Three Innovative Uses of VoIP in the Office

For decades, businesses have bought phone services the same way as other essential services like power and water. It didn’t really make much difference which vendor supplied you with these services. All that clients cared about was the final cost. The advent of VoIP didn’t change the equation much either – many organizations switched over for the cost savings more than anything else.

But it’s about time enterprises thought about VoIP as a competitive advantage. You can deploy VoIP in innovative ways within the office, giving you an edge over the competition. VoIP phone services are no longer commodities, you can customize and personalize them to suit internal workflows.

Even better, you can build intelligent applications using VoIP as the underlying platform. This flexibility can help your business work in new ways that were either impossible or impractical with legacy systems. Take a look at three innovative ways you can deploy VoIP in your office today:

Using VoIP As an Extension of Your Brand

When was the last time you thought about hold music? You know, the music your callers hear when they’re waiting to speak with service specialists. What about voicemail messages, holiday greetings, and other audio touchpoints? Every single instance is another chance to cement your branding in the eyes of the customer.

But the truth is that most small businesses don’t have the time to worry about brand building. And before VoIP, you didn’t have the means to build out your brand over the phone. Most VoIP services give you the tools to customize hold music, voice recordings, voicemail prompts etc. You can choose from hundreds of samples to select the ones that best represent your brand. You can also swap them out at a moment’s notice. How’s this useful? Imagine the brand building opportunities when you can tailor recordings according to the time, season and even location of your callers.

Suppose you have customers in different countries. Every area will have its own holidays, festive seasons etc. So a caller from one country will hear custom greetings appropriate to their location instead of random messages that have no meaning to them.

Innovative Uses of VoIP in the Virtual Office

Few organizations dreamed of the extent to which VoIP can support virtualization. VoIP supports everything from call forwarding to ringing multiple devices at a time. You can even replicate a call center environment – with all the associated features – for your workers even when they’re not in the office.

Now, many small businesses believe they don’t need such advanced functionality. Maybe none of your employees work from home. But that is the situation today and it is sure to change in the future. Imagine being able to hire new employees from any location. You are not restricted to potential candidates who are within driving distance of your office.

Another way to use this feature is if you have offices in different locations. You can easily move employees from one location to another and they can take their phone numbers with them. No more waiting for new wiring or configuration. New employees also don’t have to wait for their phone numbers and lines. You can add or remove numbers through a web dashboard in a few minutes!

VoIP and Complex Routing Rules

At the current level of technology, VoIP supports complex routing rules. Consider the following situation where a salesperson has to leave the office for a training session. With older systems, you could transfer incoming calls to voicemail or have someone else handle the customers. You don’t have many more options or fine grained control over how to treat individual calls.

In the same scenario, VoIP allows you to set priority rules for incoming calls such as:

• Transfer incoming calls to voicemail if there is no answer
• Forward calls from manager to a personal mobile phone but not if it’s the weekend or after office hours
• If an important customer calls, route call to a specific colleague and send an instant message to a mobile phone
• Send transcribed voicemails to email inbox as attachments along with the original voice message

These rules might appear complex but VoIP systems can easily handle them today. You don’t even need to spend hours setting them up or need an expert to do it. Most hosted VoIP services allow you to set these rules with an easy-to-use interface. But vendors are working to push this feature to the next level. Think of all the time you could save if the system was intelligent enough to implement these rules on its own! Callers will never reach the wrong person and your workers won’t be disturbed when they’re busy.

So, there you have it. Don’t just use VoIP in the same old manner. Use this opportunity to rethink the way you do business every day!