There is no doubt about the fact that VoIP as a solution is cheaper than traditional telephony. Often considerably so. But customers (and providers) who focus purely on the cost benefits are missing a trick and potentially risk not getting as much out of their VoIP platform as they could.
How can VoIP help you achieve your goals?
When looking at VoIP as a solution it is important to understand how it fits into your business’s strategy, and specifically how it can help your business achieve some core objectives. In this instance, I will focus on some of the ways in which VoIP can help businesses generate increased revenue and increased profit. So, given that it is merely a phone system, how can a business VoIP platform actually help a business to both increase revenue and profit?
In practice it is relatively simple. Throughout my business career (in sectors as varied as Technology, Construction, Publishing and IT), and assuming that the underlying fundamentals are in place, it has always been the case that any business that can get better at retaining existing customers, and at the same time improve its conversion rates on new customers, is going to grow both revenue and profitability.
So all we have to do is demonstrate how a good VoIP solution will actively help your business to achieve these twin goals. If we can do this then we are certainly offering you something that is much more attractive than a mere phone system would otherwise be. Well, one of the keys to successfully retaining customers is that much vaunted term “Customer Service”. In reality customers will forgive a lot if they feel that they are important and that their concerns are important and are being addressed quickly and efficiently. The core to achieving this is of course communication. So a telephone system that makes it easier for the customer to get hold of the right person, or quicker for that person to get back to them, is only going to help. By the same token any number of studies have shown that the quicker a business can respond properly to a new enquiry or opportunity, the greater chance there is of converting it. So effectively, any prospects of your business are more likely to become customers themselves if they are responded to quickly and efficiently and by the right people.
Increase Revenue, grow profitability
So how is this deliverable in practice? Well our VoIP system has a range of features that ensure the right people are easily contactable, able to access messages, have calls routed to them out of the office and take calls regardless of which location they’re in. These are just some of the ways in which a fully featured hosted VoIP system can deliver, they work as follows:
- Your business can create multi-user inbound call groups, meaning that calls can be quickly routed to the right person or department
- You can automatically forward calls to mobiles, meaning that out of office employees can still be directly contacted
- Voicemail2email functionality means that employees can hear, and respond to, customer needs much faster
- Multi-site businesses can all connect to the same system. For instance a sales call can ring the sales phones in a range of different locations. Calls can be transferred between remote locations
The above are just some of the ways in which, used properly, businesses can use hosted VoIP to make themselves better at dealing with new and existing customers.
Measure your activity
However, it is also important to be able to understand how you are using the phone within your business. How many calls are coming in each day? How long are the taking to be answered? Who is answering them? How many are missed? Any business accessing this kind of information could well identify one simple issue, which if changed could make a massive difference to how they interact with their customers. That’s why we include a full call reporting suite that allows your business to understand who is making and receiving calls, see missed calls and build up an accurate picture of how efficiently you are using the phone with regard to customer needs and demands.
If you would like to find out more about how we can help your business to increase client retention and get better at converting potential new business, please contact our Sales Team on 0161 660 2350 or contact us via email.
