There are a wide variety of channels available for communicating with your customers and delivering customer service. From Facebook Messenger to live chat functionality, you have a lot of options. At the same time, the bulk of customer service is still conducted over the phone. The truth is, according to a recent survey, over half of customers prefer the telephone to all other forms of customer support. Voice is still a key channel for you to connect with and care for your customers. Luckily, with a hosted voice solution, there are powerful new ways to bring the features you love about voice to the cloud.
If you want to use your phone system to deliver innovation, you need to start thinking about hosted voice. With hosted voice, you can bring your telephone setup to the cloud, uniting your entire business with a single advanced, cloud-based, hosted telephone system featuring business-grade voice service. Using VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol), you can stay connected to your office and customers, no matter where you work.
1. Hosted Voice Can Free Up Your IT Resources
When adopting new technology, people seldom consider the complexities involved with troubleshooting until it’s too late. We often get so excited about implementing a new piece of technology that we don’t take the time to consider our plan B if things go wrong. One minute, you’re humming along with new tech; the next, you’ve suddenly lost hours of your day down a rabbit hole of YouTube tutorials trying to fix some key component that has suddenly decided not to work.
With hosted voice, you don’t need to deal with IT because the host handles it for you. There’s no runaround because they handle everything, the components and the software. This frees you up to focus more of your attention on delivering great customer service and running your business, instead of worrying about keeping everything working.
2. Stay Connected to Customers During a Crisis or Emergency
Because your phone system is in the cloud, you can survive just about anything that might happen to your business. Even if your physical location is damaged or destroyed, you only need an internet connection to access your business’s phone system. That means you’re not in danger of losing any key information like voicemails in the event of a catastrophe and you can still take customer calls remotely, from wherever you and your team are located.
3. Increased Flexibility for Employees and a Remote Workforce
A major benefit of hosted voice is that you have far more portability than a traditional business telephone system. For the same reasons your phone system is available even in the event of a disaster, your team members get the flexibility to access it from wherever they are.
Hosted voice makes remote work a lot easier, something that millennials are increasingly interested in as they seek more flexibility and better work-life balance. It’s simple to integrate workers near and far into your team, seamlessly. You can easily reroute calls to your business number through your cell phone or distribute calls to your customer service line to a team of agents located anywhere in the world.
For businesses, there’s a major benefit here that is easy to overlook: a broader hiring pool. Creating flexibility in your phone system lets you cast a wider net than ever before to find the best person for the job, not just the most convenient. Distributed work is the future, and you don’t want to miss out because your phone system can’t adapt.
4. Easy Access to Key Features from Anywhere
Hosted voice has all of the standard bells and whistles: call waiting, call hunting, voicemail, conference calling, and more. You also get video conferencing and the ability to call an employee’s home computer or mobile device directly when working remotely. Call routing can be incredibly powerful, particularly for rerouting key numbers that can’t go unanswered.
5. Data You Can Use to Make Smart Business Decisions
Finally, because hosted voice is digital, it’s easier than ever to collect data about your business’s calls and analyze it. Anything from average call time to call volume by time of day is easy to pull and collate because it’s all in the cloud. Get smarter about how you use your phones by looking at data points to understand the where’s, when’s, and why’s..
What Your Small Business Can Do Right Now
It’s critical to move your business to hosted voice. The world has shifted to digital, and that means moving every system you can in order to take advantage.
Make sure you can field important calls about your business no matter where you are and whether or not your physical location is open. With additional flexibility for working remotely, switching to hosted voice is a no-brainer.
- You don’t need to worry about IT because it’s handled by the host.
- Better portability means you have more flexibility on the road, and with who you hire.
- Enjoy more functionality and features from your phone system.
- Collect a more complete picture of your phone data.
- Call Cox Business to learn more about our Hosted Voice solution.
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