Just a couple of years ago, it seemed like companies were going out of their way to “out-green” each other. Whether applying for green certifications, completely redesigning buildings to be energy efficient, installing roof gardens, or even making all employees live and work in trees (okay, maybe not the last one), companies were going to extensive, and often expensive, measures to prove their eco-friendliness. What a difference a down economy makes. Companies are now more focused on making green than being green, and understandably so—if a company can’t be financially successful, it won’t be around to be environmentally responsible.

But making green and being green are not mutually exclusive. There are many ways a company can actually save money while helping save the environment. Your company may cut costs on paper by relying more on electronic communication—save dollars, save trees. Or find ways to reduce travel through the use of remote workforces, teleconferences, video conferences or online workgroups—reduce your gas and travel expenses, reduce your carbon emissions. And you can pay bills online instead of by mail both at home and at work—save money on postage and checks, save even more trees and help take a polluting mail delivery truck off the road.

These are all simple things you can do to save money and make a positive impact on the environment. It’s true that these will not single-handedly save the rainforests, polar bears and fairy shrimp, but together, they add to the collective efforts of others that can, in fact, effect change.

Look for ways to make small changes in your organization. Here are a few ways we, at TelePacific, can help:

• We can help you set up a remote workforce through our 1Net IP VPN
• Fax-to-Email lets you save money on paper and fax machines by sending faxes straight to your email software, allowing you to receive and view faxes anywhere you get email
• OneCentral lets you review and manage all of your TelePacific statements without the need to print or mail any paperwork
• Conference Central lets you hold teleconferences on the fly, whenever you need to, saving you travel time and money
• SmartVoice is more energy efficient than other comparable services

 These are just a few ways we can help you save green and be more green. We are so committed to being environmentally responsible that we even remove spaces and letters from a lot of our products and names (TelePacific, OneCentral, RemoteStor, OnePac, OneSecure) to save ink and paper when we do print materials. Okay, maybe that’s not why we do it, but it doesn’t hurt and it does save money. You see? Being environmentally conscious and focusing on the bottom-line can coexist!

Remember as a kid when you used to play hide and seek with your friends? One of your friends would count to 10, you would hide and then they would try to find you. Great fun for kids but a horrible strategy for businesses.

Imagine a company that does everything it can to hide from its customers…not returning calls, being unresponsive, hiding behind the door or under the bed. That company will quickly fail. Turns out there isn’t much of a difference between actively hiding from your customers and not doing everything you can to be as accessible as possible.

You want to make sure that your customers can find you and connect with you when they need you. After all, they are the lifeline of your business—unless you’ve figured out a way to make money without needing anyone to buy or use your products or services…let me rephrase that, a legal way to make money…

If you want to provide good customer service, you have to be accessible. That means being accessible to both make the sale and to help solve any problems your customers may have after the fact.

TelePacific can help you be more accessible. We offer not only telephone, voicemail and email services, but also an array of products that can help customers better connect with you. Our line hunting service helps customers get to a real person who can help them, regardless of what number they dial (like when you call TelePacific’s customer service centers and speak with a real person). VoIP services like Find Me, Follow-me voicemail and Fax-to-Email ensure that you can access your messages (likely from your customers) wherever you are. Conference Central lets you set up conference calls from anywhere, making you accessible to clients for meetings without having to travel to their location. And with great long distance and international rates, you don’t have to think twice about calling some of your far away customers.

Be more accessible and leave the hiding to the kids…and to those who found the not-so-legal way of making money. You’ll end up with happier customers and a more profitable business.

Okay, so it’s not the most romantic Valentine’s poem ever…or the most original for that matter…but the sentiment is there. Valentine’s Day is about connecting to the ones you love. TelePacific is about connecting you to the ones you love…to do business with. And there are many ways we make it happen. Email, Internet, local and long distance calling, VoIP…nothing says “I love you” or “I want to do business with you” more than latency-free calls and lightning-fast emails.

