Having your own business is exciting but can be exhausting not to mention challenging at the same time.
For
most of us, it starts by doing all the work yourself, but eventually as
your business grows, you will need people to help you do the job. And
whilst your business is growing internally and in customer numbers, the
number of potential buyers is also increasing. This means, that you’ll
have to handle more and more (often pre-sales) customer inquiries. This
can be hard at times, and rapid growth and success can show you that the
processes you have in place, are not up to par, not scalable or just
not suited and the customer handling can go pear shaped, leading to
losing potential customers, sales and a tarnished reputation. All
because you are successful!
Avoiding business disasters and building a rock solid reputation
A cloud business phone
with multiple integrated functions can be a very helpful tool. This is a
phone system that connects over the internet and that stores
significant pieces of information and is able to combine multiple pieces
this information. For instance customer details and notes on previous
contacts, and all is not stored locally, but in the cloud. Combining
these functions into an intelligent business phone system can save you
significant money, and more important, will enable your team to work
more efficiently, and from any location where they have internet.
Another very big advantage of a cloud pbx system
is that they are more secure than an in-house PBX for telephony,
combined with each team member’s individual computer and software. In
case of a cloud based telephony solution, your service provider handles
all software maintenance and upgrades, including security policies and
for instance firewalls. This enables you to use the expertise of a
dedicated team that works at your service provider, without any further
outlay or effort. Even if your network at your office would be
compromised and hackers would try to use your internet phones, this
sudden spike in your traffic would automatically trigger red flags at
your provider, as traffic is constantly monitored by algorithms.
Monitoring, analysing and better use of resources
Cloud phone system for small business
have real-time monitoring, reporting and analysis tools, that were in
the past the exclusive domain of the big companies. You can monitor the
number of incoming calls a day, which allows you to adjust manpower at
certain times and with that, place your resources there where needed.
Imagine to be able to accommodate all the incoming calls!
You
will also be able to get a better idea of the most common FAQs, simply
by listening to recordings. This will help you to build potentially
automated processes, templated answers or post these topics on your
website in an FAQ section or wiki. The more customers can find on your
website, the lower the workload on your team will be.
At the
same, the system helps you to gather more hard data, especially when the
cloud phone system is combined with other features, such as ticketing.
That would enable you to cross link information and better understand
potential weaknesses in your processes, team or sold products. On a team
level, you can also determine easily which team members would need
extra help, and who is performing outstandingly, which makes performance
based rewards much easier.
It’s not depending on your local conditions
On
top of it, unlike your old wired and local phone system, which can be
prone to damages, power outages or hardware failures, cloud-based phone
systems are managed by your service provider. Even if the internet
connection to your premises stops working, your phone services will not
be affected and customers will not listen to a busy or unavailable tone.
At
your provider level, their systems have disaster recovery, redundant
systems, back-up policies, when at times there are man-made or natural
disasters affecting your internet connection, the information is secured
on a cloud level, on dedicated servers. With premises based system this
is far harder to achieve and this should give you additional peace of
mind and less to worry about.
Service providers have mostly
multiple routing points where their cloud based calls break out to
existing, traditional networks. If a route goes down due to a local
outage, most providers have a redundant infrastructure with additional
resources and junctions – the takeaway here is that the cloud based
telephone systems are much more resilient and flexable that the
traditional networks.
Embrace the future and get an intelligent business communication system
In
summary, using a cloud-based phone system that serves multiple channels
is a great step into working more effective – for any business. It
gives your security, flexibility and will save you time and money.
Intelligent cloud based business phone systems will also help you to
make your processes smoother and shorten the line between your sales,
customer service staff and the actual customer. Complete peace of mind
can never be purchased, but having given your communication a good
thought and choosing the right tool (such as this one) for will make it
as good as it gets.
