If you make money using the phone, then your phone system needs to be a business enabler, not inhibitor, offering the best customer experiences. Your prospects must be able to reach you in a timely manner. Your customers need to find you wherever you are, at the front desk, in a meeting or outside the office. That’s how you want to serve your prospects and customers. That’s how they want to be treated.
Here are two ways an onsite phone system can better enable how your customers do business with you by eliminating latency and enhancing reachability.
Eliminating latency
When a customer or prospect calls your company and the phone rings endlessly without being picked up, or it goes to a general mystery voicemail box, they may question how capable your business is. You want to give the impression to current and potential customers that you can serve them the way they want to be served, whether your business is big or small.
Phone system latency is sometimes referred to as the, “mouth to ear” delay. It’s based on:
• The number of rings it takes for someone to answer the phone
• The number of transfers that are required to find the right team member
• The phone connection itself if it’s choppy, breaks up or has echoes
An onsite phone system allows you to address latency by routing calls using the power of work groups.
Work groups can be created to respond to what’s happening in your business. For example, you might have a new advertising campaign and you need more people ready to answer the phone. Perhaps there are changing weather conditions and you need to re-route how support is handled. Or you want to better enable how calls are routed to a call center team and establish a top down or longest idle calling pattern so your best sales person or available call center consultant gets the next call. You may even have a business that requires seasonal considerations like greetings or auto attendance during high call volumes.
Addressing latency gives you speed and flexibility in how you run your business and respond to your customers.
Enhancing reachability
Some folks lament the current standard that you must always be reachable anytime, anywhere. But business reality is such that if you aren’t reachable and you aren’t set up to respond to your customers, then your customers are going to go elsewhere.
Reachability is how easy it is for a customer or prospect to locate you or your team. It’s not just how long it takes to reach them, but how easily a customer can access them.
An onsite phone system can help you be reachable by allowing your phone to find you or key staff members wherever they are.
It gives you the ability to use external assignment rules that have phones ring wherever an employee is – whether that’s in a meeting, traveling or at a client site. It can even mean having several phones ring at the same time, say, your desk and cell phone ringing simultaneously.
World class phone systems using unified communications allow you to implement tools that make you and your staff more accessible through Microsoft Outlook integration, and desktop client and mobility features like find me/follow me. These basic unified communication tools are a must in today’s business environment.
This enables your staff to be reachable and findable, building on the capability of your business, not working against it.
