With the Easter Bank Holiday weekend looming, how important is it for your customers to still be able to reach you, and could VoIP help?
One of the key business benefits of being online is that it gives people access to you out of hours. This also means your business can potentially reach international audiences too.
However, while potential prospects and customers can access your website and visit its pages, what happens when they want to contact you and you’re not there? Is leaving an email message sufficient, or would it make more sense to have more direct channels open?
How equipped is your business for out of hours telecommunications?
Out Of Hours Call Answering
How your business responds to enquiries is one of the key ways in which you can help define it in the eyes of your customers. Not everyone can contact you during office hours, and while they might not be able to talk to someone during these times, it is important that you make them feel valued. Among large businesses, out of hours answering services are commonplace, and some even offer 24-hour support. For SMEs, this can be more of a challenge when it comes to their resources.
However, VoIP makes out of hours call answering straightforward, and cost effective. This, in turn, helps SMEs present themselves as resourceful and customer-responsive. Phone call remain an essential pillar of the sales process. Many customers still want to have real, human interaction before they make a purchasing decision, whether this is a product or a service.
How does this work in practice? What VoIP features offer are various options. One is call forwarding, so even if your office is unstaffed over the holiday period, you might have someone designated to take calls remotely.
VoIP systems are compatible with smartphones, so you can integrate remote devices into your network, ensuring that no call need go unanswered by your business. Advanced VoIP call handling means much greater flexibility in dealing with calls, whether forwarding them to mobiles or voicemail.
This goes hand in hand with another crucial VoIP feature, call recording. Alongside this enhanced responsiveness, call recording also allows you to refine the quality control of your customer communications, and to use recorded calls for staff training purposes.
VoIP Call Recording
No one wants to miss that crucial call and call recording means ensuring that you have caller details to hand, even if the call is out of hours. Whereas this does not address customers as directly as call forwarding, with the right recorded messages, you can still capture the essential details of from your caller. Again, this is another vital aspect of customer service, and helps bolster your image as being receptive and responsive to customer, sales and other enquiries.
These calls are all securely stored. This means you have a detailed record of calls made to you out of hours, and a reminder to call people back, based on the details you have received. This is a great way of showing your customers that you are on the ball, if you call them back promptly and make clear reference to the details they have left you.
Not only this, but with VoIP’s digital compatibility, you can arrange to have recorded calls forwarded to your email address too.
Working with a Hosted VoIP Switchboard
Another way of enhancing your business telecommunications is through a hosted VoIP switchboard. This is a supported service for VoIP users, which means they have a switchboard for their business set up on a hosted internet server in a data centre. All calls are made over the internet connection, and you can receive up to 30 at the same time with no loss of quality.
This helps expand your telephone answering capabilities, and does so extremely cost-effectively, with only a flat monthly charge to pay. It is ideal for out of hours and holiday periods, as it gives you increased versatility in how your business responds to these calls. It means you can play pre-recorded messages, record voicemail messages, redirect calls automatically to mobile phones or even transfer calls to international extensions.
Managing Your Time with VoIP
The days when everything has to stop because of holiday periods have gone, but it is also true that people in business want to maintain an optimum work-life balance. The good news is that VoIP is a supremely adaptable business phone system. It gives you more choice when it comes to managing calls, whether you forward them to voicemail to a mobile number. It allows you to choose when to answer calls, or when to divert them to an answering service. It also means your customers are presented with more options when it comes to contacting you or leaving messages.
VoIP is not just a call management tool, it is also about time management. Is the time right for you and your business to discover
the business benefits of VoIP? Please contact us on 03300 881 182, email sales@vipvoip.co.uk, or complete our online enquiry form, and we’ll be in touch as soon as possible.