Ring Central - What Does Your Phone System Have to Do With Your Brand?

As you remember, your brand is how people feel you; what you are or what you do.   Today I want to talk about one of the easiest ways to make your brand stand out and that is with your phone system. I have a resource for you today called Ring Central.  If you aren’t familiar with Ring Central you are going to love all the goodies that come with this system.  And …. It’s affordable.

Here's the simple truth…

When it comes to branding, if you don't find ways to stand out, the only choice you have is to compete on price. Is that really what you want to do?

 

Who Needs an Office?

Ring centralMost real estate investors would agree that your phone is the most important tool in their business.  You could theoretically run your business without the internet (although no one would want to even try that), but you could not stay in business without your phone.

Everyone has a phone and I would venture to say that almost everyone uses their cell phone as their primary business phone.  But who wants the whole world calling their personal cell number?

Not me!  I have a solution to that problem for you today.  I can also show you how you can have a more personal way to interact with your sellers right from your phone.

 

Ring Central Pricing

I have been familiar with Ring Central for a long time, but I wasn’t fully aware of all of the features available until recently. It is a cloud based phone system that can be managed from your iPad or any similar device.  There are mobile apps for iPhones, iPads and Android devices.

Ring Central is also a low cost solution for any sized business.

You can get started for as little as $24.99 a month.  Their premium plan is only $34.99 a month for 2500 minutes which is a great deal.  What is even nicer is that you can sign up for a 30 day free trial so you really have nothing to lose.

 

Why Should You Care?

Ring Central has some great features many of which you can use in your real estate investing business.  I’m not going to attempt to list them all but here are a few of my favorites.

  • You can install the Ring Central App on your cell phone. When you make outbound calls from your cell phone it looks like you are using your office phone and that is the number displayed.
  • You can send and receive texts which is a great feature
  • You can set everything up in minutes
  • This system has voice mail and you can record custom greetings
  • Online fax capabilities
  • Ring Central has both video and audio conferencing capabilities too. I love this feature.
  • You can video chat with individuals or groups, share your screen and you can record these calls.

 

Integrations

ring centralRing Central integrates with many services.  Here are just a few:

  • Box
  • Google
  • Office 365
  • Outlook
  • Salesforce

 

Voicemail to Text

In addition to the usual voicemail, they also offer voicemail to text.

If you are familiar with Google Voice and their transcription of voice messages, you know that the transcribed version of the calls often bears no resemblance to what was actually said.  I have no idea how Ring Central stacks up when it comes to this.

In all fairness to both services, many of the folks leaving the messages can barely be understood so that is more of an issue with the caller.

When it works, it works well. I love getting that text or email detailing what the caller wants.

 

Using Ring Central in Your Real Estate Business

This service allows you to have a separate business number, but use one device for all your calls.  It’s true Google Voice (which is free) has some of the same features.  However the ones they don’t have are the real game changers.

 

Here are Some of the Benefits

ring centralYou can collaborate with sellers, contractors and other vendors from any location whether they are a Ring Central customer or not.

You can hold meetings from your computer or any mobile device.With the Standard Plan you can have up to 4 participants, and up to 25 with the premium plan.

I like the video conference capability for communicating with sellers.  Think about presenting offers to absentee owners to absentee owners face to face using this service.  It’s one more way you can stand out from your competition.

When you set up an online meeting or conference, you can integrate it with your online calendar.   You can also send meeting invitations by text message using any of your mobile devices.

Ring Central Meetings has something that is really awesome.  It uses voice recognition to automatically highlight the person speaking.  The host can give control to other participants so they may also share their screens or make changes to documents and spreadsheets in real time.

 

Access Your Files in the Cloud

You can access and share files from storage apps like Dropbox, Box and Google Drive.

As I mentioned before, you can also record these meetings to refer back to or to allow someone who missed the meeting to have access to it.

 

Some Final Tips

You still might be wondering how you might use this in your own business.  I can think of a lot of ways you an up-level your business with a service like Ring Central.

  • Rehabbers: If you are a rehabber, you could have a meeting with all your contractors (at once) every week to ensure they are on track. This would also eliminate many scheduling challenges between the individual contractors.

What if they don’t want to participate?  Since we are talking about up-leveling everything in your business, you might have some decisions to make.  You could take the time to give everyone some basic training or it may be time to look for new team members.  Many times folks are resistant to learning new things out of fear.

The choice to be #1 in your market means you need top notch people on your team.

  • Landlords:  Using Ring Central would give you the capability to text tenants without giving them your cell phone number. When tenants are given the option of texting or calling the office many of them would actually prefer to text.

From the landlords perspective this is much easier too.  First of all you spend less time on the phone.  Another bonus is that you have a record of exactly what was said or what you agreed to.

What other ways would a service like this benefit your business?

 

Did You Miss the Last Article on Why You Need to Uplevel Your Brand?

Just Click Here to read it.

 

If you’re not already subscribed to the “Inner Circle”, be sure to do that today so you don’t miss any of the business building tips I have coming your way. I want this year to be your best year ever!  And if you enjoyed this article, please share it.

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