Your new marketing campaign was a huge success and your office is receiving the highest level of calls you’ve ever experienced in your growing business. Your staff is taking live calls, checking voicemail and returning customer inquiries as fast as they can. Can you imagine the impact if your phone system goes down mid-morning – at the peak of the call volume? Who knows why disaster strikes? It could be a clumsy utility worker, a lightening storm or some other unpredictable problem. Phone system issues are a reality with traditional telecommunications systems and can create enormous business headaches for you. If your business hasn’t planned for adversity with a disaster or redundancy plan, those kinds of communication failures can significantly disrupt your business from, well, doing business. What is your communication continuity plan? In the past, developing a disaster recovery plan meant that your IT staff would need to re-engineer your business phone system so it could be recovered successfully. If you’re a growing business, you likely don’t have that kind of unlimited resources for equipment and infrastructure. This is where cloud communication can help. Cloud phone systems have greatly advanced system recovery and business continuity in the face of an outage. They’re hosted virtually, so there’s no need to worry about the types of disastrous scenarios that used to disrupt on-premise or landline phone services. If a phone line is cut, cloud-based systems are totally unaffected. If Internet service goes down, phone calls can be re-routed to backup cell phone numbers or other business offices. 3 Essential Business Benefits of Switching to the Cloud As you think about a continuity plan for your phone system, there are several important benefits to the cloud that you want to consider.
Simply put, recovery and continuity is a non-issue. With these benefits in mind, the question, then, is why you wouldn’t switch to the cloud?
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What if you were challenged by your CEO to hire a significant number of new employees within the next 6 months? He would want you to find the right talent that will do the jobs exceptionally well and meet the demands of your growing business. As a senior manager, you know that finding employees with the right stuff will require you to look outside of your current office locations. Your goal is to find the right people – location is no longer critical. And, you need to remain close to the new team with fewer layers and more attentive communication. Of course each new employee will have a personal smartphone they can use remotely, but you know that business calls are better conducted on a private line that provides more reliable call quality. You need your team to be efficient and professional as quickly as possible. How will you ensure you have a phone system for the new remote employees that will enable them to be productive right away? You know your current on-premise phone system may limit the efficiency and capabilities of your off-site staff. On-Premise Phone Systems May Limit Remote Employees Generally, the benefits of on-premise phone systems are about reliability, caller identification, and voicemail functionality. Businesses that have onsite systems want to maintain control of their technology, have concerns about data privacy and often have international locations. Modern cloud phones systems, on the other hand, allow employees (including remote workers) to:
Is a Cloud Phone System the Solution? With cloud-based VoIP technology, you no longer have to deal with these challenges. Onboarding a new remote employee is as simple as purchasing a phone, connecting it to the Internet and downloading some software.
Gone are the added setup, management, maintenance costs and headaches. Your employees have immediate access to the exact same functionality as your on-site employees. And perhaps best of all, cloud phone providers ensure your phone system is constantly upgraded and protected. All these changes provide your company improved uptime, call reliability and customer experience. In a word, a cloud-based phone system just makes things simpler. If you’re looking for a more effective way to sync remote workers to your company’s network, then you may want to consider moving to the cloud. Your remote employees — and their customers — will thank you for it. If you’d like to examine cloud phone system options for your company, contact us and let’s determine what makes the most sense for your company’s situation. If you make money using the phone, then your phone system needs to be a business enabler, not an inhibiter. It needs to differentiate your business from your competition. Your prospects must be able to reach you in a timely manner. Your customers need to find you wherever you are, at the front desk, in a meeting or outside the office. In short, your phone system needs to work for you, not against you. Your business communications system needs to ensure you have the best tools that will help you do a better job with your customer…today and tomorrow. Below are two ways an onsite phone system can improve the customer experience by improving flexibility and enhancing reachability. Improving flexibility through work groups When a customer or prospect calls your company and the phone rings endlessly without being picked up, or it goes to a general voicemail box, they may question how capable your business is. Since today’s customers have higher expectations than ever before, you want to give the impression to current and potential customers that you can serve them the way they want to be served, regardless of whether your employees are in the office or working remotely. A ShoreTel Connect ONSITE phone system allows you to improve your business’s flexibility by routing calls using the power of work groups. Here’s how: Work groups can be created to respond to what’s happening in your business. For example, you might have a new advertising campaign and you need more people ready to answer the phone. Perhaps there are changing weather conditions and you need to re-route how support is handled. Or you want to better enable how calls are routed to a call center team and establish a top-down or longest idle calling pattern so your best salesperson or available call center consultant gets the next call. You may even have a business that requires seasonal considerations like greetings or auto attendance during high call volumes. Using work groups gives you speed and flexibility in how you organize your employees and respond to your customers, allowing you to deliver a consistent level of service no matter the dynamics taking place in your business. Enhancing Reachability for Mobile Employees Today’s business reality is such that if you aren’t reachable and you aren’t set up to respond to your customers, then your customers will go elsewhere. Reachability is how easy it is for a customer or prospect to locate you or your team. It’s not just how long it takes to reach them, but how easily a customer can access them. Employees are no longer tied to an office or a desk phone. You need to make sure your staff has a mobile office with them. A ShoreTel Connect ONSITE phone system can help your employees be more reachable by allowing your phone to find you or key staff members wherever they are. ShoreTel Connect ONSITE gives you the ability to use external assignment rules that have phones ring wherever an employee is – whether that’s in a meeting, traveling or at a client site. It can even mean having several phones ring at the same time, say, your desk and cell phone ringing simultaneously. World-class phone systems using unified communications allow you to implement tools making you and your team more accessible through Microsoft Outlook integration, and desktop sharing and mobility features like find me/follow me. These basic communication and collaboration tools are a must in today’s business environment and critical for future business success. Such capabilities enable your staff to be reachable no matter where employees are located or what type of technology may come next. That’s a differentiator your customers will appreciate. Creating a Better Customer Experience You pride yourself on how you serve your customers. If your current phone system isn’t helping you be flexible and reachable, then it might be inhibiting your business – not enabling it.
It’s time to consider how your business communications can help you even better serve your customers…now and in the future. If you’d like to evaluate how your phone system can be a business enabler by implementing ShoreTel Connect ONSITE, email us at info@btxchange.com or give us a call at (408) 374-8727. |