On the road again

Ring Central’s 800-Works provides trucking recruiter full-featured communications tool.

Chuck Stephenson’s a recruiter, but not the usual kind. As an employee of Ohio-based Falcon Transport, Stephenson recruits truck drivers, and as such spends his days visiting trucking schools or meeting recruits in truck stops or Denny’s.

Because Stephenson is a home-based recruiter, he lacks a corporate contact number. So he was always giving out his home number and returning answering machine messages when he came home late in the evening.

“It was nuts,” he says. “I was giving my home number to everyone who had my business card,” he says. Stephenson also needed an 800 number, because truckers often called him from pay phones.

“I thought of just getting an answering service, but was overwhelmed by the cost,” he says. When he researched options, Stephenson learned an answering service would cost $54 per month, plus 10 cents per minute for an incoming 800 number. 

Instead, Stephenson now pays a flat $40 per month for Ring Central’s 800-Works unified messaging system. The service suits his needs perfectly, providing a toll free number, call forwarding, routing, screening and fax.

Faxing is another must-have tool. Trucking schools routinely fax him student applications and other necessary paperwork. “I give my drivers a fax, and they fax me toll free,” he says. “I access the Internet, download the fax, then turn around and fax it to the office.”

Stephenson says he’s saving reams of paper by receiving and storing faxes electronically. “I am an electronic office,” he says. “I travel with a laptop, cell phone and PDA. I don’t keep paper files. I store everything on the laptop.”

Ring Central specifically caters to small businesses and competes with companies like Access Line, UReach and Vmail, as well as phone companies offering messaging services.

Call forwarding and call-routing features — also known as find me and follow me services — are the most useful, Stephenson says. What’s more, because his home voice and fax line are the same, when he’s faxing, Stephenson can route calls to his cell phone when the home number is tied up.

Having an 800 number and a unified messaging system improved Stephenson’s working life, and it makes a great selling tool. “Now I’m telling my contacts, you don’t have to remember all these numbers, just one,” he says.