Many diverse businesses are learning they can use their new pagers for much more than getting beeped.
Alphanumeric pagers can do everything from receiving E-mail to downloading information from your office and the Web
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A new, smart type of pager that can interact with computers is becoming indispensable--on the farm and on the road.
Beepers, pocket-size devices that show you a caller's phone number, have a new name and expanded capabilities. Now called alphanumeric pagers (because they display both letters and numbers), the devices can come equipped with E-mail addresses. They interact with PCs and Macs in a variety of ways: They can receive short E-mail messages that you read on a four-line display panel. They can relay stock prices, weather reports, and sports scores (from service providers that supply the information). And they can download text or financial data from the World Wide Web or from E-mail, sales-management programs, or spreadsheets running in your office.
As a result, alphas, as they are sometimes called, are becoming essential equipment for all types of executives on the go, not just doctors and delivery people. Alphas offer a low-cost unobtrusive way to stay in touch with colleagues and customers and a simple way to keep abreast of news that may affect your business.
"My pager keeps me in touch with the world," says George Silva Jr., who runs a dairy farm in rural Turlock, Calif. With 2,200 milking cows in a herd 6,000 strong and a 30-employee business to run, the owner of the $1-million G. J. Silva and Son Dairy can't be tied to his office.
Silva, his two managers, and six other employees carry Motorola's Advisor Gold FLX pagers; he leases all nine for $117 a month from a local office of PageNet, the nation's largest paging provider. The paging service allows the secretaries who monitor the office PCs and phones to send E-mail messages to Silva and his managers when important calls come in--from a major customer like Safeway, for example, which runs a chain of supermarkets.
The messages are relayed via PageMaster, a shareware wireless-messaging program from Omnitrend Software ($49.95) that runs on all three office PCs. PageMaster lets the staff create a message like "Safeway order up 10%" and then E-mail it to each manager. Silva prefers PageMaster to the free messaging software PageNet gave him because it has scheduling features. For instance, every Monday at 11:30 a.m. the program sends the barn managers this message: "Start generators before lunch. Shut them down after lunch." That assures Silva that the farm's backup power supply, crucial to the 24-hour milking operation, is ready for any emergency.
Pagers make sense on a farm. But why do you need one if you're already lugging around a cell phone and a laptop? For one thing, when you're on the road it isn't always possible to plug in your computer to download E-mail. For another, there are times when answering your cell phone is downright rude. "You never know just what you'll be doing when your phone rings," says Tim Scott, president and founder of Mortgage Link, in Oklahoma City. "You might be on the golf course, admiring your client's swing. And interrupting that swing could cost you the deal." Pagers vibrate quietly and then store messages. You don't have to read or act on those messages until you're ready.
What's more, compared with cellular-phone service, paging is cheap. Leasing an alpha with one-way local paging service costs about $20 a month. For that $20 you can receive about 200 text messages, each running, on the average, about 200 characters. Compare that with the cost of 200 cell-phone calls. Even if those calls were brief--and local--they would run well over $80, estimates Jerry Houston, a consultant and former vice-president of marketing for Socket Communications, a pager and software manufacturer in Newark, Calif. Nationwide paging coverage, by the way, costs about $50 a month.
Scott, who carries a pager in his pocket when he's away from the office, founded Mortgage Link in September 1995. The tiny, six-employee operation originates mortgage loans for home buyers. With its minimal overhead, Mortgage Link can offer lower interest rates and fewer points than the big banks and financial institutions that are its competition. But to succeed, Scott and his colleagues must follow up every lead. Incoming calls have to be returned promptly. To make sure they are, the five loan officers, who spend much of their time in the field, depend on pagers. When home buyers call Mortgage Link for a loan or when real estate brokers contact the company to pass on referrals, office manager Shelly Garrison pages Scott or one of the loan officers from her PC, relaying a message like "New client. Call Sam Parker at 555-1212."
Mortgage Link uses Notify! Classic, wireless messaging software from Ex Machina ($119.95), which transmits the message via modem to the loan officer. In addition to paying the one-time software cost, Mortgage Link spends $80 a month to lease the six pagers for local coverage from American Paging, a local outfit.
The paging industry is dominated by a handful of national players, including PageNet, PageMart, SkyTel, and AT&T Wireless Services (formerly McCaw Cellular Communications); they all offer local, regional, and national coverage. But a large number of paging companies are small outfits furnishing local, and occasionally regional, coverage. Signing on with a local company made sense for Mortgage Link not only because Scott and his loan officers conduct virtually all their business in and around Oklahoma City, but also because local paging companies, which serve narrow territories, provide their areas with more transmitters than national companies can. The result is better service--a near guarantee that your page will go through. The best way to find a paging company in your area is to check the Yellow Pages under "Paging & Signaling Equipment & Systems."
Prices don't vary much between national and local players. When you lease an alpha and sign up for a service plan, you usually get an E-mail address for the pager (yourpinnumber@pagercompany.com). Most companies offer wireless messaging software, similar to Notify! and PageMaster, that lets you create messages on a PC and dispatch them to one or more pagers. All the nationwide paging companies also can provide software that can forward mail from your office PC's mail programs or from your company's local area network. The software lets you arrange to have certain E-mail messages or parts of them (the first three lines of those from your boss, for example) transmitted to your pager when they come in. Some companies also provide information services--sports scores, weather reports, stock prices, for instance--sometimes for an additional cost.
