VoIP has become a standard part of the way companies conduct business. Choosing VoIP instead of landline telephone service can lower your costs while letting you take advantage of flexible features that make your business more efficient.
Unfortunately, a lot of businesses never get beyond the basic features offered by VoIP, so they never discover the benefits VoIP advanced features. If you’re still stuck on the basics, you should learn about these four cool phone system options that you may not already use.
Visual voicemail
You and your employees can read much faster than you can speak. When people speak, they tend to throw in a lot of pauses and unnecessary words. This makes it inefficient to listen to voicemails. You may have already reached the point where you dread listening to the voicemails of your clients and colleagues rambling.
You have better ways to spend your time.
Visual voicemail from the right type of VoIP service translates voice recordings into text, which makes it possible for you to scan your messages quickly. You can skip the awkward introductions and get straight to the meat of the message.1
Depending on your preferences, you can have visual voicemail messages sent to your smartphone via text or to your email. Either way, this is one of the VoIP advanced features that will help you save time.
Plus, you get an easy way to organize your messages for future use.
Smart call forwarding
Many of today’s businesses don’t need employees stuck at their workstations all day. You may have policies that let certain employees work from home, nearby coffee shops, or other locations that make them feel more productive. Working remotely has become so popular that 43 percent of employed Americans say that they’ve done it at least once.
One of the problems with working remotely is that you can’t answer the phone at your desk. Smart call forwarding solves that problem.
When you leave your desk, tell your phone where to direct incoming calls. VoIP will redirect calls to your smartphone or another number where you plan to work. You can even have VoIP forward calls to colleagues who can answer questions for you while you’re out of the office.
VoIP has become so flexible that you can often use smart call forwarding regardless of whether you choose a cloud, onsite or hybrid phone system.
Call blocking
Despite rules that are supposed to limit robocalls, the FTC reports that it received 4.5 million robocall complaints in 2017. Unfortunately, many companies don’t follow the FTC rules. Some of them will even pay fines while they continue to harass people who don’t want to receive their calls.
Call blocking let’s you limit the number of robocalls that you get from known numbers. With call blocking, you never have to worry about repeat offenders—ever again.
You can also use VoIP call blocking to avoid calls from people you don’t want to talk to, including former employees and clients who keep calling even though you’ve parted ways.
Remote management
If you have several employees calling potential clients throughout the day, you may need to track their performance. After all, you want to make sure they’re doing their jobs well. And if someone is struggling, you want to be able to give them tips on how to improve conversations.
Remote management lets you see details about incoming and outgoing calls within your system.
You can even use remote management as part of your unified communications strategy to ensure that your employees are using all of the tools at their disposal to exceed customer expectations and do their jobs efficiently.
A lot of companies never bother learning about VoIP’s advanced features that could make them more successful. But not you. You’re ready to put these VoIP advanced features to work.
If you need a little help, be sure to contact your IT support partner to learn more about how our VoIP solutions can benefit your business.
the-coolest-phone-system-options-youre-not-using