Over the past 23 years, we’ve helped our customers discover the most straightforward phone system solutions offering an excellent calling experience for their customers. Quite often we see similar queries arise where with the smallest changes in their phone system plans could make a drastic impact on their customer experience when calling in.
We sat down with Laura Patterson, our telephony expert and Project Manager, to talk through a couple of ways our customers could make use of their phone system to its full potential to improve their overall customer experience.
What phone system features are often forgotten when setting up call plans?
While it’s very easy to set up a call plan and ensure calls are being routed and diverted correctly, we find it’s the small details that make the biggest difference to the overall customer experience when phoning in. Simple things like adding music to your call holding that echoes your company’s personality and recording personalised voicemails can transform the calling experience for your customer. It’s really easy to add customised messages and your music tracks on the self-service portal too, you can upload or record your own audio message and add it to your plan within minutes.
Disaster recovery or failover plans are incredibly important and can often be forgotten when setting up your call plan. This is crucial if your company experiences an outage, leaving you completely cut off from your phones and unreachable to your customers.
Lastly, Ring Groups are a really handy feature to take advantage of – a Ring Group allows you to set up groups within your phone system that mirrors the teams in your business e.g. Sales, Operations, Customer Service etc. You can set it up to either ring all groups at once, or in a custom order of your design, or even randomly select from a group to call. There are a lot of functions that can help your teams to handle calls more efficiently.
What could customers do differently to maximise their phone system and create a better customer experience?
Continuing on from one of the earlier points, disaster recovery is definitely something that goes hand in hand with customer experience, as it could be the difference between being down for 5 minutes or 5 days, and it’s often something we tend not to think about until it’s too late. Whether your office is ruined by floods, or your primary internet provider experiences an outage, you can have peace of mind knowing you can be up and running and back in contact with your customers fast. By simply diverting your calls to a mobile number as a quick solution or setting up a full plan across the business to manage calls in a crisis, we can help you work through the best solution to suit you.
Similarly, making use of our Special Days feature, which is used over bank holidays or when your offices are planned to be closed, can automatically replace your normal welcome message with a replacement message to voicemail, or forward your calls to a call answering service over your closed periods. We’d suggest adding a short message into your welcome message a few weeks in advance advising of any days you’ll be closed. This will manage your customer expectations leading up to your closure and avoid disappointment.
How could customers better prepare for changes to their call plans?
Businesses who have one or two individuals responsible for maintaining the phone system and changing call plans have greater success in supporting their customers when it comes to making changes to call plans. It’s important that they are trained on the portal and know who to call should they need anything from our support team or their account manager. Learning to make changes yourself on the self-service portal can often be quicker and more straightforward to do. If there are regular changes to business work schedules and hours, speak to us about this – we have a range of call management tools to help pre-schedule these changes and manage your day to day activities more efficiently.
What 5 hints and tips would you give customers when setting up a new phone system?
Talk to your call centre agents and staff answering calls and get their view on what would work best for them.
Spend time planning – preferably in a focus group to get everyone’s input on any changes required and base your changes on your historic call statistics and reports.
Don’t get hung up on what you currently have – think about what you want moving forwards.
Don’t forget the details such as audio messages, ring times and time scheduling.
Empower individuals in your organisation to be responsible for the upkeep and changes to your phone system. Keeping these in mind, you are in the best position to face any potential issues or issues that arise.
Remember to take full advantage of our knowledgebase, training and guides – we can always help you over the phone, but being able to make these changes yourself is quicker, easier, and gives you a better understanding of your phone system.
We understand that making changes to your call plan can be daunting, so speak to us, we’re here to help. Talk us through your plans, upcoming changes and we can give you accurate our recommendations. We can help with staff fluctuations, system changes, recorded messages and so much more that you might feel as if you need to sort out on their own. We aim to be a trusted telephony partner, not just a provider.
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