Category Archives: VOIP

Lesser-Known Benefits of VoIP Phone Systems (Part Two)

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Video conferencing features are one of VoIP phone systems’ many benefits.

Many businesses continue to use legacy telephone systems because it is what they are used to, or simply because they are unaware of the benefits that VoIP phone systems can provide. Not only are VoIP phone systems often a more affordable option, but they provide a variety of unique features that makes these systems the ideal choice for any modern business owner. Not only are these systems portable, making it easy for you and your employees to stay connected from wherever you are, but they also come with additional features not seen in many traditional phone systems that add convenience, improve security, and boost productivity. If you have been debating whether or not to switch your company to a VoIP phone system, here is a look at a few of the lesser-known reasons you should consider doing so.

Training Tools

A particularly useful feature of VoIP phone systems is its training tools. When training employees on how to handle phone calls, you may only be able to hear one side of their conversation, from which you would have to provide feedback after the call has ended. However, a VoIP system can allow you to listen in on an employee’s phone conversation without the customer knowing. Additionally, advanced VoIP phone systems will even provide coaching tools that allow you to speak into an employee’s ear (known as whispering) to provide tips and advice while they are on the phone without the customer hearing. This provides the unique advantage of allowing you to train new hires by guiding them through routine phone conversations in real-time.

Customized Hold Music

Perhaps the only thing worse for customers than being placed on hold is the terrible elevator music callers are often subjected to when they are put on hold. Not only does terrible hold music often begin to irritate callers, but when customers are on hold is also wasted time that you could otherwise use to provide them with valuable information about your company. With a VoIP phone system, you can craft custom hold music that not only replaces elevator music with more popular alternatives, but you can also add pauses in the hold music where a pre-recorded message informs customers about your hours, products/services, website, and potential alternative contact methods. This allows you to take advantage of the time customers are on hold by providing them with useful information that may even answer the question that they had called to ask.

Advanced Conferencing Features

For many managers and business owners, conducting conference calls is something they do on a regular basis. Not only do VoIP phone systems integrate conferencing, making it simple to conduct remote meetings with colleagues and/or customers, but these systems also provide advanced features that can transform the way you conduct conference calls. Beyond just supporting standard conferencing, many VoIP phone systems also allow users to send files, collaborate on calendars, and share presentations or desktops over conference calls, making it simple to get work done remotely or make pitches to customers without having to travel.

Door Entry Buzzer Integration

Advanced VoIP features are all about making things easier for businesses by streamlining services. One way that they can do this is by allowing you to integrate an analog door phone into your VoIP phone system. This allows you to have a two-way conversation with visitors and unlock the door for them from your phone, greatly simplifying this process while enhancing building security.

VoIP phone systems are truly transforming the way that small-to-medium-sized companies conduct business. Contact us to learn more about the unique features VoIP phone systems provide as well as to learn about how a VoIP system could benefit your company.

Lesser-Known Benefits of VoIP Phone Systems (Part One)

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VOIP, communications, remote, phones, technology, systems

VOIP phone systems provide advantages such as transcription and call routing.

Even in the age of emails and social media, the telephone still plays a critical role in the way many companies conduct business. However, the latest technology has definitely begun to shape the way companies use the phone, as VoIP phone systems, and the unique features they provide, give new ways for businesses to take advantage of their phone systems. If you are considering making the switch to a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone system for your business, then it is likely that you have heard about the more popular benefits these systems provide such as portability and reduced costs, however, there are a variety of additional benefits of choosing a VoIP phone system as well. Here are a few of the lesser-known features a VoIP business phone system can provide.

Voicemail to Email Transcription

While staying on top of voicemails is critical in order to ensure that you are responding to clients/customers in a timely matter, listening to all of your voicemails each morning can be time-consuming. Fortunately, VoIP phone systems provide an alternative to listening to each of your messages. With voicemail to email transcription, your voicemail messages can be immediately transcribed into text and sent to your designated email, where you can read them at your leisure at a later time. With voicemail to email transcription, you can scan voicemails quickly for pertinent information, greatly reducing the amount of time you spend reviewing voicemails each day. This also makes it easy to access important information from voicemails such as names, phone numbers, and addresses without having to scramble to write everything down before the message cuts off.

Find Me/Follow Me Call Routing

For business owners who are constantly on the go, a great feature of VoIP is its find me/follow me call routing. If you do not spend the entire day chained to your desk, you may run the risk of missing an important phone call you have been waiting for. Fortunately, your VoIP phone system can help prevent this situation with find me/follow me call routing, which allows you to create a list of numbers where you can be found before a call gets sent to voicemail. For instance, you could program your phone system so that if your office phone does not get picked up after three rings, then the call would be routed to your cell phone for two rings, followed by your home phone. Only after all of the phones on your list have been tried would the call then be routed to your voicemail, increasing the chances that important calls get through to you.