Imagine being on the phone with your significant other and he or she professes their love for you. You immediately reciprocate the feeling but due to your mediocre VoIP provider and your coworkers hogging Internet bandwidth sending last minute Valentine e-cards to their significant others and moms, your message is delayed for a second. All of a sudden your loved one thinks you hesitated to voice your love and doubts your devotion. Then you have to go out and buy flowers, chocolates and expensive jewelry just to make amends.

TelePacific’s services, including Classes of Service and dynamic bandwidth, ensure that you have latency-free calls. So when a client calls, emails you or sends a large file, you know you’ll get it right away without any delay, lag or latency. You’ll keep your client happy, saving you a ton of money on please-forgive-me (and please keep working with me!) gifts…all thanks to TelePacific’s services. Pretty soon you’ll start realizing that you actually love TelePacific. That’s okay, we’re used to it. Besides, we don’t expect flowers or candy, we don’t get on your case when you come home a little late and jewelry is of no use to us…so what’s not to love?

So this Valentine’s day, remember that TelePacific saves you money, relationships and unintentional awkward pauses. So if you don’t have TelePacific yet, call right now.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

We’re taking a less philosophical and more practical approach to the subject. Begin with the end in mind…as you’re planning your company’s future, what happens when an unexpected disaster or business-halting event happens? We’re not talking post-apocalyptic, meteor plummeting toward the earth, test-tube dinosaurs escaping from their theme park to wreck havoc, Arizona becoming beach-front property type of problem. We’re referring to less geographic-altering earthquakes, fires, electrical outages, burst water pipes and nasty computer viruses.

Do you have a business continuity plan to make sure that when something like that happens, it’s not the end of your business? I know that it may sound intimidating…heck, even the term “business continuity plan” sounds elaborate and complex…but it’s not that difficult and it’s truly a business-saving precaution.

Here are a few tips to get you started on your business continuity plan:

• Put together a team ahead of time and clearly delineate what their tasks, roles and responsibilities would be following a disaster.
• Have an alternate work site ready in case your current facilities aren’t usable. If you have a small business, this could be your home or garage. There are also companies that provide workspace, computers and supplies to clients who have been displaced by disasters.
• Make sure that all your data is being backed up and stored, on a regular basis, in a remote facility. If something happens to your building or equipment, you need to know that your data is safe and restorable to a location not affected by your local events.
• Talk to your suppliers and critical business partners to see if they have a business continuity plan, and be sure to include them in yours. If a disaster happens, you want to ensure that your suppliers and partners can still meet their obligations to you and that, if needed, they are flexible and can reroute goods or services to your new location.
• Test your plan. Create a scenario and play it out to confirm that everyone knows what to do, that your systems work, that your data is restored where you need it to go and that there are no weaknesses in your plan.

Okay, so perhaps it is a little more difficult than I was making it sound. But you’re not alone. While you probably can’t camp out in and run your business out of our lobby after a disaster, TelePacific is more than happy to help prepare for one. Services like our RemoteStor, which backs up all your data nightly in our Las Vegas facilities; Network Redundancy, which provides back-up systems in case your primary ones fail; and Remote Access to Call Forwarding, which lets you redirect your phone lines to any phone you need to, make it easier to get started on a business continuity plan. And the excellent TelePacific customer service just might brighten your day, whether or not things are going well.

Our team is very experienced with helping customers with their business continuity plans, so we know the issues and concerns as well as the best technology to set up now for peace of mind later. Whether you’re an existing customer or not, give us a call today to talk a little about preparedness…calling us might not make it to the list of habits of highly effective people, but it will definitely help keep you effective following a disaster.

 All the new gadgets are pretty cool, but I won’t be fully satisfied until they make good on the decades-ago promise of jetpacks. For generations we’ve been promised a world where people go grocery shopping on jetpacks, commute to work on jetpacks and maybe even walk our jetpack-wearing dogs on jetpacks. I want my jetpack!

