A business phone system or a PABX is critical to the running of your business and we recommend that a business should aim to have the best one that it can afford. With this in mind it is worth spending some time on selecting the best phone system for your business as it is one of the more important decisions you will make.
If you have been in business for a few years you will be more than aware of the mammoth phone systems that filled large parts of rooms of office buildings. These big phone systems are full of cards, wires and make clicking noises as calls go through them. If your office had a big system and you were in the same room as it, you will remember it from the distinct noise it makes.
Over the past ten years, phone systems have been getting smaller and smaller and it is now the case that a phone system that would have taken up one or two racks in your office can now fit onto the equivalent size of an office computer. With this massive reduction in size, we have also achieved an exponential increase of the available voice services which would have previously only been available to multinational companies but are now available to small and medium sized companies at an affordable price.
In this article we are going to have a look at some of these voice services and what value they bring to you and your business.
Voicemail to email
It is now possible to have your voicemails recorded in sound files and then sent to you via email. If you are out on the road you can open these sound files on your smart phone or on your laptop. This means that you are getting those important messages days and hours before you would have in the past and you are able to now react to potentially critical issues before they become critical.
Conference Calls
A conference call is a call where three or more people are on the same call having a meeting. Conference calls have been around for a number of years now but with the advancements in technology, they are now more widely available and fit the price bracket of all companies. If you are a financial company by law, you may be required to have your conference hardware based in Ireland so as to make sure that any decisions taken on the call are governed by Irish law. One of the major advantages of conference calls is that they can bring people together from locations all over the world to make decisions and discuss items. When you use conference calls with VoIP you get a powerful service that is now truly cost effective. Love them or hate them, conference calls are here to stay and when they are used correctly, they are an asset to your business.
VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) is the glue that now binds all the New Age telephone systems together. I could talk for weeks on this topic alone. It is suffice to say that VoIP sends your voice over the internet when you are making a call and not over the old telephone lines. This means that wherever we have an internet connection we can connect back to our phone system and it also means cheap phone calls to other international destinations that were expensive in the past.
Call Recording
It is now easy to have all the calls that are made to your office recorded for future use should you require this. This can be very useful for training sales and support staff or helping with proof of authorisation if you are a financial company who takes orders over the phone.
CRM Integration
It is now very possible to have your phone system integrated into your customer database or CRM software. This mean that, for example, as you receive a call from a customer, the phone system will be able to fetch the customer details from your CRM and present the customer information to you on your computer screen. This all happens as your phone is ringing and the customer information will be presented to you in your CRM. The benefit of this is of course the superior customer service you can provide to your customers and more targeted marketing practice and sales options.
If your company has one of the old phone systems that you are using just for making phone calls and receiving phone calls, now may just be the time to take advantage of some serious advancements in phone system technology.
If you would like to update or purchase a new phone system please contact iPing.