Saturday, October 15, 2016

My client work flow

Real-time classified makes it very easy for part-timers and travelers to connect with their clients. They may post a classified in advance or when they are available for business. Almost instantly, those on my very long "short list" will trigger sending an email to me. I have email filters to control who will get to me instantly on my cell. I can ignore others for the time being until I change my mind.

Initial contacts will be made using PM, which can be handled by mobile Chrome even for very primitive websites.

The main communication will be off websites. Nowadays, I bet the most enterprising people use Hangout. It's not cool for personal use anymore, but for business, it's different. There are simple checks online to see if a phone number is a Hangout (Google Voice) number. Nobody complained about mine.  A booking agent can have many phone numbers, one for each girl.

Multiple users share the same phone and SMS history, but not for Hangout, making the multiuser mode solidly private. I don't even use a separate secret contact list anymore. Each girl is an entry with a put off company names like IRS or some election polling organization. I put the girl's name on the title field, which is searchable but not within Hangout.

With the stored SMS, Hangout is a pretty good CRM - client relation management. If only more booking agents use it. If someone sends me a text out of the blue, immediately I can see when and where did I see her last time, and what we texted about last time. It's hard to forget her name even if I didn't mention her name once in the history. Nowadays, I'm using 100% text for appointments.

When you get a call on Hangout, only the company name will be visible on the answer screen. You can put all the girls in two companies, accepting calls for one but ignoring the other. Also, the call screen displays the Google account containing the caller in the contact list. You can use it for further differentiation, but first, you must use a tame email address.

Nowadays, I almost always get a text of the address to park. Since everybody uses Google Maps, they can just as well share their GPS location with me via SMS so I can start navigation right away. But with Google Now, I just need two seconds of pressing the home button to scan all the address and landmarks on the SMS in view, while mapping and navigation is one more click away.

With the Project Fi data only SIM, it's a good excuse to put a spare phone in the car, better than a backup phone battery. It's a fully functional phone, with voice and SMS via hangout, but doesn't cost anything if you never use it.

While Google Maps and navigation have been indispensable, now, it seems as though that they have a traffic camera on every lamp pole in the land. Last time, Maps gave me a suspicious travel time at the morning rush hour. I put my faith in it and wasn't disappointed. I was told not to get on the freeway, roaming the empty streets instead. Just when I thought I made the epic trip without using the freeway at all, Google told me to get on it, avoiding all the bottlenecks.

One drawback is that while Google knows when traffic incidents happen, it can't predict how long it will end. So, by the time you reach the trouble spot, they could have cleaned it up already, making the longer detour unnessary. Similarly, Google returns the estimated travel time in the future with a wide margin, although it must have know the exact time it took the day before.

Better than state traffic cameras on the freeways, Google has, in addition, every Android phone as a position and hence speed sensor. But Google does have other use of cameras for navigation. Once Google told me to get off, say, "Hollywood Bee El". I laughed out loud when I saw the big exit sign, exactly what Google said, "Hollywood Bl.".





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