Do Not Disturb

Do Not Disturb (or DND) is another great feature to help prevent important calls from going to voicemail while allowing you to maintain a certain level of professionalism. The fact is that you won’t always be able to answer your phone. Sometimes, it may even be critical that you silence your phone, such as when you are meeting with clients, so that you do not get interrupted. DND not only allows you to temporarily stop incoming calls to your phone when needed, but it also allows you to program your VoIP phone system to redirect calls when you have Do Not Disturb turned on, allowing another colleague to answer the call at the touch of a button. This can then prevent important calls from going to your voicemail.

For businesses that still use legacy telephony services, switching to a VoIP phone system could give them access to a variety of useful features that could help to boost their overall productivity. Contact us to learn more, and look out for our next post as we continue to look at some of the lesser-known benefits of VoIP phone systems.

Unlock Remote Work Opportunities with VOIP

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VOIP, communications, technology, remote work

In today’s new world, remote work opportunities are more common than ever.

VOIP has a great deal of benefit to offer the modern business, from affordable high-end phone services to virtual numbers that are accessible on any device. But the single most important thing that VOIP has to offer is expanding your office phone system into the phones (and hotel rooms) of distant employees. VOIP is one of the essential elements of introducing remote work to a mobilizing company culture. Remote work has a number of incredibly powerful benefits for the modern business, and not just allowing employees to occasionally spend a day working from home in their pajamas.

Hire Distant Employees

The greatest new capability of a company that introduces remote work is hiring talent outside of commuting distance. Without cloud collaboration and integration technology, remote work is very difficult for companies to manage. In many cases, businesses can only work very limitedly with contractors when remote work is needed, or the expertise of a remote professional is needed. Businesses often get job applications from people who are distant, in hopes of a remote offer or a tempting enough relocation package, and most of the time businesses must turn them down. But times are changing.

Rather than having to regretfully turn down those outside a few miles radius or asking great talent to relocate for the job, VOIP gives your business the ability to benefit from their talents. You can give remote employees the freedom to telecommute through VOIP and your other cloud collaboration software. These new highly skilled employees can enjoy a company phone number and even become a fully integrated part of the team without having to move closer to the office.

Boost Morale with Telecommuting Options

For your currently commuting staff, VOIP opens the door to allowing your team to telecommute from home to boost morale. Since the very dawn of computer work, employees have vied for the ability to telecommute and those permitted knew they were part of a small, elite, and privilege number. But cloud technology is making telecommuting ever-more possible with VOIP at the cutting edge of work-at-home integration.

For today’s professionals, staying home and telecommuting every now and then is incredibly enjoyable and feels a lot like taking a vacation at home. Employees can stay home, wear pajama bottoms, and enjoy the company of their cat while getting a full day’s work done. In fact, many businesses discover that employees who occasionally telecommute get more work done in those morale-raising days than they might in the office.

Employees Stay Home Sick and Without Taking a Sick Day

Speaking of greater productivity, remote work also introduces the possibility of sick days without sick days. VOIP makes it possible for professionals to take days away from the office without taking days off of work. When an employee comes down with something contagious, it is both courteous and more comfortable for them to keep it out of the office. This often results in lost productivity for the simple necessity not to spread the illness and not to distract coworkers with sneezes and sniffles.

Now, the option to work from home allows them to keep that illness out of the office and take care of themselves without interrupting their normal workflow. They can even be reached at the same number and share in the call hunting pool while sipping tea and not getting their colleagues sick. Colleagues and clients alike can stay in touch with employees who are home sick while keeping the office safe from spreading illness.

Flexible Work Options for New Parents

Similarly, your employees who take parental leave for a new baby or need to stay home to care for a sick child don’t have to fully tap out of work. There’s no denying that new babies need a lot of care, especially in their first year of life. But not 100% of the time needed at home actually needs to be non-productive. In fact, many parents are missing work long before their child is old enough to trust in the care of a babysitter.

Being able to work from home with VOIP means that responsible parents can log in and get some work done whenever they have a few moments. Since their job is being held for them anyway due to parental leave, this is wonderful for both professional parents and employers. All the hours where the child naps peacefully or plays quietly, parents can log in, turn on their phones, and be at work without having to physically come into the office. Recovering mothers with access to VOIP and other collaboration software often start logging hours again while they are still recovering physically and bonding with the new infant.

