Getting the Most From your VoIP System – Tips and Tricks to Improve efficiency – Part 2

In the previous article, we talked about a few tips and tricks to improve the efficiency of your VoIP system. Most of them like auto provisioning and training are one time tasks that you should do before or during initial deployment. In this piece, let us take a look at some more things you can set up to boost productivity. These quick tips should let allow you to get the most out of your new system during everyday use.

Configure ‘Find Me Follow Me’ Features

As you know modern VoIP systems enable you to use multiple devices with the same number. It is convenient for those times when you are away from the office, working from home, on the road or at a conference. You can still make calls and stay in touch with clients, team members and managers. But what happens when someone wants to call you? How does the system know which device is currently with you?

There are 2 ways an employee can handle incoming calls. One option is to set up the system so that all your devices ring at once. It leaves you free to answer calls on the nearest phone or computer. The caller doesn’t have to know to call the landline or your mobile device, all of them will ring. This is very useful if you have an erratic schedule or constantly travel.

The second option is to set up some rules so that only certain phones ring at different times during the day. Suppose you work from home 2 days in a week. Those days, you can configure the system to call your mobile device. On all other days, it will ring your desk phone. Most systems will let you set up a daisy chain of devices – first ring the IP phone, then the mobile, then the softphone etc. If you don’t answer the call on one device, it will go on to the next. If you don’t answer anywhere, it will send the caller to voicemail.

No more fumbling around with missed calls or poor customer experience. Your workforce will be much more productive if this feature is enabled and correctly setup.

Use the IVR and Auto Attendant Effectively

Interactive Voice Response and auto attendant are not new features that are exclusive to VoIP. They’ve been around for awhile now. However, it wasn’t freely available to many businesses. Enabling those features was an expensive proposition that only larger corporations could afford. A VoIP system brings them to smaller businesses at an affordable price. Most vendors include them in their plans, so there is no need to pay extra.

You can use IVR in a few ways. One useful task it can perform is to inform callers about your business while they wait to reach a person. It can be anything like your usual hours of operation or special holiday timings, upcoming sales and so on. Normally customers would have to ask a person, now they have that information in less time. It frees up your support agents to handle more complex queries from other customers.

You can also program the system to give customers account specific information like account balances or outstanding bills based on the number they’re calling from. It might seem like a small feature but the productivity boosts are significant. The only thing more valuable to a business than money is time and a VoIP system can save you plenty of it!

Setup Automatic Voicemail Transcription

Voicemail is useful to any business but the way you access and store messages is a cumbersome process. VoIP systems provide more efficient ways for a business to handle voicemail. For one thing, it can send your voicemails directly to the email inbox and transcribe them as well. So you can treat voicemails just like emails. Delete them, save them for later or note down the details you need. All from the comfort of your computer!

It can save individual users plenty of time that is otherwise wasted in manual transcription or scribbling down important data on pieces of paper. The collective savings for your business also quickly add up. Think of all the useful data that is locked up in your old voicemail messages. They are difficult to organize, take up lots of storage space and there is no useful method of analyzing them for valuable insights.

Your VoIP system can transcribe them into text messages which are easier to store and analyze. You can enable transcription for both old voicemails and new ones in real time. Instead of storing gigabytes of voice data, transform them into easily retrievable text documents.

VoIP systems often serve as a foundation for unified communication tools. But it doesn’t mean you’ve to wait until you deploy UC to improve efficiency within your organization. Get started today!