Lisa and I were recently in Scottsdale for a conference with some fantastic speakers on a variety of topics. Each one a bit different from the last. We had speakers on marketing, customer service, sales, and many on technical training on the VoIP product itself. It was a great mixture of speakers to constantly keep us engaged and wanting to come back and soak up more. Each speaker had a unique way of presenting and one thing was for certain…there was a certain power in their voice.
One of the technical speakers presented common terms and definitions of what your business voice service has the capability to do. Every business is unique in how they operate, which makes being able to customize your voice service so powerful to you. Perhaps you too have heard some of these telecom buzz words and wondered what it means or how it could impact your business?
- Recording – the ability to record your calls with your customers. This can be done either on an individual call basis by pushing a button to record, or on an all call basis where you can capture all calls and scroll through to find a specific call you needed. Call recording is great for many reasons, project managers tracking project changes and requests, law enforcement, outbound call centers for training, just to name a few.
- Monitoring – There are a couple of different meanings to the term Monitoring. Maybe you are a supervisor of a new hire and you want to monitor their calls for training purposes by listening in or whispering to the trainee some suggestions on what to say next. Or maybe monitoring to you means that you can see presence of who is on the phone or in meetings and who is available to be transferred a call or answer a quick question via chat.
- SCA – Shared Call Appearance (SCA) is the ability to have more than one device tied to an individual user. You can have the typical desk phone, but also have the same appearance through an app on your mobile device, desktop, or even your tablet. Giving you the ability to work from literally anywhere on any device.
- ACD – Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) means your system can recognize the incoming call and routes it to a group of individuals based on pre-defined conditions. For instance, maybe you have two individuals in your company who take 90% of the incoming calls. You set parameters to have it ring those two individuals first, and then if they do not answer or it is busy, it flows to another group of users.
- Reporting – Ever wondered how many calls your employees are taking, what their average call duration is, when are your phones the busiest. Call reporting can be as simple as giving you individual call history or as sophisticated as allowing you to run reports and be able to make decisions based on the results. For instance, we had a client who discovered that one of their busiest times was at the end of the day, when most of their employees were clocking out. This allowed them to adjust their staffing needs to capture that call volume.
- Campaigns – Ever wonder how effective your marketing campaigns are? You can integrate your newsletters with a click to dial offer or assign a dedicated number on an ad in the magazine and run reports to track those calls for effectiveness.
- IVR – Interactive Voice Response (IVR) is the ability for you to do things like add a short “how’d we do” survey at the end of the call. Or, the ability to route calls through voice recognition instead of pressing buttons. Imagine automating your business so that after every service call an automatic call is made to the customer to make sure their service needs were handled ok. If someone scored anything less than a 3 on a 5 point scale where 5 is the highest, that call gets routed to a live person to resolve and leave your customer with a positive experience.
- Receptionist Console – No more is the need to add additional hardware to the receptionist phone so everyone in the company has a unique button. Now you can have a monitor where you can see presence of the company directory and determine visually who is available. You can answer calls and transfer to people with the click of a mouse. Or, you can simply IM/Chat with an employee if the caller on the other end has a quick question that you need an answer to, for example, are my documents ready for me to swing by and sign?
The voice is a powerful tool for any business. Conversations can be had through so many means of social media, email, chat…but sometimes isn’t it just easier to use your voice to have the two-way conversation and get the answer you were looking for?
Our office is hosting a series of small breakfast or lunch seminars on Friday, 11-17-17 with one of our vendor partners on VoIP. If you would like to join us and find out more about any of the above buzz words, we would love to have you join us! Just let us know.
