In any business, the ability to communicate with clients and customers is essential to your success. Having a phone system that meets your needs is crucial to ensuring those good lines of communication — especially in a shifting working landscape where more and more people than ever are working from home.

With the uncertainty due to the Coronavirus pandemic and those new working scenarios, it would be reassuring to know that your phone system can keep up with those unforeseen changes. Having a VoIP system — a phone system run through internet connections rather than traditional phone lines — makes meeting new challenges more straightforward and communicating with your team easier.

Here are some features of a VoIP system that will make those day-to-day moments that bit easier.

Conference calls

If your staff are working from home or you have a mixture of remote working and office working, you can pretty much guarantee that you’ll want to make a conference call so you can speak with several members of the team at once. VoIP makes conference calls straightforward and seamless, possible at just the press of a button.

Auto Attendant

Ever called a customer help number and been met with a voice asking you to press a certain number for a certain department? Some people find them frustrating, but these auto attendant functions can be exceptionally useful in making sure that callers always get through to the right department and the right person as quickly as possible if they’re calling a general number.

Hunt groups

Equally, if you find that isn’t the approach you want to take, you can set up a hunt group; external callers ring in on one telephone number and the calls are easily routed to a whole group of staff members to answer. It leads to a quick response from your team members without customers having to navigate those menus — different approaches work better for different companies and these two options showcase VoIP’s flexibility.

Added flexibility in where staff work

VoIP phones can be taken from the office, plugged in to an internet connection anywhere in the world with minimal fuss and they’ll start working immediately. That means if your team currently need flexibility in where they work due to Covid-19, they’ll always be able to take their phone with them.

When someone calls into the business, all of the VoIP phones connected at home will ring, just as they would in the office. Transferring calls between phones also functions just as it would normally.

Number porting

If you’re installing a new phone system, one of the potential headaches is losing those numbers that your customers know and use regularly. Changing numbers on your website, marketing materials, letterheads, signage and email signatures would be a real pain in the neck, but with VoIP based phone systems, you simply port your old numbers to the new system. It’ll be business as usual and no-one outside the business will ever know you made the switch.

Call recording

If your business works in a regulated industry, you may have to record certain calls — or you may want to keep a record of certain calls to track customer satisfaction and respond to questions. Whatever your call recording needs, VoIP allows you to easily record calls and store them in a format that can be easily replayed later, rather than having to read through reams of scribbled notes.

Other benefits to VoIP

As well as making day-to-day operations smoother and easier, VoIP can lower costs greatly. Many assume setting up a new phone system would be expensive, but savings of up to 80% on call charges and line rental means that any initial set up cost is quickly offset by savings in the long term.

If you’d like to learn more about how VoIP could keep you, your colleagues and your clients communicating smoothly, please give our experienced team a call on 01237 420010.