Having your own business is exciting but can be exhausting not to mention challenging at the same time.
For most of us, it starts by doing all the work yourself, but eventually as your business grows, you will need people to help you do the job. And whilst your business is growing internally and in customer numbers, the number of potential buyers is also increasing. This means, that you’ll have to handle more and more (often pre-sales) customer inquiries. This can be hard at times, and rapid growth and success can show you that the processes you have in place, are not up to par, not scalable or just not suited and the customer handling can go pear shaped, leading to losing potential customers, sales and a tarnished reputation. All because you are successful!
Avoiding business disasters and building a rock solid reputation
A cloud business phone with multiple integrated functions can be a very helpful tool. This is a phone system that connects over the internet and that stores significant pieces of information and is able to combine multiple pieces this information. For instance customer details and notes on previous contacts, and all is not stored locally, but in the cloud. Combining these functions into an intelligent business phone system can save you significant money, and more important, will enable your team to work more efficiently, and from any location where they have internet.
Another very big advantage of a cloud pbx system is that they are more secure than an in-house PBX for telephony, combined with each team member’s individual computer and software. In case of a cloud based telephony solution, your service provider handles all software maintenance and upgrades, including security policies and for instance firewalls. This enables you to use the expertise of a dedicated team that works at your service provider, without any further outlay or effort. Even if your network at your office would be compromised and hackers would try to use your internet phones, this sudden spike in your traffic would automatically trigger red flags at your provider, as traffic is constantly monitored by algorithms.
Monitoring, analysing and better use of resources
Cloud phone system for small business have real-time monitoring, reporting and analysis tools, that were in the past the exclusive domain of the big companies. You can monitor the number of incoming calls a day, which allows you to adjust manpower at certain times and with that, place your resources there where needed. Imagine to be able to accommodate all the incoming calls!
You will also be able to get a better idea of the most common FAQs, simply by listening to recordings. This will help you to build potentially automated processes, templated answers or post these topics on your website in an FAQ section or wiki. The more customers can find on your website, the lower the workload on your team will be.
At the same, the system helps you to gather more hard data, especially when the cloud phone system is combined with other features, such as ticketing. That would enable you to cross link information and better understand potential weaknesses in your processes, team or sold products. On a team level, you can also determine easily which team members would need extra help, and who is performing outstandingly, which makes performance based rewards much easier.
It’s not depending on your local conditions
On top of it, unlike your old wired and local phone system, which can be prone to damages, power outages or hardware failures, cloud-based phone systems are managed by your service provider. Even if the internet connection to your premises stops working, your phone services will not be affected and customers will not listen to a busy or unavailable tone.
At your provider level, their systems have disaster recovery, redundant systems, back-up policies, when at times there are man-made or natural disasters affecting your internet connection, the information is secured on a cloud level, on dedicated servers. With premises based system this is far harder to achieve and this should give you additional peace of mind and less to worry about.
Service providers have mostly multiple routing points where their cloud based calls break out to existing, traditional networks. If a route goes down due to a local outage, most providers have a redundant infrastructure with additional resources and junctions – the takeaway here is that the cloud based telephone systems are much more resilient and flexable that the traditional networks.
Embrace the future and get an intelligent business communication system
In summary, using a cloud-based phone system that serves multiple channels is a great step into working more effective – for any business. It gives your security, flexibility and will save you time and money. Intelligent cloud based business phone systems will also help you to make your processes smoother and shorten the line between your sales, customer service staff and the actual customer. Complete peace of mind can never be purchased, but having given your communication a good thought and choosing the right tool (such as this one) for will make it as good as it gets.
