When people call your business, they don’t want busy signals and voicemail – they want to talk with a live person who can help them or direct them to someone who can. The interaction with your phone system is often the first impression customers and clients get of your business and customer service.
Traditional landline solutions often cause frustration and problems for businesses and callers like out of date automated phone menus, poor call quality, complicated settings, and high costs. Let’s explore how Cloud VoIP phone systems solve these issues and improve your business communications.
1 – In-House PBX maintenance, upgrades, and troubleshooting
With landlines, there are large phone boxes aka “your PBX” attached to the wall in the phone/server room of your office. Not only are these expensive to purchase and take up a lot of space they often require troubleshooting or maintenance to fix problems that occur. These issues could take days or weeks to fix depending on the level of service provided by your phone provider.
If you want to upgrade your system to handle more calls or users these systems often required costly hardware cards to be installed. You wind up paying not only for the hardware itself but a service fee for the onsite visit required by your telecom provider.
With a cloud VoIP phone system, the PBX is located on servers on the internet rather than onsite in your office. With this type of hosted solution, the responsibility to maintain and backup this equipment falls on your VoIP phone provider. Any issues are fixed quickly without costing you any money. Another advantage to a hosted cloud solution is that they are extremely scalable and as the system gets feature upgrades, they are made available to you automatically without you having to make additional investments.
2 – Customers getting busy signals
With a traditional phone system, you can only handle as many calls as the number of lines you have installed. Have 4 phone lines? That means if three members of your team are on the phone and another customer is calling in any additional customers that call will get a busy signal as you have used up all your lines. This is very frustrating for your customers and clients. Think about how much business you might be losing!
With VoIP, you can add telephone numbers and telephones limited only by the bandwidth of your Internet connection. With a traditional PBX, you buy a system designed for a given number of lines and telephones. If you need a bigger system, you must pay extra to add capacity. This is no longer an issue with a VoIP system. No more busy signals for your customers or clients!
3 – Complicated settings and system changes
With traditional phone systems making changes to outgoing messages, auto attendants, and setting up call forwarding can be complicated and time-consuming. They are also costly if you are charged a fee from your telecom provider to make theses setting for you. This process often drove employees or businesses to give up on changing outdated settings. Instead of a current updated phone system your customers are forced to deal with old outgoing phone messages, outdated directories, incorrect automated phone menus, and calls that forward to the wrong place. That is NOT good customer service.
Modern cloud VoIP phone systems give employees the ability to easily adjust the system. They can record and switch between multiple outgoing voicemail messages and forward calls to their cell phones while traveling. If a person moves to a different desk you can simply pick up the phone and move it to their new location. One quick call to your VoIP provider and they can remotely make any changes to your auto attendant menus without waiting for an onsite visit
4 – Poor voice quality
The sound quality of the traditional telephone network is limited due to the technology and devices it relies on. This narrow sound band often results in calls that sound scratchy, echoey or hard to hear.
The internet, on the other hand, has a wider band of audio technology allowing for HD quality voice for crystal clear sound on your calls. If you have a reliable internet connection with good bandwidth, you should experience voice quality that is the equal of, if not better than, a traditional phone connection.
5 – Difficulty reaching people
Nothing is more frustrating for a customer or client than leaving voicemails that are not returned at all or returned after a long delay because someone is out of the office and can’t easily check their voicemail. Many callers won’t even leave a voicemail for fear it won’t get returned or want the gratification of talking with someone and will instead move on and call another business. These missed calls = missed opportunities.
VoIP phone systems can shorten the time it takes you to follow up with your callers by delivering your voicemail as an attachment to your email. You no longer have to “call into” your office to check messages or wait till you are back at your desk. As soon as a voicemail comes in you are alerted via email on your smartphone and can tap the attachment to hear the message. Can’t interrupt an important meeting to listen to that important message? Voicemail transcriptions can be included in the email so you can scan the transcript of the message instead.
Thanks to the mobility of VoIP callers are less likely to reach your voicemail in the first place. Team members can use the find me/follow me feature to have calls ring to their cellphones when they are out of the office or use a smartphone app to let your cell phone act as a seamless extension of your business phone system allowing you to make and receive calls from anywhere.
6 – Analog faxing
While many companies have moved on from faxes some businesses still rely on it for signed agreements or other confidential information exchange. Fax technology has not changed and still has all the inherent problems that make it so inefficient.
Most VoIP systems include electronic faxing which allows employees to send and receive faxes over email. The days of being tethered to a fax machine at the office because you need to send or receive a fax are gone!
You can now send and receive faxes from anywhere using nothing but your smartphone or a laptop. No more blurry documents, busy signals, and sending sensitive information to the wrong place!
7 – High costs and confusing billing
Landline systems are expensive to install, maintain, and upgrade. VoIP solutions, however, function on your existing internet connection. This allows providers to deliver advanced features and capabilities at a much lower cost. There are also no “per minute charges”, hidden fees and mysterious charges, or hurdles to plan decreases or cancellations. The solution is completely scalable so you can add or decrease the number of extensions and phone numbers you need without jumping through hoops.
Get rid of call frustration and improve your business communications with a cloud VoIP solution
Why deal with these daily call annoyances? Let the Garam Group upgrade your old phone system to a modern cloud VoIP Phone system to save on costs, improve customer service, and ensure your business is competitive in your industry. Check out our free resource guide to find out about the Pros and Cons of a VoIP Phone System or contact us to schedule a complimentary phone system audit and demo our system.