Accessibility for Handicapped Professionals

Remote work also provides accessibility in another way. Physically handicapped professionals often have trouble adapting a standard office to what they need to work comfortably. And businesses don’t always have the resources to provide the accommodation that a handicapped professional needs. But home offices can be highly optimized for comfort and convenience. Handicapped professionals have already spent years perfecting the chair, desk, equipment, and environment at home to accommodate their needs, and often look for remote work opportunities to take advantage of that.

In the modern age, skilled professionals with a significant handicap find it much easier to seek find the remote positions that work best for them. By introducing remote work to your policies through VOIP and other cloud software, you open up your ability to hire highly talented people who can only work comfortably when working from home.

Reliable Business Trip Connectivity

Lastly and quite interestingly, VOIP also makes business trips much smoother than they have ever been before. An entirely different style of remote work, roles that require a great deal of travel can stay connected to the internal company cloud phones. Once, traveling for business was a lonely and stressful experience. Employees were cut off for hours, sometimes even weeks at a time. Able to only get work done remotely that might be turned in at the end of the trip. With email, collaboration became possible. With cellphones, it was easier to touch base.

With VOIP, they can remain an extended part of the office culture; continuing to collaborate on projects and communicate with team members fro the same number and interface that they use every day in the office. They can stay in touch with both colleagues and clients through familiar channels. And even if their phones and devices break on the road, any computer terminal with a headset jack and high-speed internet can connect to the VOIP number.

Technology is the leading force of transformation in today’s employment culture. While the war for talent makes good professionals invaluable, technology makes it possible to connect and collaborate from anywhere. Contact us today for more insights on the mobile workforce and connecting with great professionals far and wide.

How Many Ways Can You Communicate Remotely with a VOIP Phone System? – Part 2

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VOIP, communications, remote, phones, technology, systems

With the features of VOIP phones, no communications task is impossible.

Welcome back for part two of our discussion on the different ways you can communicate remotely with a VoIP System in your office.

Customer Chat

VOIP platforms can even connect you with customers through the correct implementation. Provide live chat customer support through your VOIP phone platform because the VOIP platform is a feature-complete for all necessary business communications. Your VOIP platform can be plugged into mobile apps, website widgets, and your own company software to help customers connect when they need assistance through API’s.

Presence Video Chat

The VOIP system goes above and beyond voice communication by also hosting a comprehensive platform for video calls as well. Known as “presence”, your team can appear in a meeting in any combination of ways. Video chat, or video conferencing, is essential for bringing teams together when they cannot share an office in-person. Video chat is responsible for creating a sense of shared workflow while teams are remote.  Whether it’s one person tele-attending an office meeting or an entire team all video-chatting to each other, VOIP can provide.

One on One

One-on-One presence calls allow two people to share a video conversation as if there were sitting across a desk from each other.  This is the most popular way to conduct a face-to-face meeting without sharing the same room. Many people connecting through video chat for the first time will start with one-on-one calls. Or you can even cut it down to one person on video and the other talking video-free or just text chatting.

Video Conference and Team Meetings

The far opposite is video conferencing in which everyone is somewhere distant, projecting their presence into a virtual conference room. This can be used for formal meetings with business partners as well as casual collaboration sessions between team members. Video chats are essential for remote team collaboration and can help to simulate a shared office environment.

Async Office Phones

Lastly, VOIP has covered a few extra bases where there was a communication need but no old-fashioned PBX standard. Mainly, how voice translates to text in an asynchronous fashion. Voicemail and recorded calls are the most difficult to handle forms of business communication. This is because the data must be listened to before it can be properly recorded, acted upon, or stored as useful data. Fortunately, VOIP is the bridge that can quickly transform audio recordings into useable digital transcripts.

Voicemail to Email

Checking your voicemail is a thing of the past, unless you want to. VOIP features can transcribe voicemail into emails so checking your voicemail is as quick and simple as skimming a few short paragraphs. You and your team will never have to waste time listening to voicemails again.

Recorded Calls and Call Transcripts

You can also record calls voluntarily as they are happening, providing a way to keep records, dictate notes, and protect employees in tricky situations. These recordings, like the voicemail, can then be converted into transcripts for textual records as well.

What all can VOIP do for your business? There are so many things you can achieve with cloud-based business communications and VOIP platforms are built to cover them all. With a comprehensive communication platform that goes beyond the classic business phone system, we hope to cover every base you have. And if there’s a form of communication that’s been missed, you can bet the highly compatible integration will take care of it.

The possibilities are endless when bringing VOIP communications to your business. Contact us today to find out more about the many capabilities of VOIP platforms and how to build your VOIP structure for the best possible performance within your current workflow and business plan. You can even expand your capabilities by exploring mobile workforce, remote commuting, and extremely flexible network scaling. We look forward to hearing from your team.