Phone Systems Featured Article

While customers are increasingly relying on communications channels such as social media and chat for their interactions with businesses, that doesn’t mean that office phones are less busy; calling is still a vital and often used means of interacting with businesses, especially in the B2B space.

Missing calls is never a good idea, but for businesses it can mean lost sales and missed opportunities. Businesses that don’t reliably answer their phones and return calls immediately also hurt their brand; few things communicate amateur business behavior more than not answering your phone.

Thankfully, missed calls need never happen in the age of VoIP, even when natural disasters such as hurricanes or blizzards attack.

That’s because VoIP usually comes with robust routing functionality that helps businesses connect callers with employees even when employees are not in the office.

The four key features that make this possible are call forwarding, simultaneous ringing, follow me functionality, and cloud-based voicemail.

Call forwarding redirects calls to another phone, whether that phone is the personal cell phone of an employee, a home office, or a different phone in the office. This feature ensures that no call to a business ends in a dead end.

Simultaneous ringing is another approach that makes sure all calls get answered. With simultaneous ringing, an incoming call can ring on several phones at once. So even if an employee is only away from his desk for lunch break, he still can take the call from his cell phone or another employee designated to take the calls can answer it.

Follow me functionality also can be useful. It allows businesses to set a predefined sequence where an incoming call will ring at a particular number, then the call will ring to a different number after that. A calling tree can then be set up where an incoming call will bounce around until someone answers it.

Finally, VoIP also offers cloud-based voicemail in most cases. This means that even if an incoming call does go to voicemail, employees can see and access the message more quickly and no matter where they are located.

It all adds up to an insurance policy against missed calls. VoIP ensures that calls to a business are never missed.