Sales Director
Communication is the bedrock of any relationship - whether with your partner, family members or, in this case, across your business. It’s the common thread that keeps your operation running smoothly; linking different areas of your business to deliver the best service possible for your customers. However, maintaining consistency in your communications can be tricky. All it takes is for one element to fail, and you risk financial and reputational damage. In our latest article, we look at the signs that you need to update your digital communications, while offering useful solutions to support you in the future.
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Have you experienced issues reaching a certain company before? Was it off-putting? If yes, this is how your customers feel when they can’t reach you. These issues often stem from companies not embracing modern communication channels, with a significant increase in growth recorded amongst those who do.
Of these channels, social media is a powerful tool for furthering your brand presence, while giving customers another way to contact you. “But won’t managing all those platforms at once be time-consuming?” you ask. Not if you’re a business that embraces VoIP technology.
Many VoIP services provide omnichannel communication, allowing you to see all customer communications in one place—including social media, phone calls, and emails. This allows you to give your customers consistent service regardless of who they speak to, avoiding frustration and providing efficient follow-up support. If you’d like to learn more about VoIP technology, what it is and how it works, read our article ‘What is VoIP?’ here.
For businesses, monitoring your communications over specific periods is essential. If you’re not doing this, you’re throwing away information that could help shape your business's future.
Collecting the relevant data gives you access to trends and patterns, including peak call times, certain customer behaviours, and your workforce's effectiveness. Analysing this data helps you understand more about your customers and employees, letting you adapt what you do to suit your audience.
While plenty of third-party tools are available to help analyse your data, VoIP users will find various handy analytics features built into their systems. You’ll have access to a host of real-time data, including call volumes - which let you predict the volume of staff you’ll need on certain days.
A surefire way to lose customers is to try their patience. This can happen when they sit in call queues without knowing when they’ll get the help they need. Thankfully, VoIP systems like T2K’s Horizon VoIP model offer handy call management features to help you solve this issue.
VoIP Call routing can help cut down customer wait time. This feature diverts customer calls to the appropriate team or department, quickly ensuring they get relevant support.
Linking your call routing to an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) feature makes sense, too. With this feature, when your customer calls, they’ll be given a series of different options, allowing them to choose the relevant support they need.
Nothing slows a business's momentum faster than persistent technical problems. Inside your business, they can prevent work from getting done, cost money to fix, and cause critical data loss. More importantly, they can bring communication with your customers to a screeching halt, stopping them from accessing support and information when they need it.
One of the most common technical issues is poor call quality. This can lead to calls dropping out and audio delays, hindering the flow of calls and even leading to miscommunications. If this happens regularly, it's worth contacting your internet provider. They’ll be able to run tests and let you know whether your internet connection and bandwidth are powerful enough to handle the call traffic you’re receiving. If they aren’t, you may need to upgrade your connection.
You may also experience issues running your operations using older equipment. Often, this is because the hardware needs more processing power to handle your system's demands. There may also be compatibility issues between your system and other platforms or tools you use. If you’ve had enough of dealing with these issues, why not hand them over to your provider? That’s right - with a hosted VoIP solution, your provider looks after your VoIP connection, hosting it in a cloud environment while taking care of all the maintenance and security upkeep.
Still experiencing poor call quality? It may be worth looking at Quality of Service (QoS) solutions. Available both as part of your VoIP set-up, or as third-party software, QoS applications monitor areas like bandwidth and latency to support better network performance.
By doing this, they allow you to identify the cause of poor call quality and fix it before problems escalate. QoS features can also work inside your network to prioritise certain call traffic, ensuring quality remains high.
It’s important for your home workers to have boundaries. They should have a space to work that’s free from distraction and lets them focus. However, some businesses have found the communication gap between office and remote workers detrimental to operations.
For homeworkers, reasons include lack of set expectations, not being included in team comms, and technological barriers preventing them from accessing work systems.
To close this communication gap, it’s important to give your remote workers everything they’d have if they were in the office. That includes attending the same meetings, regular check-ins to see how they’re doing, and, of course, access to the same systems and information they’d have if they were in the workplace.
