How to use voice tech to communicate better with customers

Chris says: “As long as you have got an internet connection your business telephone number will come through to whatever device you are working on. This means you can give your customers a single telephone number for you, and regardless of your location, you can always take their calls. Companies which have still got older telephone systems using ISDN are very much tied to a physical premises and so the only option for them is to forward calls to mobiles. But with VoIP that is not an issue; you can literally get your desk phone and plug it into an internet connection and start taking calls - and your customers will be none the wiser. Moving your phone system to the cloud with a leading VoIP provider gives you and your team the freedom and the flexibility to work from anywhere.”

Chris says: “In the past getting a phone system meant buying equipment that you would need to upgrade, and so you might have only been able to afford a £2,000 phone system with limited features. But with VoIP you are subscribing to a monthly service for a shared platform which gives you access to all the features that the big companies use. This means that you can now get features like call recording, for example, which in the past only larger companies would have had. If you have your whole team working from home it is quite handy to have call recording in place so you can keep an eye on what is going on and very useful when you need to have difficult conversations with customers – just knowing that the call is being recorded can help.”

Chris says: “Another advantage of a cloud VoIP system is where multiple people in your business share a similar role. It could be that you have got one phone number for your sales team, for example, and when somebody rings that number, all of the sales teams’ phones ring, meaning less missed calls. In times gone by you would be in an office and everyone’s phone would start ringing, but now if there are five people in the sales team all working from home, their phones will all ring at the same time and whoever answers it first will take the call.”

Chris says: “Most of the time our customers don’t use music on hold – instead they use the music on hold feature to deliver messaging to customers. That might be marketing messages telling customers about a new promotion, for example, so whilst your customer is waiting on the phone you can market to them. But actually, what we are finding more now is that because of the pandemic people are using those messages to give informational notices, for example to say that they are dealing with exceptionally high call volumes at the moment. That kind of functionality is something that big companies often use, but now it is accessible to small business owners too.”

Chris says: “Switching to a VoIP system in the cloud means that you can get almost unlimited telephone numbers. So, if you are running a marketing campaign in Newcastle, for example, you can get a local Newcastle number added to your system for as little as £1 as a one-off cost. That will give you a phone number there and then that you can use in your marketing campaign.”