The virtual office continues to gain in popularity as more and more employers take the approach of heavily promoting flextime and work-life balance in an effort to attract top talent. Often times, human capital accounts for the greatest percentage of a business' expenses. Despite the fact, the right people resources tend to be the driving force behind a company and frequently prove to be the most valued asset of an organization. Consequently, the rise of the virtual office has allowed employers to cast a wider net on recruiting from areas they might otherwise have forfeited. Plus, virtual work increasingly serves as an appealing incentive for bringing aboard fresh talent. The virtual office work environment not only helps to create a healthy atmosphere, but it is also an active ingredient for better employee retention.

There are also other advantages that exist for establishing a virtual office work environment. Consider a company where most of the business is generated by outside sales representatives. Having virtual office salespeople geographically dispersed in different sales territories around the country will expand a company's presence and widen the target market for selling the company's products or services. Customer service and support is another function that can be handled by virtual office workers. Properly trained virtual call center agents accomplish the same tasks without the high administrative overhead costs of maintaining a contact center facility. With a virtual office environment, you can be sure that real estate costs are kept minimal as less office space is required.

In any virtual office setting, properly equipping your virtual office employees should be a key consideration. Virtual office workers should be outfitted with the business productivity tools to effectively communicate with each other or with office employees as well as with clients and customers. Innoport offers a highly affordable suite of uni fied communications services that provide a perfect solution for any virtual office. By integrating online fax, voicemail and hosted PBX capabilities, Innoport easily manages your voice and fax communications to give you ubiquitous access to all your calls and messages.

Using Innoport, each virtual office employee could be given a personal toll-free or local area code telephone number for accepting voice calls and fax transmissions. If the number is set for both voice and fax, Innoport automatically distinguishes between a voice call and fax signal, so callers do not have to press any additional keys.

With find me/follow me, your virtual office employees can mask their private numbers, such as a home number or personal cell phone number. Each user can go into their Innoport account online and schedule routing sequences from his/her Innoport phone number to forward calls through a predefined list of contact numbers until the call is picked up. Along with days and times when no forwarding is set, unanswered calls return to Innoport voicemail. Each employee can personalize his/her mailbox and when a message is left, it is sent to the virtual office worker's email as a digital audio file attachment in .wav format, which can be listened to using just about any standard audio player. Voicemail messages can also be picked up by phone.

When a number receives a fax, the fax is immediately sent via email as a PDF or TIF attachment, which are both very common formats, so a virtual office worker can pick up his/her faxes from anywhere. By the same token, a virtual office employee can send faxes from anywhere with no more than an internet connection. Innoport offers two easy ways to send faxes: online from an Innoport account or directly from an email account. Using webfax or email-to-fax, faxes may be sent to one or multiple recipients worldwide.

Innoport's hosted PBX capabilities can also help to project a professional image or to deliver transparency if operating off of a virtual office work environment is intended to be concealed. To centralize a remote work force, Innoport can be used to create a virtual office phone system where one number serves as the main company phone number with an auto attendant set up to transfer calls to different extensions or menu options. Each virtual office employee can have a customized mailbox extension on the system with a personal voice mailbox greeting. Extensions can be independently configured with separate find me/follow schedules and email address(es) for voicemail delivery. Features included with Innoport's hosted PBX system are business and after hours greetings, call screening for prompting callers to announce themselves, incoming call identifier for tracing which menu option or extension a caller has selected , a hold/retrieve functionality, custom music-on-hold, and unsupervised extension transfer for passing a caller to another mailbox extension or even an external telephone number.

Sign up now!