Is your business phone system built to succeed?

A business needs to align its product or service offering to the customer’s need. It is the ability of a team to create opportunities and chase them that gets rewarded in form of business sales, revenues and insights.

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Take an example of Indian Railways. A particular issue around reservation and customer service begins with a consumer’s call to IRCTC. Overtime the call volumes have multiplied into thousands of conversations happening every day.  Such burgeoning call structure is akin to the problem faced by other tours and travels businesses, only, at a smaller scale. So while an Indian Railways may invest lakhs of rupees to take care of its business phone needs, what do you do with your budget constraints, profit targets and comparatively low call needs?

Here is quickly evaluating the ability of business phone systems to bring customer success:

Your options: Business phone system – PBX, EPABX, VoIP

History watch: Before fax and internet, telephones were the easiest means of communication. A big gramophone like phone was available at both the receiver end and the transmitting end. People could hear what was being said at the other end. This way the overall communication got handled in a few minutes.

Today, the same telephone in an office, home or corporation manages the daily business need of communications over large distances. Large number of telephone networks or Private Branch Exchange, both wired and wireless, are capable of using Internet telephony technologies with less bulky hardware in case of wired and no hardware for wireless virtual PBX.

User value: Intangible benefit(s) with Virtual business phone system

You might like to ask yourself these questions:

• Would the business phone system succeed at bringing the customer to you?
• Is it cost effective?
• Will the business get more customers once the shift to this system?

These questions will mostly not have concrete answers. Most importantly, they tend to overlook indirect benefits of a call management system. Keeping a database of every call and effective call communication to smoothen the intra-company coordination are amongst the attributes you cannot directly measure.

All in all a smooth singular telephone system makes sense to communicate with all internal and external agencies or people. An end-to-end overview of a company’s calls goes a long way in demonstrating professionalism and drawing meaningful analytics out of it to take your business to the next level.

Getting the best business phone system

The technological advances like internet telephony have enabled VoIP and similar other technologies. These innovations are shaping the commercial world in allowing new businesses to compete with acclaimed consumer products and businesses.  In that sense, business has become more modern and utility driven. People have less to suffer in terms of business communications hassles, computing capabilities, and avenues to know and expand markets.

Your ‘business telephony system’ is a necessity which you ought to fulfill with less effort and cost. You need to exercise control over your call data. Look at contribution to your business continuity and propagation into new markets.

So, to measure the success of your business phone system, these might be better questions to ask:

• Robust Customer Response: Is the service provider handling your service right?  Is it enabling you to improve your customer response?
• Create seamless brand perception: Is it strengthening your brand?
• Optimized algorithms and analytics: Are you getting the business value?
• Real time communications: Do you get the remote working flexibility? Are you equipped to manage calls from other places – coffee shop etc.
• Work productivity: Are you increasing your business output?

Business telephony has created big success for biggies like Wal-Mart, Verizon, Ford, Amazon, Google, Apple, IBM etc. While others who did not pay heed to the business telephony system(then) were swept aside (as compared to the opportunity they had in hand) like Sears, Sony, Yahoo etc.  (Rick, 2010)

Musings: How have pre-modern business phones survived? Could new phone systems – internet telephony, Smartphone’s, Mobiles etc. play a key role?

Effective new systems of business telephony showcase even better potential by incorporating features like voicemail, basic telephony, follow me, teleconferencing, do not disturb, call forwarding, caller id, find me and everything else. The new phone systems like those from iPad, iPhone, Smartphone’s and mobile attempt to connect in real time with lots of web based features and applications. These then allow the user to breakthrough between different time zones at varying distances to get to customer. Thus where old pre modern business telephony only allowed little variation in features and services, the new phone systems using internet technologies bring more advantage to business.

Virtual call management has to be the way to go!!