Info for virtual PA

[martinkay]

I'm going to try out one of these remote virtual PA arrangements for my business and see if it works out. The idea being that calls will be answered if I am engaged or out of the office and unable to deal with them myself, and will perhaps sweep up some possible sales that may have gone elsewhere because nobody picked up the phone in time.

The information for pretty much everything along the lines of to "have you got such and such in stock" and "please can a order a Hokey-Cokey 2000" will be accessible to the virtual PA just by looking at the web site, but the question they won't be able to answer from there is "I ordered XYZ, it hasn't arrived / has it been despatched" questions, because that's in my local Actinic installation.

So, is it possible to output a daily report of order/shipping status in HTML format and automatically upload it to a (hidden) web address (as an example) for the PA? Or any other possible ideas to provide them with this kind of information would be most welcome.

Cheers
Martin

[Duncan Rounding]

I would reccomend you speak to Jan at www.Mole-End.biz .
I think her One Stop Automation program may be able to produce a scheduled report and email it on. There's a free trial you can download.

[martinkay]

Thanks Duncan that definitely looks to be able to do the job. If the PA arrangement works out I may have to give that a try. Unfortunately we have hit a slight policy stumbling block in that they are not allowed to take down card or bank details from customers so if we can't find a workaround for that I might have to forget the idea anyway.

[Jan]

We used GoResponse (http://www.goresponse.co.uk/) to do this - they took orders for us - it's expensive though and error prone. We have people here now to do it, it's so much better.

For just call answering MoneyPenney (http://www.moneypenny.co.uk/) were pretty good and quite cheap as well but they will not take orders.

Regards,

[martinkay]

Thanks Jan, it is the latter I'm trying. I need to seek further clarification on this but I think we might be able to sort something out for the odd order, and if we can then the automation thing might be useful.

[martinkay]

We have this morning agreed a process whereby Moneypenny will take the odd order as a back-up for me for the cost of an extra "regular" message (99p), using a third party secure site for the card details. So we'll give this a whirl and if it looks like the automation tool will help further with "remote order management" in this scenario, I'll let you know.