel provides business owners with so many amazing services and features, we haven’t forgotten our expertise in the field of communication over the cloud.

Our Telephone Features help you to run your business smoother. Convenience, functionality and affordability have all been taken into great consideration during the conception of these features. Be sure to give us a call at 1-888-MELOTEL to begin taking advantage of these features today! But allow us to give you a few more reasons why you should switch to MeloTel.

Company Directory, Dial By Name. This feature allows your customers to easily connect to a member of your staff. If all they know is the name of the person they are looking for, MeloTel makes it easy. A caller simply dials a few characters in the first or last name of the person trying to be reached, and the system then helps the caller to find the correct user, automatically routing the call accordingly.

Call Routing. The MeloTel system ensures that you can filter your incoming calls with Caller ID. You’ll also be able to see the status of the user and the time of the call. The call routing system also uses rules that perform a number of predefined actions such as hanging up or transferring the call to certain destinations that are either on or off of the network.

Music On Hold. What’s a phone call to a professional establishment without hold music, right? At MeloTel, we allow you to customize your music to suit your brand. Feel free to incorporate your favourite music or a pre-recorded message that advertises your company’s special deals. At MeloTel, our Voice Talent Production team can even create an original jingle for your brand!

Out of Office Options. This awesome feature allows you to truly plan ahead. After all, you won’t always be available to answer every call – no matter how convenient MeloTel makes things for you. And you deserve a break, now and then, don’t you? This option allows you to create some predefined actions for certain dates. So if your business is closed by 6pm or if you are on holiday, this feature lets your callers know.

The MeloTel VoIP Panel. It doesn’t matter where you are in the world, our interface allows you to have a secure and easily accessible way to manage, customize and configure just about everything. You can change voicemail passwords, setup calling rules and listen to your call recordings while you’re on vacation, just as easily as if you were in the office.

Mobile and Conferencing. Schedule multiple conferences using a conference number or dial internally within your network. Whether you are in the office or out on the road, you can either create or join existing conferences using public phone numbers. Your customers can also join conferences easily by dialing a phone number that you have assigned for this purpose.

In our last blog, we began discussing MeloTel’s Hosted Phone System and the many features that it provides our customers. One of the best features, according to our clients, is the cost-effective convenience it offers them. Not only is switching to MeloTel bound to save you money, but our incredibly helpful features make running your business that much easier. Let’s give you a few more examples.

Toll Free or Local Numbers. Want to give off that aura of professionalism the way that bigger companies do? No problem. MeloTel can assign your company a toll free number. You may also assign your business a number from another area code so that people who would regularly be calling a long distance number to reach you can contact you as if you were a local business.

With MeloTel, you can open up your company to clients anywhere in North America. Our toll free numbers are available with several prefixes including 800, 855, 866, 877 and 888. Getting a toll free number is practically a mandatory option if you do business with customers across the continent or country. Make it easy and convenient for your customers to contact you by getting a toll free number.

Voice Mail to Email. This MeloTel feature makes sure that you never overlook an important message. We know that lives of business owners can be hectic ones. And, at times, certain messages are simply forgotten or mistakenly skipped. This feature ensures that your voice mail is recorded so that you can check it from anywhere you are by simply by calling your extension.

However, it also automatically forwards a WAV file of that message to your email address. This way, you will not only be reminded that you have an important message to check, but you will be able to play your message on any device you check your email from. This feature has worked wonders in helping business owners retrieve important messages so that they may conduct their business expeditiously.

Automated Attendant Receptionist. MeloTel’s Telephone Features come with your very own receptionist – sort of. There’s no need to hire someone new to answer the phone. Our system lets you create complex auto-attendant voice menus with several contexts, options and actions. This will help you to both reduce employment costs and increase your customer satisfaction.

Email 2 Fax/Fax 2 Email. The traditional fax machine is no longer necessary. MeloTel’s system allows you to send and receive faxes over email simply by using the web management interface. For example, a customer can simply send a fax via email to send@faxpush.com. You then receive the fax as a PDF document that is located in your email inbox.

To learn more about MeloTel’s Hosted Phone System, give us a call at 1-888-MELOTEL. As mentioned earlier, making the switch to MeloTel is easy. And we’ll make sure that you’re happy you made the switch. Thousands of Canadian business owners are making the switch each year. Be sure to check out our next blog to learn about a few more reasons why!

MeloTel prides itself on offering its client base a wide variety of awesome features and services. But, at the heart of it all is our Hosted Phone System. Becoming experts in the VoIP telephone world is what helped for MeloTel to get its start in the telecom industry. So, we’ve made sure to stay on top of this technology, never letting go of the fact that it is what helped us to begin buttering our bread.

We also pride ourselves on offering our clients top-notch equipment and service without having them make huge investments. We provide a convenient and economic telecommunication solution for small businesses all across Canada. As long as you have high speed internet, we can get you making calls over the cloud. It’s easy and it’s cost-effective. And it provides you with quite a lot.

Virtual Hosted Phone System. Our Telephone Features can allow you to assign multiple numbers to your company so that you can define different extensions and create a virtual directory. That way, when calls come into your company, the system will answer the call and offer the caller a number of choices so that he or she is directed to the correct department.

These features include professionally recorded welcome messages and options that include dial-by-name or dial-by-extension choices. You may also have your incoming calls routed to another phone number, even including your cell phone. That way, you’ll be able to manage your call from just about anywhere in the world. Your customer, of course, will be none the wiser.

Our system allows you to communicate with your clients, colleagues and co-workers from various locations using a single phone number. In other words, wherever you go, your office goes with you. There’s no need to ever miss an important business call again. With MeloTel’s system, you’ll be able to manage multiple calls at once. No busy signals are ever sent out to your customers.

Local & Toll Free Number Portability. At MeloTel, our telephone features work so that you don’t have to work as much! It is our mission to make things as easy and convenient for you as possible. Let’s say you’re moving your office location to a new area where your old area code is not available. Perhaps, you operate your business without a physical location.

With MeloTel, you can move your business location without having to change your existing number. This gives your customers the comfort of familiarity. It also ensures that you don’t have to toss out that whack of business cards that you had printed up for yourself! You may move wherever you like. But if you move your service to MeloTel, you won’t have to move to a new phone number.

Moving to MeloTel is easy, by the way. We’ll make your transition a surprisingly painless one. It all starts with giving us a call at 1-888-MELOTEL. In addition to all of the great features we provide, we also guarantee that we’ll be saving you money. Be sure to stay posted to the MeloTel Blog this week as we continue to go through the many fantastic features that come with our Hosted Phone System.