How To Grow Your Business With VoIP.
There’s a lot more to VoIP that meets the eye - it’s not just a way to get rid of line rental costs. In this blog we’ll explore 10 ways a VoIP system can help your business to grow.
1. Softphone Applications
A great feature of VoIP is the fact that you can use your system anywhere there’s data, using softphone applications. This means that if you have employees who travel a lot, such as engineers in site or field sales employees, they’ll be able to use the in-house VoIP system.
As an IP Telecom Hosted PBX customer, you’ll have free internal calls, so communication between your remote teams couldn’t be easier.
2. Call Recording
It’s a lot easier to get your calls recorded using a VoIP system, as calls are stored in the cloud and can be easily accessed. IP Telecom Call Recording gives our Hosted PBX customers the option to record some or all of their inbound and outbound calls - and recording can be stopped mid-call to allow for sensitive information to be gathered like credit card or bank details. IP Telecom can retain call recordings for either 2 years, 5 years or 10 years.
3. Voicemail to email & Fax to email
Voicemails are converted into a .wav file and sent to your email so you can listen to voicemails even when you’re not near your phone. You’ll also be able to access faxes to your email, meaning you won’t need to have a fax machine in the office that you’ll have to pay line rental for.
4. Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
Uploading an IVR into a VoIP system is as easy as recording a file and uploading it to the cloud, there’s no need for hardware, and IVR’s can be easily be changed as needed. An IVR can then be related to a ring group (see below). For example, an IVR can be as simple as “press 1 for sales, 2 for support, 3 for accounts” etc., then a ring group can be set up to reflect the recording.
5. Ring Groups
When using an on-site PBX system, a ring group will require an engineer to set this up and modify ring groups on-site. This can prove costly as well as time consuming if you are depending on an external company to do this for you. By using VoIP from IP Telecom, you will have access to a web portal so changes can be done to any ring groups quickly and as often as you need.
6. Door Entry Buzzer Integration
A handy extra to have, door entry can be managed through your phone system. This allows two-way conversation, and doors can be unlocked from your own desk as well.
7. ERP Integration
VoIP can integrate with a range of ERP systems, The way this works is that customers are able to click on a phone number within a system to initiate a call and their handset or soft phone will begin calling that number. Likewise, when a customer or prospect is dialing inbound, the application can have the ability automatically offer to open on that customer account and allow those activities to be logged and tracked for reporting purposes. IP Telecom are happy to announce that we’ve been working on CRM integrations to be launched in early 2020!
8. Disaster Recovery
One of the main concerns people have with VoIP is that if the broadband goes down, you lose your phones completely until the systems are back up and running. This is not the case! When using VoIP, you’re actually reducing the risks for downtime as there are failover options available to you. You can switch to a secondary broadband connection, or divert to a different number.
9. Call Queues
Just like ring groups, call queues can be managed easily online as opposed to potentially paying an engineer to come on site to do this for you. Queues can be arranged so that if a call wasn’t answered, it could be sent to another person in the queue or to sent to a different queue altogether.
10. Call Reporting
Some of the most important reports for sales, marketing, support and customer service departments are derived from the number of calls made, received, average number of calls, longest hold time, call handling time, calls abandoned and other important information. All of this information can be easily accessed using Call Centre solutions, and IP Telecom is preparing to release it’s new Call Centre LITE solution in early 2018, where customers will have a simple dashboard with a handful of reports available to them as well as call queuing with announcements where a caller is in a queue.