Each March we like to mention it is time to celebrate the birthday of Answer.co.uk – this year marks our 5th year since we launched our PAYG Telephone Answering Service.

To celebrate we have a coupon code setup which offers £5 off any deposit of £50 or more.

Simply enter the coupon code Happy5 on the google payment page and you will receive £5 off.

Payment can be made by logging to your Admin user or by going to this top up page.

We’re also celebrating our birthday with a competition offering the client who makes the 20,000th successful payment via Google Wallet win 20,000 pennies of call answering credit (ie. £200).

All you need to do is make any deposit and once we have our 20,000th successful transaction we will add £200 to the winning account.

The only clue we can give at present is the 20,000th transaction will happen at somepoint during March 2013!

We will also immediately notify everyone via our facebook page. It will be then up to the winning account whether they wish to reveal their identity.

Last Thursday JAM attended the Hertfordshire Business Awards at Knebworth House, Stevenage for the third year running as a multiple finalist.

In fact JAM have now been a finalist eight times out of a possible nine since 2010, more than any other company in the county.

This year we were back as a finalist for the best business following our 2010 success.

JAM were also a finalist in the International Best Business Award.

Unfortunately we didn’t win either award but could take some consolation from James Millman winning business person of the year.

As ever the event was extremely well run with more companies than ever in attendance.

Everyone at JAM had a very enjoyable evening and look forward to hopefully attending again next year.

We have come to the conclusion that it would far more interesting to include photos of our clients rather than stock images on our marketing material.

For example take a look at this landing page we have knocked up for one of our online marketing campaigns.

What we want is for you to send in a picture demonstrating an example of why you use Answer.co.uk.

It could be along the lines of because you need to look after your children, with a client, busy doing what you do, speaking on the phone, taking a family holiday, treating the office to lunch, relaxing out of “working hours”.

Along with your photo include a catchy caption telling us why it is you are needing to use Answer.co.uk.

Please make sure the picture is not a close up and has enough space around it for some text. If possible but not essential capturing what it is you do.

All entries (so long as decent) will appear on our facebook page and you will receive a £5 credit in your account as a thank you.

The winners will appear on this page, and receive £50 credit as well as a link to their website from the image.

Please send your entries to sales@answer.co.uk with your company name login in the subject and caption in the message so we know who to add the free credit to.

As many of our clients are aware when you login into your Admin user, one of the checklist items is our referral scheme with unique links should you wish to recommend us.

For three years we have been paying clients 5% of all payments received from anyone recommend via this method.

Last year we then introduced the ability for Answer.co.uk clients with one click transfer their referral balance to their call credit making the service even more cost effective.

Earlier this month we decided to go a little further with the offer. Now anyone who recommends us will receive a £5 bounty payment in their referral balance once the first payment is received from whoever is referred.

In addition to help promote our service any new Answer.co.uk client signing up from a referral link will receive £5 credit immediately in their account.

The following image is similar to what you will be able to see within your Admin user account.

A few of the things we pride ourselves on are continual innovation and putting the customer in control. Our latest caller history feature is something we’re incredibly excited about and hope you find it invaluable.

Most caller history functions in the industry are solely to make the operators job easier by storing certain details against the phone number. We’ve managed to go much further and actually make our caller history system useful for you as well as us. When we take a message, our system now creates a contact for that person. When that person calls in again, the contact details are shown to the operator and the second message is linked to that same contact. This means you can get a full picture of all the calls from that person. Not only that, we’ve added features to let you control how we answer the calls for an individual caller!

If you’re a  pureJAM , Answer or JAM client (apart from call out customers where we need to do a bit more work on it) you’ll find the extra features are now enabled in your online portal.

You can now :

• See calls grouped together by caller
• Add a note for a caller
• Tell us who the point of contact is for that person
• Force your status to be different for that person
• Edit/Validate the details so we can confirm the call details in a more natural fashion.

As usual, some annotated screenshots below to give you an overview of the new features:

Then if you click on the name of the caller, it’ll bring you to their ‘contact’ page where you’ll find the extra functions:

And here’s a screenshot of a message entry screen to show you what it looks like when we take another message for this caller:

In the past few days Google have merged google checkout with google wallet. This will be noticeable when making your next payment online.

If you’ve used Google Checkout before, all you need to do is login with your Google username and password to buy from us.

If you’re using Google Wallet for the first time, just fill out the single page of information when you make your purchase. After that, you’ll only need your Google Wallet login to make a purchase.

Looking at google wallet it does appear to be cleaner than google checkout and simpler to navigate, especially when leaving a review.

Once logged into your https://wallet.google.com/manage/#reviews)”>google wallet account, click on My Seller reviews , choose a transaction and leave a review as shown below.

It is a huge honour to announce the news that JAM are a double finalist at the FSB Hertfordshire Grand Final awards next month.

This follows on from our best medium business 2010 award in Hertfordshire, which was fantastic recognition for the hard work put in by everybody at JAM.

