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Business Essentials: The Importance of Strong Communication Systems
By: Scott Resnick
Companies have a number of different options when it comes to addressing their telecommunications needs. Providers of business phone systems are able to offer a wide array of useful communications technologies to their clients. Many of these technologies can serve to significantly increase the efficiency of a business, and allow for a higher level of customer service. However, before you choose a business phone system for your company, there are a number of things that must be carefully considered.
Choosing the Right Business Phone System for Your Needs
One of the main things that’s likely to influence your decision when it comes to choosing the proper digital phone system is the size of your company. Indeed, size has a direct impact on the telecommunications needs of any business. For example, a large company will frequently have more departments, a wider range of products, and a more geographically diverse customer base than a smaller company would. If you’re operating a larger business, each of these characteristics will serve as determining factors when it comes to selecting the communications tools you need to implement.
On the other hand, if your company is smaller in size, you may employ less staff, and your customer service department may not be as readily available outside of the normal business hours. There are a number of business phone systems that can make use of technologies designed to address these issues. However, you’ll need to do a bit of investigating, to find out which features are most suited to your needs.
In addition to size, the manner in which a company is structured plays a role in its communication needs. For example, many smaller businesses need to be quite mobile. A lot of these types of businesses do a significant amount of work outside of the normal office environment. As a result, they must have the ability to communicate with their customer base from a variety of remote locations. There are a number of technologies that can make this possible.
With larger businesses that have complex structures, a disruption in telecommunications can have wide ranging detrimental impacts. There are some excellent NEC phone systems that companies can take advantage of and offer a high level of reliability. If anything does go wrong with the communications system in a larger company, it’s imperative to address the issue as quickly as possible. With this in mind, you’ll want to make sure that an emergency response service is in place, so that you can get all crucial technologies back up and running.
Selecting the Right Technology for Your Needs
Once you’re fully aware of the major factors that determine your company’s communication needs, you’re in a much better position to choose the technologies you want to implement to make the business run more efficiently.
There are some NEC phone systems companies can employ that offer a significant number of useful technologies. Some of the more popular features that businesses often elect to implement include:
- VOIP technologies
- Interactive voice response systems
- Call recording software
There are certainly many benefits to be had when it comes to using these kinds of technologies. For example, a lot of companies are choosing to use VOIP when they want to increase the mobility of their operations and the flexibility of their communications systems. VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol), is a technology that makes use of special hardware and software that enables phone conversations to be conducted via an internet connection.
VOIP offers a highly cost effective way of connecting with customers all over the world. The technology can be used over a simple wi-fi connection, and is very easy to implement and maintain.
When dealing with customers, or members of your support team, conference calling can easily be implemented using VOIP. Regardless of the issue being dealt with, all necessary parties can be brought into a call at the same time. In many cases, this will allow for a more speedy resolution to the problem.
Yet another benefit of VOIP when it come to business mobility is the fact that the technology can be used to connect to home office resources from remote locations. Things can be set up so that your employees have access to company voice and fax facilities no matter where they are.
With NEC phone systems, businesses can also make use of an interactive voice response program. Interactive voice response systems can serve a number of useful purposes. For one, these systems can greatly increase the efficiency with which customer support queries are handled, by ensuring that calls are properly routed.
When one of these systems is in place, a customer will automatically be asked questions to which they will give vocal replies. Based on these replies, their call will be transferred to the appropriate department within your company.
Even if you operate a small business without many different departments, you can use voice response systems to your advantage. The technology can easily be setup to answer common support questions, or handle routine tasks like checking customer account status. This functionality can be made available even if a customer calls outside of normal business hours.
Finally, the responses that a customer provides to this sort of system can easily be recorded. Having recorded information that pertains to the support issues your customers are facing can be highly beneficial when it comes to making decisions about staffing, or training programs for your employees.
What went into the decision you made for communications systems?
This article was originally published by TTI Houston
Published: August 21, 2013
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