The mark of a great service

Mr. Allen is planning a business trip to Los Angeles this weekend and has a very busy schedule, packed with back-to-back meetings with multiple clients located in different parts of the city. Included in his agenda is a dinner meeting with a client who selected the venue. This client sent him an email with the name of the restaurant where they would meet for dinner.My task was to include the appointment in his calendar so that he had the name and address of the restaurant. I did not stop there, however. As Mr. Allen’s schedule was pretty hectic, and I thought that it would help if he was familiar with the restaurant’s menu – one less thing to think about. So I called the restaurant and asked them to send me a copy of their menu.

As I was updating Mr. Allen on his agenda, I mentioned to him that I am sending him a copy of the restaurant’s menu so that he could get an idea of what he wanted to order. He was very pleased about it and mentioned that those are the types of things that he expects from our service.

This was an email from Bert Landa, one of our personal assistants. Bert was given kudos by the member who felt compelled to speak with one of Prialto’s managers to let him know how impressed he was with Bert.

We can’t say it too often: People are at the core of what we do here at Prialto. They are our most important resource. And when every single employee feels empowered, and when they care about what they do and the quality of work they produce, you get service that is, well, pretty great.

Tags: Productivity Assistant, time management, wow moment

Prialto Voice – A Voice over IP Solution

You’ve probably heard buzzwords such as VoIP, IP PBX, and IP telephony, but what is it? How can you benefit from it? Doing all the necessary research to understand it all can be daunting. And after that, performing a cost-benefit analysis of going from a “Plain Old Telephone Service,” or POTS system, to a Voice over IP telephony system can be complicated. The inputs are so many, and some of them are not readily measurable in dollars. At Prialto, we’re using VoIP exclusively, and actually, our business wouldn’t be viable without VoIP – proof positive of its cost efficiency.

Now, how can VoIP save your organization money? Read on to find out more. › Continue reading

Zimbra Desktop: Achieve greater flexibility with your email

Local access to your Prialto/Zimbra email and calendar is moving closer to production release.

Zimbra Desktop is a desktop email client alternative to Outlook. One of the biggest benefits of Zimbra Desktop is that it runs on more than just Windows. Versions for Windows, Mac, and Linux are available, and the application looks exactly the same on all systems. Moreover, if you have been using the Prialto Collaboration Suite (Prialto CS) webmail, you will instantly recognize the layout and design in the Zimbra Desktop as it’s nearly identical, giving you the best of both worlds!

Zimbra Desktop is now out of Beta and will soon be released as General Availability. The latest version, 1.0 RC1, is a feature-complete product and is now available for download at Zimbra.com.

Zimbra Desktop benefits at a glance:

* Offline email access
* Write emails when offline and send as soon as you have an Internet connection
* Same great search capabilities as with the webmail version
* Gather external email accounts, such as Gmail, in the same place, and access them offline too
* Access your documents and briefcase while offline

Prialto’s corporate email solution, Prialto CS, is based on the Zimbra platform, which provides our members with the ability to manage their email and calendar from any computer or mobile device with its online capability. And now with the offline version, users will have the ability to access their email, calendar, contacts, and documents on their computer even when not connected to the Internet (e.g. during a flight) – creating even greater flexibility for our members.

When hard work and diligence pays off

From one of our members…

“As a new user of Prialto, my wife and I were eager to put the service to good use. My wife works for an international economic development agency, which promotes poverty reduction through economic growth in third world countries. Accordingly, we put forward a rather unique request for our Prialto agent, Bert: research and compile a set of websites outlining best practices for creating a voucher system for agricultural development programs in Africa. The nature of the request was time sensitive and within a day of the initial request, we received a neatly organized list of websites which succinctly and clearly addressed each of our questions, saving my wife hours of research and enabling her to leverage the results for immediate review and synthesis into a report that was distributed to her organization’s Board the next morning. Kudos to Bert and Prialto for providing such a cost-effective, and incredibly versatile, personal remote assistant solution.”

Rob, Washington D.C.

Tags: Productivity Assistant, wow moment

“You rock!”

Here’s just one of the ways we make life easier for our members:

After trying unsuccessfully to book three nights at the Yosemite Lodge where he is planning to take a vacation with his wife, James, one of our members, sought my help. He gave me the dates and asked me to call the Lodge every now and then to see if any rooms become available – he was aware that the dates fell in the middle of the high season.

I called the Lodge consistently for two weeks when finally, a room freed up. Although it was only for two nights, not three, I asked the Lodge to hold the room and notified James immediately. I was hoping to add an extra night later on. I suggested to James that he take the room. He said yes, and the reservation was made.

Today I called the Lodge to see if we could extend the reservation to three days. They answered in the affirmative. I booked the extra night right away.

James was thrilled to know that he can plan his vacation the way he wanted without spending a lot of his valuable time making it happen, and I was glad to do it for him.

He sent me a succinct email that said it all:

“You rock, thank you.”

James

Tags: Productivity Assistant, time management, wow moment