Business Innovation

In recent years JAM have also won a best ebusiness award, creative innovation award, and last year were a finalist in the East of England business innovation category.

These awards have all been down the telephone answering service software which has once again helped JAM be a finalist for the FSB Business Innovation Award.

Utilising this software, JAM recently joint ventured with the largest answering service in the world and relaunched AnswerAmerica.com.

Employee of the Year

For the third time JAM are a finalist for employee of the year at the FSB Hertfordshire awards. This year hoping to go one better than previous years is Scott Cooke.

Scott is a very deserving finalist after a massive contribution to JAM over the past 12 months both with supporting the old system and the migration to the new system.

Throughout his time at JAM, Scott has always remained extremely calm and an excellent team player, and this was none more so in evidence in the final months of 2011.

Grand Final

The grand final for the 2012 awards will take place at Shendish Manor Hotel on Thursday 21st June. Good luck to all the other finalists.

You may already be aware of the £40off coupon code we currently have on offer for the top Answer.co.uk package, or the recently introduced #happy4thbirthday coupon code (£5 off – minimum deposit £50)

If you want to take advantage of either offer you need to either login to the admin homepage and click on add funds, or click here .

For £40off – Select Tariff 5 and click on the google checkout badge. You will then be presented with the payment page where you will be prompted to apply a coupon code as shown below.

If taking advantage of #happy4thbirthday then please ensure you choose tariff 2,3 or 4.

Using the former offer as an example, apply the coupon code £40off and £40 will be deducted from the payment.

For anyone following me on Twitter at the end of January and start of February, you would have noticed a fair few number of tweets referencing #netski.

Netski is an annual ski trip organised by Warren Cass with a whole host of different businesses represented. Verbier was the location for Netski 2012.

The criteria for the trip was to have a sense of humour, not take themselves too seriously and like to talk business/skiing amongst other things.

This proved to be spot on as the 17 people on the trip certainly all had a sense of humour, and absolutely didn’t take themselves too seriously.

I found this very refreshing considering the calibre of business person in the room. No matter how successful or connected everyone had time for anyone, and for myself as the newcomer in the group that was a big relief.

Described in the original blog post was the chance to bring any issues to the group. This for me was perfect as I was very interested to listen to the likes of Robert Craven, Tim Johnson, Bill Morrow about their experiences and thoughts in business.

The amount of knowledge and business know how in the group was phenomenal and I certainly came away with plenty to think about. I also had an opportunity speak at length with Mark Lee who was enormously generous with his accounting wisdom.

As well as the serious business chat, there was also plenty of good natured banter on the trip. The skiing high(low)light for myself included losing everyone during a trek across the four valleys, which involved staying on a very long button lift unnecessarily and finding myself at the top all alone of a rather tricky black run.

I wasn’t the only one to find myself all alone but that is for someone else to perhaps describe in another blog post.

The après ski was certainly very enjoyable, although perhaps not for those who were asked by me to purchase a JD and Coke at a rather inflated price (Verbier is certainly not a place to find a bargain). Although a little quiet during the week in the bars, it was certainly JAM packed by the end of the week for the Six Nations encounter between Scotland and England.

All in all a great week with loads of business chat, plenty of laughs, and also some business being done in the group.

For those with a passion for business and skiing I thoroughly recommend Netski.

When Rachel Bridge (The Sunday Times Enterprise Editor) tweeted last year the following regarding her new website – www.entrepreneurthings.com, I had a quick look to see what it was all about.

Very excited to get first US order for my entrepreneur mugs today at www.entrepreneurthings.com . We can send them anywhere in the world.

— Rachel Bridge (@rachelbridge100) December 14, 2011

I was rather surprised to find no contact number, which in my opinion is rather crucial for any online website regardless of size.

I am of course biased in this matter but when the question was posed to the general twitter public, it soon became apparent the vast majority where in agreement with me.

@rachelbridge100 for your website to be legal you need a contact number and a snail mail address on it — Philippa Bowen (@philippabowen) December 15, 2011

@rachelbridge100 not necessary but if you’d have one you’d have a virtual pa / answer phone system

— jameseder (@jameseder) December 15, 2011

@rachelbridge100 I agree, I always feel more confident purchasing from a website with a telephone number and not just an email. — SophieJSpooner (@SophieSpooner) December 14, 2011

Of course the tweet that caught my eye the most was if you have a number on your site, make sure someone is going to answer.

Almost as bad as no number at all is one that forever rings out or simply goes to a voicemail.

This is of course where JAM can be of use whether it is taking an actual order over the phone, answering queries, or simply taking a message via our PAYG Answer.co.uk service.

Ironically when Answer.co.uk was launched in 2008 we didn’t initially advertise a number on the site, and instead wanted to focus visitors to do everything online.

This proved a mistake as the moment we did advertise a number the number of conversions increased.