The Mobile Professional

Rana Vridagiri is on the go so much she thinks of Her suitcase as home. “I sometimes feel like one of those little pull-toy dogs children drag about on a rope,” says Rana, who works for a computer software vendor, setting up and training new customers.

“We make manufacturing software that helps companies take control of their entire process, from ordering raw materials, to shipping finished goods and everything in between. Whenever we get a new customer, they send me to gather that customer’s details, set up the software for their unique needs and train their start-up team. Thus I find myself bounced about from one end of the continent to another.”

For Rana, the biggest problem was keeping up: tracking the constant schedule changes imposed by her home office, handling the questions and problems coming from earlier customers and knowing who was whom and where was where from one day to the next. “My company put in very expensive PBX voice-mail system, but it just didn’t work for me. I couldn’t get my messages except by the phone, I couldn’t make changes when I needed to, and I couldn’t have calls reach me in the field. So I decided to get my own Universal Office and this has solved everything for me.

“Now I can get and send messages by phone, fax, e-mail or on the web, and I do not any longer need to worry about being four time zones away when I do it. And things like the on-line phone book are vital to me. Just the other day, I got a call from a customer and realized that they had not left me a number to call back on, and I had accidentally left my address book in my hotel room. But it was not a problem. I simply asked the current customer if I might use Her web browser for a moment. I logged on to Genie Online and got the telephone number I needed, called my own Genie number and placed the call. The customer who I was visiting at that moment saw the whole process and was very impressed. They knew that I could handle THEIR next problem with equal ease.”

Her co-workers have been just as impressed. Two of them have since gotten their own Universal Offices. “Now the three of us are tied together online as we have never been before. We send each other voice messages with technical tips all the time, whenever we find something new and interesting at a customer’s site. The company is watching us very closely and deciding whether to move everyone to a Universal Office system. I have explained to them that, when they decide to do that, we can connect our existing Universal Offices into it without losing anything.

“The only problem I now have is trying to comfort my boss when she thinks about all that money she wasted on a PBX system.”