 Until jetpacks become a reality, we’re left with 3D infomercials, motion-sensing Xbox game systems and multi-hundred dollar machines to read $10 books. Nothing much there to help the business community. But fortunately you don’t have to rely on bleeding-edge-see-through-3D-motion-sensing-abracadabra-futuristic technology to help your business. There is great technology readily available to help increase employee productivity and effectiveness…even in an age without jetpacks.

Consider shifting to a remote workforce—that’s when your employees, absent jetpacks, avoid the maddening traffic and resulting stress and instead work effectively and efficiently from home. There are a multitude of benefits to employing a virtual workforce, including reduced costs for office space, ease of accommodating differing schedules and the ability to bring together a team with broad knowledge and experience (and no relocation). On top of that, it can even result in a more “ecologically-friendly” workforce with less commuting (pollution) and less paper usage (resource conservation).

But before you agree to the concept of a virtual workforce faster than you picked up the phone and ordered those ShamWows, take a moment to consider some of the challenges a remote workforce poses, as well as some of the steps you can take to overcome those challenges. Some challenges are obvious, such as the importance of setting and checking in on goals; some may not be so obvious, such as the importance of remote workers visiting the office on a regular basis to stay connected with co-workers. Whether your company has already deployed a virtual workforce or is starting to explore options for doing so, here are some things to consider:

• Consider what job roles are appropriate for working remotely and what are not. Some things are still best done by a team working in the same location.
• Detail the parameters of the working arrangement. During what hours are employees expected to be available? How quickly are they expected to respond to email or phone calls?
• Ensure that remote employees have ample opportunities to interact with each other and those back at the office. Have them call in to team meetings, have them come into the office on a regular basis and include them in work-related social activities. The face time and interaction they have with the rest of the team will lead to a more productive relationship.
• Get more remote workforce tips and things to consider here.

Technology can make many of these challenges easier to overcome (why technology hasn’t perfected the jetpack, we’ll never know). There is software available to help you monitor when and for how long employees are logged on to your server/system; conference call services and online web meetings to keep the team working together; email and other online communication tools to make it easier to stay in constant contact and the coolest of all—you can scare your employees by appearing on their 3D television and fooling them into thinking that you’re there watching them work.

TelePacific can help you get started with your remote workforce…or if you’ve already started one, perhaps we can help you enhance it and make it more effective. TelePacific’s 1Net IP-VPN allows employees secure remote access to your servers, email and other company systems through a simple web interface, so they always have the work files they need to be productive.

And when they want to discuss those documents with a group of team members or with the client, they can use Conference Central. Conference Central is a reservation-less audio conference service that is easy-to-use, flexible and secure. You can set up a sub-account for every employee, and every conference host is provided with a dedicated access number and a suite of user-friendly features.

And if you have some clients who are not quite up to speed with the latest technology, you can use TelePacific’s Fax Central, which provides you with a private fax number so you can receive and view fax documents as electronic attachments in your email inbox. You can access faxes wherever you can access your email, and you can even forward them as email attachments—saving paper and saving time.

With all these out-of-office work tools, maybe next year you’ll be all set up to work productively while you’re in Las Vegas enjoying CES…hopefully at the product launch for the new commuter jetpack.

Email and the Internet are a large part of what makes global business possible. But don’t forget the phone. While a lot of this long distance business is done over the Internet, phone contact is critical, particularly since face-to-face contact can be virtually non-existent.

Make sure that your telecommunications company and your phone plan align with your business strategy and goals. At TelePacific, we have very flexible plans to meet your exact long-distance telephone needs. Do you want great rates on nationwide and international long distance calls? We have that. Do you want to have more control over your budget by prepaying for minutes at a rate as low as $.02 per minute? We have that too. Do you want unlimited local and long distance calls through VoIP? Well, sorry, we don’t have…wait, just kidding…, we absolutely have that too! With TelePacific, you can tailor our programs to meet your needs.

