Agent@Home Magazine - February 2009
Focus on Technology
The Everywhere Office
By Kate Rice
Make the most of your mobility with these low-cost tech tools
Being an agent at home means that you work in an office without walls. Your office can be anywhere—in your house, on a cruise ship, in a coffee shop or at the playground. Such mobility gives you a competitive edge, and several tools can help make you as mobile and efficient as possible, as economically as possible.
For a tool that’s lightweight, eminently portable and downright cheap, nothing beats the new netbooks. There are many out there, and what they share is a low price—they start at roughly $350—low weight (two or three pounds, nine or 10 inches wide and as thin as just an inch) and Wi-Fi. You can slip an Acer Aspire (www.acer.com), Dell Inspiron Mini (www.dell.com) or HP 1000 Mini (www.hp.com/united-states/campaigns/mini1000/alt.html) into your handbag, briefcase or backpack and be online anywhere there’s Wi-Fi. Some have hard drives of just 16 GB, some go as high as 120 GB. You have to make sure you’re comfortable with the small screen and the keyboard. This is definitely something to test drive at a brick-and-mortar retailer. All are Windows based, and you can use them to make online bookings on any of your favorite browser-based websites.
David Locke, an independent affiliate with America’s Vacation Center (AVC), started with a Linux-based netbook, then upgraded to an Acer with Windows. His wife, Cindy Jabbour, also an independent affiliate with AVC, uses one as a second computer on her desk when she’s multi-tasking, then drops it into her bag when she goes out. It works with AVC’s web-based technology platform, Agent Power, as well as with other browser-based tools, such as VAXVacationAccess.
Even smaller than the netbook is the iPhone (www.apple.com/iphone), which Ernie Ratliff, who provides technology support to his wife, Sue, also an independent affiliate with AVC, describes as a mini-computer that can take the place of a laptop in the short-term. He not only uses it as a phone and to access email, but also to go into AVC’s browser-based technology platform, AgentPower, to look up clients in the database. “If I get a phone call from a client and I need to access their database, their records, their trip, I can do that,” Ratliff says.
Ratliff, an AT&T manager before he “retired” and began providing technology support to his wife’s travel agency, finds the iPhone operating system (Windows Mobile) far quicker than a BlackBerry. The iPhone’s 3G technology means that you’re accessing the Internet at what Ratliff calls “super speed.” (The 3G is available in most major metropolitan areas.) Its larger screen also makes it easier to use.
Again, it’s important to give this a test drive so you can begin to familiarize yourself with its touchscreen keyboard and to see how your own browser-based tools work on it.
If you’re on the fence about a netbook and face too big of a penalty from your mobile phone provider to switch to an iPhone just yet, but you do have a BlackBerry or similar PDA, you can turn it into a mini-computer of sorts with a BlueTooth keyboard. (For an example, visit http://www.talkietech.com/blfoblke.html or simply Google BlackBerry Bluetooth keyboard). These foldable keyboards, which cost $80 or $90, let you take notes or write lengthier emails on a PDA. (These keyboards do not work with the iPhone, although the promise of such compatability looms on the horizon.) You can buy word-processing and spreadsheet programs to use on a BlackBerry for about $40.
Since mobility is so integral to at-home agents, making it easy for your clients to keep up with you no matter where you are is essential. An upstart in the Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) arena, so popularized by Skype as well as by other companies such as Vonage and Vodaphone, is magicJack (www.magicJack.com), which enables you to access the Internet over your land-line telephone as well as on your computer. The magicJack device, which looks like a large thumb drive, connects to your computer’s USB port. At the other end of the device is a standard jack that connects to your phone. The device loads its software into your computer (it’s Windows and Mac Intel compatible), and you can then talk online over your landline. On the road, you can plug the device into your computer, pop on a headset and get a dial tone. You can also buy international service. But it doesn’t just let you talk online affordably, it allows you to forward your home voice-mails to your email—just click the email and listen to the message.
Google is another online tool that has a great deal more to offer than its already-impressive search capabilities. It can provide you with a free alternative to Microsoft Office—word processing, spread sheets—and give you the capability to share it with multiple users. The price is right—free—and it has networking built into it.
You’ll find all these tools—and a lot more—at www.google.com/options. For example, Google Docs can completely replace MSN Office. You can use it to produce word-processing documents, spreadsheets and presentations.
Carol Fullmer, manager of business development for Uniglobe Travel Center and known to many agents as “Google Granny,” can create a document on any computer and share it with anyone. Google Docs lets you create a document or spreadsheet, upload it to your Google account (easy to create—and free) and share it with anyone. If you’re working on something with others, you don’t have to email a spreadsheet to everyone to update, your colleagues simply update that spreadsheet online. It’s less cumbersome than emailing back and forth, and less prone to errors.
Google Docs has approximately 300 templates that you can use for client newsletters. You can also use Google Docs to send surveys to clients as a way to stay in touch. Clients simply fill out the survey then click “submit,” and the information they input is automatically populated in the spreadsheet.
Fullmer finds such surveys an easy way to let clients know that she’s thinking about them. She’s sent such surveys to as many as 300 email addresses. “You could use it with groups, asking questions such as, ‘What would make your dream vacation of a lifetime?’” Fullmer says.
You could also give them ideas—a great chef on a cruise ship, for example—to get their creative juices going.
To work with Google Docs offline, use Gears, an open source extension that adds offline functionality directly to a browser. Google Docs can be accessed offline by typing http://docs.google.com into your browser or by clicking the desktop shortcut that’s downloaded during the installation process.
Google Calendar is another management tool that can also be accessed from any computer. You can input appointments and have reminders pop up on your computer, and then have them emailed or sent as a text message to your email address or cell phone. Its great appeal is the ease with which you can share reminders with others to keep track of vacations, travel and appointments. You can access Google Calendar only when you’re online, but you can sync it with other calendars, such as Microsoft Outlook.
Google can also provide you with your own website and email for a mere $10 a year. To get the standard edition, visit www.google.com/a/cpanel/domain/new. You get a domain name, control of that domain, as well as email, a calendar, instant messaging and web pages. This makes it easy for you to have several websites featuring the many facets of your travel business for a low price. You can build the site using Google’s tools or very easily redirect the URL to another page in your existing website. The beauty of this isn’t just that you get your own URL, but that you also get the accompanying email with your name or your company’s name for just $10 a year. Although the email address is that of your site (example: kate@playhookywithkate.com), it’s housed within gmail, giving you all of gmail’s benefits, including a huge amount (more than 7 GB) of storage. That means you can manage your email within your own program (Outlook or Entourage, for example) but have the original emails stored in gmail for fallback.
Want a little more power for your site? You can upgrade to Google’s Premier Edition for $50 annually. That gives you 50 GB for your email, 10 GB of storage for your site, plus 500 MB per user for shared storage. Google gives you a 30-day free trial for its Premier Edition.
Google makes it easy to use all of these tools by providing a library of videos that introduces users to the basic tools, then moves you through all the various ways you can use these tools for your business.
A lot of agents are not computer whizzes, says Fullmer, but Google’s options and applications are easy to use. You don’t have to worry about getting hung up on having more technology than you really need—and the price is right.
The common thread running through all these tools and applications? They’re low cost and they’re mobile. Learning to use them won’t take up a lot of your time—and they’ll make you more efficient, freeing you up to do your job.
Become A Travel Agent
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