A Secret to Small Business Success: Make Every Caller Feel Important

It’s no secret. The most critical element in any business relationship is in the very first interaction, which is often times a first call placed into an organization. Ongoing success lies in delivering a positive customer experience with each and every interaction thereafter. If a business is able to create a sense of accomplishment with its initial interaction, regardless of the actual outcome of the call, the customer leaves with a feeling that his concerns are being addressed, and the positive experience manifests itself in many ways, such as repeat business and word-of-mouth recommendations.

How can you accomplish this? The obvious answer is to ensure your customer service staff are the best in the business, and ensure you have an effective training and coaching program in place for them, including frequent product and service education.

However, while the concept is simple, implementation can be more of a challenge. After all, you’re a smaller business, without the resources of your larger competitors – you have neither the budget to deploy expensive, yet feature-rich enterprise communications systems, nor do you have the IT staff to manage complex platforms in-house.

One-Stop for all Small Business Needs

That’s where a full-service small business communications provider like Cbeyond (News - Alert) can step in and help. Since its inception a decade ago, Cbeyond has had a singular mission to deliver traditionally elusive enterprise communications services to the small business owner, and has leveraged its innovation and partnerships to build a service set tailored to the small business owner.

The idea was that small businesses would want – and should have access to – integrated communications services at a price point they can afford and without the deployment and management complexities of typical enterprise solutions. By leveraging a next generation VoIP network and software-based architecture, Cbeyond is bringing converged voice and data communications to small businesses on a single, integrated platform.

Small Details Drive Big Impact: Introducing Virtual Receptionist

First, small businesses need to be aware of their customers’ needs – more than what services or products they need, but an understanding of the most frequent and fundamental information they often request. While this information may seem trivial, being able to easily provide basic, yet important details quickly can be the difference between satisfaction and frustration. Typical examples include driving directions, hours of operation or how to reach a particular person.

Understanding the value of these details, while realizing that most small businesses can ill afford the administrative staff to handle these questions on a regular basis, Cbeyond has added its Virtual Receptionist service to its product suite, which intelligently routes calls to the appropriate individual or recorded information, based on time-based schedules and caller voice prompts.

The functionality of Virtual Receptionist allows small businesses to easily and cost-effectively route their callers to the information they need, whether that is pre-recorded information on monthly specials, holiday hours, or an easy to navigate employee directory based on name or department. In fact, Virtual Receptionist is built to accommodate any scenario and can route calls to any 10-digit phone number, as well as to Cbeyond’s cloud-based voice mail service, which becomes an integrated part of the employee directory, particularly useful when people can’t be disturbed or don’t have a directly reachable number.

The flexibility built into Virtual Receptionist includes the capability to run on pre-determined schedules, based on day of week, time of day, or routinely switching on and off based on other situational factors, such as when the receptionist is on the phone or busy with other tasks.

Importantly for small businesses, Virtual Receptionist is easy to set up with a slick user interface, taking as little as 15 minutes from logging onto Cbeyond’s customer portal, Cbeyond Online.

According to Jon Harmer, senior product manager for messaging and collaboration at Cbeyond, Virtual Receptionist is simple. “Non-techsavvy users can log in and use the Flash-based interface to configure what is typically a fairly technical solution, without the need for any voice recording, thanks to the use of text-to-speech technology.”

The text-to-speech feature provides an easy way to configure and re-configure the system, which can be done remotely from anywhere users have Internet access, adding even greater flexibility.

Aside from the ease-of-use and flexibility of Virtual Receptionist, one of the biggest benefits to the small business owner is the professional feel that the system provides to all callers. This automation in the form of a man or woman’s voice selected by the owner showcases to customers a professional brand that is always in a good mood and routes appropriately. The addition of Virtual Receptionist to any small business is an immediate brand enhancer.

By providing a simple, integrated auto-attendant and IVR solution, Virtual Receptionist offers small businesses, who likely have an old, rigid IVR system attached to their PBX (News - Alert), an opportunity to increase the value of their communications solutions while reducing costs and management efforts. For businesses that leverage professional talent for recordings, it provides an additional cost savings with a professional quality software-based voice generator. For the existing Cbeyond customer, Virtual Receptionist provides a much-needed integrated solution for managing incoming calls effectively, including system set-up and modification.

For prospective businesses, it represents another element of a completely integrated communications solution, including fixed and mobile voice, voice mail, fax, Internet, and more, at a price point designed for small businesses.

In either case, Virtual Receptionist provides a platform that ensures not only that every call is answered and that callers have easy access to the information they need, but also offers the flexibility for each business to set up the system to meet their unique and evolving requirements.

“This is the enterprise-class solution for small businesses,” says Harmer. “We make it very simple for small business owners to interact with it and manage it.”

In that simplicity lies the secret for small businesses to ensure that each caller will feel important enough to hang up satisfied. IT

For more on Cbeyond’s Virtual Receptionist service, visit http://www.cbeyond.net/services/virtual-receptionist.htm.

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