Virtual Office Solutions from Regus

Regus is another well known name in providing specialised services to small businesses. With 40 years of experience, it has around 1000 best street address around the world. A combination of fully trained staff and latest technology has enabled them to provide flexible solutions which you would see for yourself in their different packages on offer.

There are over 400,000 customers worldwide and range of businesses from low cost startups to Small & Medium business trust them with professional services.

Plans:

There are primarily 4 packages, but you can ofcourse negotiate with them for specialised version to suit your needs:

Mailbox plus
Most basic plan to get any one of over 1000 prominent landmark as your business address. Your mails will be accepted, processed and forwarded to designated address.

Telephone answering
Get a dedicated local business telephone number. A local personal assistant will take all your calls in your company name, screen them and the pass the message to you via email, phone or sms. Voice mail comes without saying.

Virtual Office
With this you get all the services offered in Mailbox plus and Telephone answering package. In addition, you can access private office for 2 days a week. Also you can display your company name in reception area. This adds more credibility to your image, specially if you need to make contact with client.

Virtual Office  plus
If you need access for over 5 days a week, this is the plan for you. It has all the features offered in Virtual office basic plan.

Value addition:

• Free access to over 1000 drop-in business lounges and cafes, which is good alternative to busy and often noisy cafes to hold informal meetings with clients.
• 10% discount on meeting room and day office usage.
• Regus has tie-up with leading brands like FedEx, Staples, American Express, AVIS, and more through which you can avail upto 50% discount on your daily office purchase.
• Network with fellow Regus customers: you can form mutually benefitting relationship with other small businesses using Regus's services.

To signup, visit www.regus.com

Leading Virtual Office Provider - USA2ME

Okay, now that you know features to watch out in virtual office solution, the first one I have here is USA2ME.

USA2ME specialise with offering US centric services. If you are looking to establish a USA presence, then you can get a US based address. So they are like specialty.

How it works:

• You signup for new account and get USA address- Street number and Fax number.
• You can immediately start using Street and Fax number wherever you like- your business or while shopping online, etc
• Your faxes or shipping items or any kind of correspondence will be received by USA2ME
• Shortly you will get email notification of the new items
• You can use your free online account management system to review, cancel and receive desired items at your given address.

Features
Online Account Management : you will get an access to website to
- Review your received items
- Ship your items to anywhere in the world
- Order a scan of your document for urgent review
- Discard any junk mail or unwanted item (this way you don't have to pay for shipping unwanted items)

In addition, there are various optional valuable services:
- Personal USA Shopping assitance
- USA property management
- USA Phone that rings in your country
- Ebay Selling assistance
- USA Magazine subscriptions (limited time offer: open your account and receive free magazine subscription)
- USA Doctor or Attorney referrals
- several customised services

In next article, we will review two other leading Virtual office solutions provider.

Virtual Office Rental Features

Before we jump on to next article, which would be comparing leading Virtual Office providers, let's look at different product packages that is normally offered and ensure what meets your requirement.

Address Services
This package purely consists of mail forwarding service. You choose any address your facebook for customers and all your customer mails will be packaged and sent further to your personal address. So it's more of the mail redirecting service. If you are probably starting as internet based company, then it just makes sense to use this mail forwarding service to keep your costs low. You can always move to higher-end package with many more features as your business grow.

Telephone Services
You may also want to get a telephone number to receive your business calls, sometimes it makes sense not to reveal your personal number or just keep it 'personal'. So you can hire Telephone services wherein you are given a dedicated telephone no which your customers can call. Your calls will be answered by a team of customer care professionals which supplies basic info to customers and then redirect to your chosen tel no for additional knowledge. You will also get a Voice mail system which you can retrieve at your will or can be pushed to you via email or SMS.

Workplace solutions
With this service, you can take benefit of Conference room facilities, Video conferencing, your own private room on need basis. Plans can range from as simple as 2 days a week access to private office room or for a full week. It's important to consider proximity of the office address to your home, after all flexibility from working at home is something only business can offer and you don't want to ruin it by spending dead time in traffic chaos. However, I always felt a good change to work at some location away from office a few days a week. It's gives a fresh break from home besides you can concentrate much better away from home.

Support solutions
As a business you could always makes some purchases, may be as simple as stationery or computers. This extra services offer discounts on such purchases, on-demand administrative services, personal assistant to help with your work. You might just get away with free.

You can always work out the cost and pricing as per your requirements. Next article, I will describe on leading virtual office space providers that you can depend for professional services under reasonable prices. All of them are good, you can perhaps just check their plans and then see which suits your need.

Get a Professional Looking Business Address

"T41, Roseland Residency, Pasadena, US" - how does it sound for a business's address. Imagine you are looking to buy some product from a business that has this address. How would you feel? Do you feel safe and confident that this is not a fly-by-night operator? Now imagine, the one mentioned above is your business's address.

Most mom and pop businesses today operate from personal living space, your apartment. Each year there are thousands of new entrepreneur business kick starting from their small garage or may be their bedroom.

Trust is the most important factor that alone, I think, is more important that anything else...assuming you have a competent product and customer service. You don't need to be 'best' in industry, but you certainly must be competitive.

So how do you build trust and instill confidence in your future customers while still operating on minimum cash. Building Trust with customer is long process and lot of factor goes in to the process- providing best in value competitive products, having clear privacy, user agreements, and return policy, being transparent in your transactions with customers (e.g. upfront disclose the shopping cost). One of the ingredient ofcourse is business's physical address.

When a customer thinks your business has a product that fulfills his needs, next thing he would do is try to get your phone no, email or address through 'contact us' page. Most startups are often single man office and can't really afford lavish office spaces. Not that they need too. But having a famous landmark as your office space can certainly increase your credibility.

Every problem has a solution!

Virtual Office

What's a Virtual Office you ask? It's an office and it's virtual :). It doesn't exists...not in literary sense. But instead there are companies that specialise in arranging the infrastructure, logistics to 'stand in' as a face to your business. These are just more that mail forwarding business. They often provide additional facilities and support needed to run a business. For e.g Personal assistant, Call centre to manage your calls, Conference rooms, etc

Why do you need a Virtual Office? There are many benefits using Virtual Office:

• Pay for only what you use- the disadvantage with traditional renting is you probably are only going to use your office for one-third of time. You still pay for rest of the time. Besides, you don't need other facilities like Conference room for full day, so why pay full rent? 
• Brand your business with an address that complements your professional image
• Increase your business's perceived value just by renting out prestigious location
• Receive all your mails / couriers forwarded to your residential address. 
• No more need to beat the traffic, do all your business at convenience of your home. What's more you all contribute less to pollution (if you normally drive) and help the green cause
• Still maintain a professional business address even in cost cutting mode 

Having virtual office needn't cost you fortune, there are different products/ plans available that can be used as per your needs. So it really is pay for what you actually use.

Disadvantages

• If you have just started and just need to test waters for a new business, and may be you are very tight on your budget, then ofcourse I wouldn't recommend investing for a virtual office just yet. 
• If a client decides to visit your office, may be to meet you, or do some background checks, then of course they wouldn't find you. Instead they may meet a Mail Forwarding office. But you can make use of cheap conference room facilities at the very same location to meet your clients.

In next article of this series, I will compare some reputed virtual office providers that offer reasonable and flexible plans for Office space. You are always welcome to leave your comment if you want to know certain other aspect of virtual offices on this article.