Software: Boomerang
Slides, Past Video and Training Material
Productivity Tools with Rich Merlino
Speakers:
Richard Merlino – Rich
Erin [unintelligible 0:00:06] - Erin
[Start 0:00:00]
Rich: I think our first mini-presenter is Erin [unintelligible 0:00:09] who is going to over one of my favorite tech tips of all time. This thing runs my entire life. She’s actually a member of the Worcester County St. Patrick’s Day Parade Committee, and I can’t wait to hear about this, the Greater Worcester Mothers of Twins Club. Who knew? Paul, do we care which microphone?
Paul: [unintelligible 0:00:32]
Rich: She should use this one? Okay. Are you ready?
Erin: This one to change the slides with?
Rich: Something to change the slides with? Yes. This will do okay here. Yes.
Erin: Boomerang is a tool for Gmail , which can help you manage your email by both—right here?
Rich: Yes.
Erin: Okay. Boomerang can help you manage your email by both reminding you to read certain emails and then also helping you schedule certain emails that you might want to send out. For example, you’re checking your email, the MassLandlords newsletter comes in, but you don't have time to read it. You do however want to get back to it later, you tell Boomerang to return it to your inbox at a certain day and time. Then in the meantime, it goes and lives in a special Boomerang folder, so if you do want to go back and look at it before it returns to your inbox, you can do that. It doesn’t disappear, so you don't have to be nervous that it’s going to live in the trash or you’ll never see it again.
The next one, which is really helpful is it allows you to schedule emails to be sent at a later date because sometimes you think there’s something you need to do, you need to send an email, but it might not work to send it at that particular time. I needed access to my tenant’s apartments a couple of different times in November. I sent them an email with the list of dates, but then I want to remind them 24 hours in advance of each appointment, so I sent them the email with all the dates and then I sat down and typed out a couple of more emails, saying, “Hey, remember, I’m going to be coming into your apartment tomorrow, Tuesday, 11/27,” just so that they don’t get surprised when they read my original email.
There you’re telling it, “Okay, send this email. I’m writing it on November 15, but I want Boomerang to send it on November 26th.” That also lives in the Boomerang outbox folder, so for example, if the appointment got cancelled, you could just delete the email. It’s not like it has to get sent out on November 27th. That’s it.
Rich: All right. Thank you very much.
Audience: [applause]
Rich: I just used this a couple of minutes ago to email myself a password for the next thing I need to log into here, so it ended at the top of my inbox when I was here at this meeting. I email myself all the time. Some people talk to themselves, I email myself.
I use this Boomerang send later feature. If there’s something I don’t need to address until like March, I will just send myself an email that will show upon March 15th and then it will pop into my inbox. It will be at my fate because I don't know about you, but I used to have like a bunch of [unintelligible 0:03:23] paper floating around, and they weren’t as well organized and difficult to execute on it at the right time, so this actually puts things in my face at the time when I can actually execute on it, so that’s why I’m very excited about that.
Thank you so much, Erin. That was great. She really did a nice job putting that together. The next thing I’m going to go over, this is an example of a phone system. There are a lot of different phone systems; last month, we went over probably the simplest one, which was Google Voice, which you could go from not having anything to having a Google Voice number forwarded to your cellphone in probably about 5 minutes. It’s really, really simple. It’s the great thing to do.
Does anybody in here use a virtual phone system for their business or anything else? Not that many hands. Okay, great. Maybe this would be helpful to you then. Just shout out a couple of examples. Which one do you use? You use One Talk Verizon.
Audience: Google Voice.
Rich: You use Google Voice. Okay. There’s one other one? Okay, all right. This is one that I’ve used. This is called Better Voice. This isn’t a Better Voice commercial. It’s just an example of what you can have. This thing is $20 a month. For $20 a month, I have nine extensions. I don't know if I can have more, but I don’t need more. There’s not that many of me, right? There’s only a couple of us.
But what’s neat is that I could set up the call flows in here. Rich, what the hell is a call flow? Glad you asked, group. See how I talk to myself? Jennifer, who I’m fortunate enough to have on my team, you can see up here. you know what, I’ve never used the laser pointer thing on here. I’m about to. This is Jennifer’s phone number. If you want to call her. If you’re feeling lonely, you can give her a call. No, don’t do that.
[0:05:18]
She works Monday through Friday from 1:00 PM to 5:00 PM. She actually works a little bit later than that, but that doesn’t matter, and she’s off on Saturday and Sunday. During these hours, all phone calls get routed to her cellphone. This is just an example. You could do this, so you can schedule phone calls to go to certain phone numbers at certain times.
I can have 10 of these set up here. I can have this routed all the phone calls to go to somebody, everyday of the week different times. You can have, if I go down a little bit lower, then there’s a text message down here. this is an automatic text message. If somebody calls and I don’t pick up and Jennifer doesn’t pick up, then the caller gets an immediate text message that says, “I will get back to you. We strive to return all voicemails by the next business day. Thanks for calling.” That’s pretty neat, right? I mean that’s just a couple of examples of some things that it does.
