Is it time to review your phone options to improve productivity?
A traditional business phone system is made up of landlines and SIM cards. One number per phone, and a huge difference between internal and external calls. Doing anything fancy took a lot of training, but there are some pretty neat things an old business TelCo plan can do. Conference calling, call waiting and call center management. These are things that many businesses are afraid they’ll lose if they switch to VOIP. But their fears are entirely misplaced.
In fact, rather than losing features, VOIP actually adds significant capabilities to your business phone solutions. It can do everything a TelCo PBX system can do and much, much more. You may have heard about the call-following, one-number convenience, and the affordable scalability. But today, we’re here to talk about four different new VOIP features you may not have heard of, tricks that your old TelCo plan just can’t do.
Automated Call Transcription
Call transcription is one of the most widely useful features VOIP brings to the table. As a software solution with modern voice recognition capabilities, it has now become simple to quickly and easily transform a phone call or voice message into a transcript. This is ideal for anything from customer service to accommodating hearing-impaired employees.
VOIP transcription can send you your voicemails as emails, can transcribe customer service calls for the record, or even be used to dictate memos through the phone.
Video Conferencing
TelCo systems invented conference calls, but they also introduced the unbelievable headache causing hassle of conference calls. Trying to handle multiple lines, accidentally hanging up on clients, and the nightmares of speakerphone have all been thoroughly explored by modern business. But you haven’t conferenced until you’ve tried the silky smooth star-trek like experience of a VOIP video conference call.
With the right screens and microphones connected, you can practically place each remote meeting member in a chair in the room it’s so easy to connect and conference. In fact, you can have every single person in a different room on a different camera and VOIP will make your conference happen.
CRM Integration
Another major benefit of using software phones instead of physical landlines is the fact that it can integrate with other software. VOIP has the capability to connect with many varieties of business software solutions, but by far the most popular is to simply connect to your CRM. The CRM is already a modern rolodex, the place where you store all your client and vendor contact information.
With an integrated connection to your VOIP phone system, it becomes a breeze to both call clients directly from the CRM interface and to quickly pull up a customer’s CRM file when they call in. Integrating with your CRM even makes it easy to create CRM records of the transcriptions of every call held with a customer. Finally, you can track phone customer service records as well as email and chat histories to create a more continuous customer experience for your clientele.
Remote Call Routing
Last, but certainly not least, is the ability to route calls out to remote team members. Even in situations where you would normally need everyone in the office sitting next to each other on the same phone extension. The customer support industry, in particular, is experiencing a remote-work revolution as VOIP makes it possible to route support calls to employee computers no matter where the employee is located.
No longer do you need an entire floor of phone techs, because VOIP handles all the usual call routing hassle internally. If a person is scheduled to take customer service calls, they can be reached on any active device connected to their VOIP account. In or out of the office.
VOIP is one of the best things that has ever happened to modern businesses. No matter what kind of business you run or how much you rely on business phone plan features, VOIP can do all that and more. For further information on VOIP or advice on the right VOIP integration for your business, contact us today!