Business VoIP Solutions – 3 Ways you Could Improve Productivity

Organizations are upgrading to business VoIP solutions every passing day and all indicators point to VoIP becoming the standard for telephony. Many companies switch to VoIP for the cost savings and stay for the productivity improvements.  Businesses that have only now started using VoIP may not yet have explored all the features that their system offers. You may soon find that the efficiency improvements are more beneficial than the reduction in your monthly bills.

There are many ways in which business VoIP solutions can help your employees become more productive. What matters more than the number of features you have is how you use it within the company. Sometimes you have to change the configuration or settings of a particular feature to make it work for your users. Other features will be fine working on the default settings. The usefulness of any single feature will depend on the size and type of the business, the industry you operate in and many other variables.

Use Conference Calling More Often

Using conference calls – with or without video – instead of meetings is not a new concept in the business world. However many organizations still don’t use this facility to the maximum extent. Having virtual meetings instead of physically traveling someplace can save a lot of time, money and other resources. So why wouldn’t you use it more often?

There are often a number of reasons why this happens. Generally speaking the interface and experience of conference calling is not very intuitive to users. Nobody is going to use a tool that they actually dislike. Sometimes the feature is not optimized properly with the result of poor quality audio or video. Rather than deal with such issues, your employees may prefer to just meet face-to-face.

Business VoIP solutions bring together audio calling, video chat and conference facilities in one cohesive package. Starting a video conference call is no different than having a regular one-to-one conversation in a VoIP system. If the VoIP system has been optimized properly, the audio and video quality should be pretty good as well. So instead of having an hour long meeting which interrupts everybody’s workday, just schedule a conference call all interested parties. You get things done much quicker with VoIP.

Set up Find Me Follow Me Correctly

The  Find Me Follow Me feature is similar to call hunt groups but designed to work for individuals. Many business users are no longer confined to their office desk during the workday. Sales agents or managers are frequently on the move, traveling between offices and visiting clients. Quite a few businesses also offer the option of working from home or telecommute into their employees. This means that most people have at least 2 devices (a phone and a laptop) that can take calls.

This makes it difficult to keep track of calls from customers, partners or distributors. You keep missing calls if you’re away from your desk too often. On the other hand it is not the caller’s job to know when and where you are all the time so they can call you on the correct device.

Individual users can set up specific times during the weekday which tells the phone system how to direct incoming calls. You can set up all your devices to ring simultaneously, thus letting you answer which device is the closest. The system can also try one device after the other until you take the call. So the order could be something like this – ring mobile device first, then desk phone, then a coworker and finally go to voicemail if there is no answer.

Auto Attendant and IVR

This is yet another underrated feature that is not fully utilized by companies. Nowadays not having the auto attendant feature makes a business look unprofessional. Once confined to only those organizations that can afford such systems, it is becoming essential to even small and medium businesses.

You can set up your business VoIP solution to give many types of information to customers. Some of the most frequently asked questions such as business hours, holiday hours, directions and even upcoming sales or other events can be given by the auto attendant instead of a person. It frees up valuable human resources to deal with more complex issues.

The IVR system can handle short or simple queries without tying up the lines for your tech support teams. For instance, the bulk of your incoming calls may be related to outstanding bills or account information. The IVR can answer such queries based on the number from which the customer is calling or by asking them to input their unique ID.

Using these features can save your employees a lot of time, freeing them up for more productive tasks. Start exploring your VoIP phone system and see what other features will work for your organization!