Can you get your voicemail when your not in the office?
Voicemail is an important part of business communication, but it can be a nuisance to manage. Why should you have to replay all your messages to find the one you need to hear again? What do you do if you press the wrong key and accidentally delete an important message? The good news is that there’s a VoIP feature that lets you receive all your voicemail in your inbox. This feature, logically, is called voicemail to email.
Messages in your inbox
When you enable the feature, your VoIP system forwards each message to your inbox as an audio attachment. The subject line and text will tell you when it arrived, what number, and the caller’s name if it’s available. You can choose to delete messages from your voicemail automatically when they’re sent, or to leave them there. Leaving them gives you extra flexibility, but auto-deletion guarantees your voicemail will never be full.
Once the messages are in your inbox, you can employ all the tools that are available for managing email. You can sort them into folders, mark them as high-priority, and forward them. You can set up filters to highlight messages from some callers and mark others as spam.
Sometimes an old voicemail message is the only place you have an important piece of information, such as a caller’s phone number. Being able to get back to it easily can save a business deal.
The limit on your messages is only the limit on your inbox. That’s usually a very generous cap, but voice attachments are large, so you may need to delete or archive old messages.
Messages as audio files
The attachment holding the voice message is an audio file, usually in MP3 or WAV format, so you can treat it as an independent file. This is useful for archival purposes. You can save the attachment as a file, delete the message from your inbox, and have a permanent record. This way you can save as many messages as you want, organizing them into folders using any scheme. For instance, you can save all voice messages from a supplier and save having to ask questions they’ve already answered.
Transcription to text
You can choose to have the VoIP system put a text transcription of each message into your email. This will save time when reviewing your messages, especially if you’re in a noisy environment where it’s hard to make out what the caller said. Copying down phone numbers while listening to voicemail is seriously annoying. Having the number in the transcription is much easier.
Not all voice transcriptions will be equally useful. If the signal-to-noise ratio is poor, the transcription could be spotty. Even so, it will often give you enough of the message to tell whether it needs your immediate attention or not. Sometimes the transcription could even pick up words that you have trouble identifying.
Extra convenience
Letting your VoIP service send your voicemail to your email makes the messages far more convenient to handle. All your communications are in one place. You can review the messages at your desktop as well as your phone.
If you know your associates are using voicemail to email, you can be more confident that they’ll get your voice messages and notice them. People are apt to ignore or lose messages on their phones, but if they’re getting them in email, they’ll pay more attention to them, and you’re more likely to get a response on the first try.
SystemsNet offers hosted PBX and VoIP, with features including conferencing, auto attendants, “follow me,” voicemail to email, and much more. Contact us to learn how you can have a better business phone system.