At the simplest level, a VoIP phone system is a means of making a phone call using an Internet connection rather than using a traditional landline. If you are one of the businesses already using a VoIP hosted phone system, you’ll be familiar with features like call queuing, call transfer and presence or “busy lamp field”. These are standard calling features that you would expect to see on any VoIP provider’s features list. But if you look beyond options like voicemail, call transfer and remote operation, you’ll find a host of other features that can help your business. How many do you know about? Here are a few of our favourites:
- One number: At first the concept of having one business number doesn’t sound like a big deal. But having the ability to use your number on your desk phone, Windows, Mac or mobile device allows you to be professional and available wherever you are. You can have your business phone number on your personal mobile; meaning you no longer need to carry round additional devices. You can have all your devices ring at once, or easily add and remove your One Number from a device; you’re in control of how and when you are contacted. This is real unified comms!
- Call recording: this is increasingly necessary for audit trails, training and for compliance. With most unified comms products you have the choice of all calls or selected calls being recorded as a standard feature. Compliance driven customers benefit from password protected recordings where recordings are stored in secure encrypted data centres.
- Drag and Drop IVR: You may not know what an IVR is, but we are confident that you’ve made a call to one. Otherwise known as Auto-attendant or Virtual Receptionist, IVR stands for Interactive Voice Response, or Intelligent Voice Routing. Press 1 for Sales, Press 2 for Accounts and so on. IVR systems were once expensive and only within the grasp of companies with a big IT budget. Thanks to the cloud, companies of any size, from start-ups to SME can now provide callers with professional greetings and menu options for call routing. Smaller companies can use the IVR feature to build a big company image, whilst larger organisations can build their call-flow to efficiently handle high volumes of calls. You can pre-record your own greetings or use text-to-speech, professional voice prompts, and music-on-hold.
- Video conferencing: if you are looking for a VoIP phone system, its time to think beyond voice and start considering your full communication needs. Make sure you buy a phone system that includes video conferencing as well as voice calling. Its great to be able to share screens and see the person you’re talking to.
- Wallboard: for a contact centre solution using unified comms, make sure you can see which customer service representatives are on the phone and how many live calls are waiting to be connected. You can easily see what is happening in real-time; what calls are coming in, calls per agent, average call times and so on. Wallboard allows you to keep a record of all the calls that have come into your system. Some companies use the wallboard feature to create friendly competition as a way of motivating their sales teams.
- Mobile and desktop applications: a less-known feature of VoIP and unified comms is that you don’t need to have a handset to make and receive calls. Use your computer or mobile phone to make and receive calls by simply downloading the phone system software onto your device of choice, giving you complete mobility and flexibility.
VoIP business phone systems offer a lot more than simply calling features and cost savings. By switching to a cloud-based phone system you can easily benefit from efficient call handling, better customer service, mobility, and improved collaboration.
Firstcom Europe’s cloud telephony system, Universe is suited to businesses of any type or size. Whether you need a handful of subscriptions or a fully unified communications solution for a large team, we can meet your needs.
Click here to see more (https://firstcomeurope.co.uk/universe-voip-phone-system/)