You can also text from this, so I think it’s useful to make your phone calls and text messages from the same phone number. If you just have one phone number, it just makes it a lot easier. That’s why I try not to let any of our residents have the handyman’s phone number. Well, I called him and told him about. Has everybody experienced this? Right. You just have one channel of communication, it just make it a lot easier.
When somebody leaves a voicemail, I get an email with a transcription of it, which are sometimes hilarious. If you read the transcriptions for some of them, you think that these people have the worst potty mouths like everybody, they’re just sailors and truck drivers, every single one of the residents. It gets really creative sometimes. Has anybody seen this before in some of the—Google is notorious for it, but it is handy. You can see who called. You can get the gist of it. You can listen to it. It comes with an app in the phone. It’s really, really neat.
One thing that I like best about it, being on the go, is that and again this isn’t a Better Voice commercial, all the providers, and I’ll go some other examples, they all have very similar features.
I’m staying right I your way, am I?
Male Audience 1: No, no.
Rich: I’m ruining the meeting for you. I’m sorry [laughter]. What’s neat about this is I have a Better Voice app in my phone, and it has all the contacts in it, so if I want to call one of the residents or text one of the residents, they’re all in there, just like your own cell phone. I have all the contacts in there. I don't have to go look it up somewhere and then type it in. Does that make sense? Yes. It does handy things like that.
What are some other neat things that this does? Free fax machine. You can send and receive faxes because sometimes like housing authorities like to do things over fax. Isn’t that right? I can’t think of any other time. It doesn’t come up often, but it comes up so infrequently that I’m not buying a fax machine for this, right? There are other websites where you can have fax services and stuff like that, but it’s just built into a lot of these online phone things. It just comes along with it, and it has its own phone number as well.
The other thing that might come in handy is it comes with a conference room, so you can have people call in if you were to have a meeting with your handyman, whatever. If you were in talk-in-talk with multiple people, three, four, or five people, you can get them all in a little conference room. Everybody puts in a pen and you can all be in one call, so that’s just another neat feature that this comes with. I probably won’t get a phone system just to have that, but it’s funny once you have something, you kind of do find uses for it, and we actually use it every week now.
Is there anything else I can ramble on about that? Everybody has their own greeting. Did you make this bigger?
Doug: Yes.
Rich: Okay. That’s fine with me. Nobody can ever see anything on my phone or on my computer because I keep everything super small. Anyway, these are a list of some extensions. Now this spreadsheet actually has like 10 different—I mean you can just Google “virtual phone system” and you’re going to see MightyCall, Better Voice, Ring Central, Nextiva, CallRail, iTeleCenter, Sideline, eVoice, Ericall, Jive, and I didn’t see Grasshopper. Grasshopper, that’s the other one. There’s a million of them, right?
[0:10:00]
Some of the features. Separate extensions, call forwarding based on day and time, notification options, easy making outbound calls from one cell phone. Some of them don’t have apps for the iPhone. They only have it for Android, vice versa. That’s something before you sign up, you want to know about. Voicemail transcription, texting, that’s a big one. Some of them don’t allow texting. Notification to cell when a text is received. Ease of texting from one cellphone. MMS, none of them have that, so nobody can send you a picture I don’t think through any of these.
By the way, don’t look at the data in here for each thing because this is outdated. This is from 1-1/2 years ago or something, so this is probably a little changed. Let’s see if there’s anything else in here? How many contacts we can text at once? That’s a limiting factor like I like to text all the residents in a particular area when the plow is coming, so they can move their car, so it’s handy to be able to text a bunch of people at one time. Better Voice happens to not do that anymore.
Autoresponder type capability. Nobody has fallen asleep yet, right? I’m wrapping this up. Let’s see if there’s anything else we should go over.
Ability to record calls. You have to be careful with that Massachusetts. It’s a two-party consent state for recording, so if you’re going to record calls, you have to have one of those things, “Calls maybe recorded for quality assurance purposes,” or something like that, or because we’re creepy, however it is that you want to word it. When it doubt, tell the truth.
Transcription of entire phone call. Some of them will transcribe an entire phone call. Conference call, call transfer, free trial, number of minutes. Let’s see.
Guarantee. This one is in read. Guarantee future phone number portability. This is one of these things that you learned the hard way when you get a business number and you put in your business card, you put it in front of the sign of your building, and then you want to switch from one of these companies to the other because it started to suck or you found another one, and you can’t take the phone number with you. That’s not a good situation, right?
This will be my last recommendation on phones is that I would make sure that you get a guarantee something in writing that you’re going to be able to port your phone number to wherever you wanted to, so that they don’t want to keep your business phone number. Does that make sense?
All right, does anybody have any questions for both commentary on phone systems? None whatsoever. All right that means it’s time to move along to our next speaker.
[End 0:12:47]
