Voice over IP (VoIP) is the technology of the future; it provides limitless, advanced features and functionalities that can boost the productivity and communications of your business. VoIP can help you achieve your goals whilst reducing your telephone bill. Here are some of the helpful features that VoIP can offer.
Unlike landlines, VoIP allows you to get as many phone numbers as you need for your business with no need for additional lines and extra line rental, saving money on your phone setup and maintenance bill. The benefits of having multiple phone numbers are endless.
By using unique numbers you can track the success of your marketing campaigns by allocating different numbers to different advertisements and monitor the responses you receive from each one.
With differing numbers you can expand your geographical presence in certain parts of the country or the world and appear as a local business by having different local numbers without spending more money on new premises or staff. Geographical numbers can also facilitate your integration in foreign markets and increase the number of your leads and customers. Some businesses might choose to have multiple numbers with different area codes to appear bigger than they actually are. VoIP also allows you to take these numbers with you whenever you move with no extra cost.
The number of concurrent calls you can make with the antiquated landline system is limited to the number of physical lines installed at your business site or at each site if you’re running a business with multiple locations. The inflexibility of this system is an obstacle to the scalability of your business, not to mention the expensive fees you need to pay each time you decide to add a new line.
VoIP runs over the internet. This means that it doesn’t require any physical wiring and can offer you a consolidated set of lines regardless of the amount of locations. This feature will not only save on your phone installation and maintenance fees but also allows you to increase the number of concurrent calls you can make at each location easily with no downtime to your system.
Whether you are outside of your office for a day or traveling abroad for a meeting, or if the nature of your job requires that you work in different locations around the month, you might want to transfer incoming calls to your mobiles and ensure that your customers are still able to reach you regardless of your location. VoIP allows you to forward calls to your mobile or any other phone number or extension very easily and unlike landline, you can enable this feature anytime you want even if you are outside of the country.
VoIP calls handling feature deals with calls your office may receive after the work hours. You can either forward the callers to a voicemail mailbox or set up a special audio message to let them know when they can call again. You can also forward these calls to your mobile or to a different extension or department, such as the 24/7 support unit if your business has one. This feature allows you to plan for any upcoming event in advance like a public holiday or annual leave, or even just for regular breaks during work, such as lunch break.
One of the useful features of VoIP is that it allows you to easily create a phone directory for your business that includes the numbers of all your clients and employees. The phone directory can be updated easily and accessed directly from any phone connected to your VoIP system. This will help you to save a lot of time in your everyday tasks and focus on the work that matters.
One of the added benefits to this feature is that you can import or export a contacts list in a CSV format. This will allow you to copy your contact list between an Outlook or Gmail account and your VoIP phone with ease and without wasting any time.
On hold music plays an important part of the image of your business and your relationship with your customers. VoIP allows you to tailor this music to any tune you want. You can choose to play a list of popular songs on your support line for example to keep your customers entertained while they are waiting on-hold, or personalise a special message with an energetic tune on your sales line to advertise for new products or an upcoming sale. The choices are unlimited, and VoIP allows you to upload as many audio files as you want to your online dashboard and allocate different on-hold music to different extensions or users.
Call queue management means that you’ll never have to miss valuable customers just because you don’t have enough extensions or available staff to answer them. With this feature, your customers will be answered automatically and held in a queue until one of your staff can answer their calls. They will also hear a personalised message telling them how much time they still need to wait followed by your choice of on-hold music.
VoIP allows you to set an interactive and personalised voice response to guide your customers to the correct extension when they call your business’ number, such as press 1 for sales, press 2 for support. This feature saves a lot of time for both your customers who won’t be put on-hold while being forwarded from one extension to another, and your staff who will only receive calls related to the speciality of their departments.
Managing and editing IVR is very easy and can be done at any time. You can either personalise your interactive response message and add the names of your different departments or choose a message from pre-recorded ones on the system.
Personalised greeting messages will elevate the call experience of your customers and reassure to them that they are calling the right number. VoIP allows you to add tailored greeting messages to both your regular incoming calls or to your voicemail messages. For example, you can tell your customers when you will be back in the office or give them an alternative number to call.
If you’re losing clients because the phones in your business are constantly busy or because you work in different offices or locations throughout the day, then this feature is for you. Call hunt allows you to transfer incoming calls to another number, extension, or even a voicemail if the first line was busy or no one answered it. For example, you can set a rule to forward incoming calls on your office number to your mobile after 5 rings, or forward the call to a list of extensions in order until it reaches a non-busy agent. You can have up to 30 hunt groups in your system, and you can also choose to broadcast incoming calls to ring at each non-busy line at the same time until it gets answered by one of your employees.
Like with landlines, you can forward incoming calls to your VoIP number to a voicemail when you are unavailable or busy. But unlike it, you can access this voicemail from anywhere and using any device. Your voicemail messages will be automatically converted into a sound file and sent to your email as an attachment. You can then listen to this message from anywhere using any device or even email it to one of your colleagues if they are best placed to deal with this customer or query.
