I was surprised recently to realize many of our clients thought we were a bigger company than we are (we have 4 employees and a few 1099). I never purposefully misled anyone in this regard so I was curious where the impression came from…After asking a few of my long-time customers some questions I realized that most of that impression came from the systems and processes we put in place early on.
So - How can you take a 4 person company and make it seem like a much larger corporation? Even better - can it be done for free? (hint: yes.) Leveraging technology can help you not only make you seem bigger to your customers and potential customers, but can streamline your business processes. Maybe you can actually stop working before dinner tonight? 
Here are the four open source and/or free apps I use (and simply couldn’t do without)…
[1] Website
Every company can create a great website even if you less artistic talent then an aardvark (like me). A few good Wordpress templates and creative commons graphics, maybe a photo or two of you own and you’re up. The great thing about Wordpress is that once you customize your template you can post via email, Blackberry, or 3rd party software. You can have different types of users (ie.e permissions) so that many can contribute and you don’t need to rely on one person for all content. Also, with a good Spam protection plug-in (e.g. Akismet) you can have users and clients post messages for an even more informative site. We have tabs on our site for support, marketing, technical information, and client-specific access to documents. It acts as our central portal for anything related to our company for both customers and the general public.
[2] Receptionist
I still can’t believe how good Asterisk PBX is for the price. basically if you purchase a linux server and possibly a interface card or two, sign-up for a VOIP subscription service you can have a $20,000 PBX for about $1000 plus $30/month. It is completely customizable and includes conference calling, voicemail, call forwarding, multiple-IVR, etc. We use a particular incarnation of Asterisk called TRIXBOX. This includes a nice GUI interface (FreePBX) to make it easy to configure, SugarCRM integrated with Asterisk contacts, and a few other items. Basically all you need to do is create a CD from the ISO image, load it in the server and follow the directions. You should have your PBX running in an afternoon. We use the very nice XLite software phone from Counterpath, but you can also buy VOIP phones or uses ATA converters. We have our extensions roll over to our cell phones after 5-6 rings (follow me), we have a separate menu for the support hotline and we get full monthly reports detailing calls received and made for the month. This software really makes everyone think we have some swanky office in downtown instead of my friend’s basement. We also found a female with a great speaking voice on craigslist and paid her $20 to record the few messages we needed for our PBX and mail the WAV files to us. Awesome!
[3] Help Desk
HelpStream (formerly PathWorks) is an online Support and Trouble Ticket application that was started by some Ex-IBM, PeopleSoft, Remedy executives. The best thing about this online application is that it has most of the features you find in a full-featured trouble ticket and support desk application without the setup or maintenance required. If you don’t want branding and don’t mind some unobtrusive ads, you can even use it for free.
Helpstream can be used for customer service, IT help desk, bug tracking, and a wide variety of other case tracking and user self service requirements. It’s a powerful, affordable, easy–to–use solution for fixing technical issues faster. Helpstream customers include organizations of all sizes, in a variety of industries.
I like the FAQ and KnowledgeBase feature that lets my customers search for solutions themselves Before they call me. (Although you need to train/incentivize them to do so I learned.) Once a ticket is submitted I get an email to my corporate distribution list which sends it to all the agents and also sends us SMS messages so we know we have a request. Then based on agreements with our customers on response time - we login and work the issue. I looked at some of the other OpenSource ticketing solutions like OTRS, but found that for the effort - HelpStream was our best bet.
[4] Customer and Partner Collaboration
Knowledge Tree is an open source knowledge-base and document management application. It can be used to collaboratively work on manuscripts, proposals, or marketing materials, etc. I use it to create project specific file cabinets and keep all pertinent files where anyone can access them easily. Examples of documents included: Current project plan; meeting minutes; Visio diagrams; technical guides and brochures; purchase orders, etc. It automatically sends out notifications and has user rights that allow lots of granularity of control. We use this mostly to prevent spending time emailing updates to everyone and remembering who is supposed to get what document. It avoids managing our FTP server (the old way we did it), and it makes us look more professional since we can brand the site. There is a link to this server on our Wordpress Website.