VoIP technology facilitates this, allowing employees to access your systems from anywhere with a broadband connection. Most systems also come with a host of collaborative tools, like video conferencing and instant messaging, allowing remote workers to participate in tasks and projects regardless of location.
If you’d like to learn more about how VoIP can support your remote workers, read our article ‘VoIP and Virtual Learning: Making Remote Learning Accessible’.
If you’re a mid-sized company still using a landline connection, it could be causing you to spend unnecessarily. While these connections aren’t costly in themselves, they may result in financial loss due to higher calling costs, maintenance fees, and a lack of integration. They also cost your employees more, requiring them to travel to your location daily.
If you’re looking for ways to save money on your communications, why not look into VoIP? You’ll find lower call or maintenance costs, and the ability for employees to work from anywhere. Here’s the best part, though - the integration.
VoIP integration allows you to pair your system with many of today's popular digital tools and platforms. This includes whichever CRMs, email clients and other tools you currently use, all of which work alongside your VoIP solution to create an efficient, accessible and future-proof system. This makes VoIP systems highly scaleable, meaning you won’t have to spend money overhauling your system to be compatible with emerging technologies.
To learn more about VoIP integration, read our article here.
We know that running a business can involve a ton of admin tasks. These tasks are often monotonous and time-consuming, leaving you with less time to spend building a business and satisfying your customers. And of all the things you can stand to lose, time isn’t one of them.
Thankfully, modern technology has plenty of options to help you. For example, many digital business solutions include automation tools designed to take repetitive tasks off your plate, allowing you to focus on high-priority tasks. If you’re a VoIP user, you’ll find that most systems include automation tools that work in the background to help streamline your processes.
Call logging features automatically log important call data, saving your call agents time and reducing the risk of error. With this feature, you’ll have access to call data like start/end time and call agent, alongside the duration and location of a call. This feature saves you time and money, while giving you access to data that could help you identify valuable patterns and trends.
Voicemails are a great way for customers to communicate when they don’t have time to wait in a call queue. However, recording the details of voicemails can often be tricky - usually warranting repeat listens to note down the entirety of the message. VoIP’s voicemail-to-email feature was created to prevent this hassle by converting voicemail audio into a text transcript, which is then sent to your email inbox.
Earlier in this article, we covered the huge benefits of VoIP analytics tools. Did we mention these tools also include automation features? Well, they do, and they can be set up to send you regular reports—including call volume, quality, and usage times. They even help secure your VoIP network by detecting suspicious activity and preventing security threats.
Modern technology is built to be accessible. Now more than ever, designers consider user behaviour, making the tech we purchase easier and more efficient. Some older software and devices aren’t quite as user-friendly though, requiring repeat training before users can retain how they work. If this sounds familiar, this outdated technology is likely costing you far more than it delivers.
VoIP is incredibly user-friendly, allowing you to avoid the frustration of constant retraining. Along with the automation and collaborative tools we’ve mentioned, you’ll find that using your VoIP interface and its features quickly becomes second nature.
Most systems can be managed from a central interface, allowing you to customise and maintain your network to suit your business needs. From a workforce point of view, your staff won’t have any trouble navigating to the tools they need. Most VoIP software places popular tools front and centre to save users time hunting for ‘hidden’ features.
Whether it’s uniting your workforce, resolving persistent tech challenges or cutting costs, VoIP technology has you covered. Dealing with communication issues more often than you’d like? Then why not switch to a reliable, easy-to-use digital telephony system, created to grow alongside your thriving business?
If you’d like to learn more about how VoIP can solve your communication problems, contact T2K today.
Having worked for T2k for nearly 25 years, it's fair to say that Lee is an expert when it comes to all things telephony and business communications. Overseeing the commercial side of the business, he has helped the company evolve and grow through the decades. In recent years, and with the advent of VoIP and hosted telephony, Lee has made sure that T2k is at the forefront of technological developments. With a firm interest in helping businesses navigate the world of telecoms, Lee is responsible for the majority of the content on this website.
