Many Small Businesses rely on mobile phones as their primary connection point for customer contact. But – as a tool for business communications – your mobile phone is extremely limited!
A business advertising a mobile number doesn’t imply ‘permanence’. It doesn’t tell its customers where its area of operation is. Incoming calls to the number, ring on just one device, and if the call can’t be answered, it goes to voicemail.
Modern Unified Communications (UC) platforms can add features that use your investment in mobile devices. UC makes telecom’s a ‘smart’ and integrated part of your business sales and marketing strategy.
Let’s look at how UC can benefit a small business:
Mobile devices:
Modern UC platforms provide phone extensions that can be applied to; desk-phones, web-phones on laptops and PC’s, and VoIP app’s on your mobile phones. The options available allow you to create an ‘open’ business phone system used at; your head-office, at branch-offices, at home offices and by travelling staff reliant on mobile devices and laptops.
Landline numbers:
Phone numbers with UK area codes give a precise indication of the geographic area where your business operates. Businesses are no longer limited to a single number or a fixed area code. If your business operates in multiple geographic areas – then it’s easy to provide you with Direct Dial numbers for those areas and identify incoming calls from different towns or counties. Showing a set of e.g. three UK geographic numbers on a website will give a much stronger picture of your ability to support customers than a single ‘07’ mobile number would.
“Ask us about …”
Incoming calls can be guided through short introductory messages that confirm the caller has reached your company. The marketing message prompts them to ‘ask us about …‘ e.g. your business ‘unique selling point’ or a discount/intro offer on a product. Easy to use Text-to-Speech tools allow YOU to keep these offers current as and when you want.
Auto-Attendants:
Not all calls are customers asking to buy your services. Auto-Attendant scripts push callers through routes to identify the nature of their call and deliver them to resources best suited to handle their enquiry. Calls arriving with e.g. a ‘Sales’ flag on your phones, can be dealt with differently, and by different staff than those calls flagged for ‘Accounts’.
Call Queues:
Queues give us the ability to distribute calls to a group of users in different ways. While straight-forward ring-all queues are most common, one of the most useful is a ‘cascading’ queue. A call may be pushed into a group of phones where the most appropriate person gets the call first, and then – after a short delay – the call is passed on to include others if that person can’t take the call. Round-RobinQueues also introduce another point at which information about your business (messages on hold) can be passed to your customers while they wait to be connected.
Call handling:
If your business relies on a mobile number for customers to contact you, then the person holding that mobile needs to act as a ‘receptionist’ for the whole business. If you have a team, then that involves identifying who the customer needs to talk to, taking a message, contacting your colleague and then having them call the customer. UC app’s on mobile phones allow you to simply transfer that call to your colleague. If your phone system is front-ended with an Auto-Attendant, then – rather than bothering staff that can’t help – calls can go directly to staff able to best assist that caller.
Call Data Records:
Call queues also allow us to collect data that helps you plan business growth and allocation of resources. The CDR’s can tell us useful information e.g.; what time of day you are called most, which numbers are most used by your customers, how many calls are being handled by Customer Service and Accounts teams, how many sales calls are received on a daily/monthly basis (and trends), and how many calls are not answered or abandoned. All of these stat’s give valuable information about your business, how it is ‘experienced’ by your customers and where you need to focus to improve service delivery.
Call Recording:
As long as appropriate GDPR guidelines are followed, call recording is a valuable addition to a phone system. Recording can be used to clarify verbal instructions given by a client – and for swift dispute resolution before issues escalate. Our UC recording solutions offer different retention periods and transcription options. We can even apply ‘sentiment analysis’, where the speech recorded from each of the parties in the call, is tagged as ‘positive’, ‘neutral’ or ‘negative’ in its contribution to the conversation.
After hours & Holidays:
Call routing through a UC phone system is reliant on ‘Time Frames’. These time frames determine ‘normal’ business hours, after-hours, and also – Public and Bank Holidays. This means that you can set up specific messages stating your business hours – or to provide alternative strategies for out-of-hours emergencies (e.g. “press 9 to be connected to our emergency staff”). These messages (and alternate call routes) are scheduled based on the time of day, day of the week and the date. Auto-Attendants can be edited so that different personnel can share out-of-hours duties – rather than having that one mobile number as the only point of ’emergency’ contact.
Where calls are allowed to go to voicemail, UC can provide voicemail to e-mail services so that messages left for your business can be picked up by authorized staff from a shared mailbox.
Implementing a strategy to inform and support your customers outside of business hours not only provides a high level of customer support – but – doing so using UC technology, allows you to reclaim some work/life balance.
Future proofing:
Our NetSapiens UC platform is capable of becoming a business communications tool for all sizes of companies in all fields of business. So – we can assure you that even if you start with an app’ on a single mobile phone, when your business grows, we can expand and evolve with you.
Contact us at Foxhall Solutions – to discuss how this affordable business enhancing solution can help your growing business become more efficient and successful.
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