So ignore geographic lines and do business with the confidence of knowing that you’re getting great service and great long distance rates. However, if you are actually, physically traveling to do business, please do not ignore geographic lines. Make sure you take your passport and follow all the laws of the country you are visiting. Telling Scotland Yard that TelePacific told you to ignore geographic lines will not be a sufficient excuse as you stand in front of those guys with the long black robes and funny white wigs. Trust us, we may or may not have tried it (our lawyers won’t let us talk about it).

So, what are your plans and goals for Y2KX (see how it just rolls off the tongue)? I’m sure you have some personal goals, business goals and loosely-committed-to New Year’s resolutions.

Keep us in mind. TelePacific can likely help you with your business-related goals. For the whole exercise resolution thing, you’re probably on your own. But for helping you grow your business, save money and enhance client interaction, we can help. It might be a new year, but we’ve been helping customers grow their businesses since last millennium (every year that passes that statement becomes increasingly more impressive)!

 Have a happy new year, and an even happier one with TelePacific!

But even though it’s all the rage and has a trendy name attached to it, corporate social responsibility is not a new concept. Companies like TelePacific have considered the social and environmental impacts of their decisions for a long time. TelePacific takes social responsibility seriously–from the way we treat employees, to the environmentally sustainable practices at our offices, to our paperless invoices, to the way we keep jobs locally in the communities we serve, to the products we develop to help keep business people connected without the need for paper or travel.

So if and when the fad passes and we move on to new trendy phrases and activities, you can rest assured that TelePacific will continue to do its best to be responsible to the people, communities and environment we serve. We don’t do all of these things because they are trendy—we do them because we believe they are the right things to do.

And on that note, the right thing to do may just be to reduce the number of buzzwords available to describe anything people feel like labeling trendy or hot. You can do your part to help in that effort—vote on which words and phrases should be banned from the English language in 2010. Make that part of your personal social responsibility.

That’s the peace of mind that you get from knowing that while you’re out, your office network and all your data files are safe and secure with TelePacific’s OneSecure Managed Security service. You don’t have to be concerned that an employee trying to get a last minute deal on thermal socks for his mother will instead infect your network with a computer virus… OneSecure’s firewall and antivirus protection will put a stop to that. Or if the unauthorized roasting of chestnuts on an open fire—inside the office — gets out of hand, you know that TelePacific’s RemoteStor can quickly and easily give you access to all of your files, which were backed up the previous night and stored at a secure off-site location.

With TelePacific, peace of mind is suddenly not all that elusive — more like a piece of cake. It almost makes for a great holiday present…though I would stick to the ticklish transforming robot thing for your kids if I were you. VoIP just doesn’t seem as fascinating a present to a toddler.

 Happy holidays to all!

At TelePacific, we take pride in being both transparent and accountable. We monitor and measure nearly everything we do, from customer satisfaction to how quickly calls to our customer care center are answered to issues that arise with clients, products or services. Otherwise, how can you solve issues before they become problems if you’re not continually assessing and evaluating what you do? That’s why our team of managers and executives meets every single week to review and discuss any issues that arose over the previous week and find ways to resolve those issues—and avoid having them repeated.

And that’s just the beginning of accountability. At TelePacific, we take the phrase “the buck stops here” seriously. That’s why customers can call our CEO, Dick Jalkut, directly with any comments or issues. Dick answers his own phone when he’s in the office and is more than happy to talk about any issues that may come up—positive and negative—because he understands accountability. 213-213-3500. Keep it in your Rolodex…or more likely, your digital contact database. If you’re a customer who needs to talk to him, that’s Dick Jalkut’s direct line. Try getting that from other companies, particularly other telecommunications companies. That’s accountability.

And we’re transparent as well. Not in the way that our buildings and people are see-through, but we share a lot of information. Our web site shows some of our recent customer service results, and even though we’re not a public company, we still make public a lot of our financial information.  We want our customers to know who we are and what they can expect from us. We set high expectations and then strive to surpass them.

So while the concept of accountability and transparency in government and corporate leadership may be an endangered ideal, we’re trying hard to keep it from extinction and even lead the way to a renaissance of responsibility. High hopes, I know…but we do set those expectations pretty high.