Four Phone Features You Need to Better Serve Customers

Is your office feeling a bit short-staffed and harried these days? If so, you’re not alone.

A poll found that one in three Canadian companies have open positions they cannot fill, and 91 percent expect to face hiring challenges in 2023. That deficit takes a toll on your team, but it could also be frustrating your customers through longer hold times, routing mistakes and unreturned messages – eventually causing you to lose valued clients and their business.

Upgrading to a feature-rich business phone system should be part of the solution. It can give you tools to elevate your customer experience and equip your staff to better manage the heavy workload.

If you’re in the market for a new or more advanced business phone product, look for these four features to help you provide top-notch customer service:

1. Receptionist Console

How it benefits customers: improves quality of customer service

Your receptionists and operators have their hands full these days, so having the right technology at their fingertips can help them stay on top of customer demand and serve customers with excellence.

A  receptionist console lets your receptionists see who on your team is available so they can transfer or forward customer calls to the right person. That means customers never get routed to someone who is on another call or away on vacation. At times when call volumes are especially high, you can have the system route calls automatically so you never miss a customer or opportunity.

A receptionist console can also place calls in queues based on the criteria you choose, so callers get connected with the agent or employee who can best address their issue. For instance, callers may be categorized by language spoken, region or category of inquiry. Any of your employees can also connect to a call queue and speak to customers to provide additional support during peak times of day or when there’s an issue or event prompting high volume!

2. Call Centre

How it benefits customers: gets callers to the right agent faster

If your business or industry experiences consistently high call volume, you may want to seek out a business phone provider that offers a call centre option. A contact centre serves as a high-tech switchboard that determines callers’ intent and gets them to the right agent expediently. For example, a contact centre can route calls to agents who speak a particular language or have skillsets related to the caller’s selected product or issue.

A contact centre should also offer automatic callback, which allows the caller to request a return call rather than waiting in the queue. The contact centre keeps the caller’s place in line and automatically contacts the caller and connects him to the agent when it’s his turn.

Having a contact centre built into your business phone product is both affordable and convenient. You can staff a cloud-based contact center with agents from anywhere, broadening your hiring possibilities while saving money on office space, furniture and equipment. That lets you scale or downsize seamlessly to adapt to peaks and lulls – for instance, adding more agents during the holiday season. You can also train from anywhere, since customer service managers can easily log into the platform and listen to a call, provide “whisper” coaching or record a conversation.

The end result is better customer service delivered more quickly, by the right agents, in the right way – every time.

3. Shared Business Numbers

How it benefits customers: prevents missed calls

No SMB owner or manager can or should be available all the time (no, not even you), so choose a business phone product that allows staff members to easily cover for one another to field important customer calls. For example, a solution that allows your team members to share the same business phone number lets everyone connect their own devices to that phone number via an app, so their phones can either ring simultaneously or in cascading order. Whoever is available to serve a customer can answer the call.

4. Business Texting

How it benefits customers: gives them an alternate communications channel

About nine in ten consumers want to text with businesses, according to a consumer survey, so it behooves companies to choose a business phone service that makes texting one-on-one with customers easy and cost-effective. A cloud business phone solution that includes Business Texting allows you to text back and forth with customers when they have questions, send them updates on their orders or reach out with special offers. You can also send text auto-replies by setting rules, like when someone texts your business while you’re on a phone call or when your business is closed for the day. That’s the type of personalized and responsive interaction that creates a loyal customer.

What’s in it for You?

Pleasing customers is the priority, but to make a change to a new business phone system, there has to be value for you as well. We get it. Cloudli’s cloud business phone solutions deliver that win-win through these key benefits for businesses:

• Unlimited local and long-distance calling in Canada and the U.S. (subject to Cloudli’s Fair Use policy)
• Texting in Canada and the US using SMS/MMS or enhanced Business Texting
• Faxing capabilities from your desktop, mobile device or web
• Ability to pay only for what you need, selecting the plan that best suits your staff size and business requirements
• Easy portability of your current number, so you don’t have to go through the hassle and expense of changing numbers
• Seamless integration with your current applications

Why not give it a try? Reach out for a demo today with one of our cloud business phone experts to get a walk-through and address any questions. We’ll help you design a unified cloud communications plan that maximizes your manpower and starts pleasing customers immediately.