Your small business phone system features can go a long way to enhance your entire team’s daily efficiency and productivity!
Around 78% of businesses struggle with balancing the quality and speed of their customer support services, according to Salesforce.
This means that a lot of companies essentially aren’t maximizing the full potential associated with hosted small business phone systems, and this is where the Data Talk experts help to empower call agents and customer support teams by boosting productivity rates via top-of-the-line telecom features and technologies.
So, how exactly should small businesses distinguish their must-have phone system features from the no-need-to-have features?
Below we’ve created a comprehensive checklist of 100% necessary business phone system features that entrepreneurs and business leaders should be on the lookout for while choosing their next telecom solutions!
Your Small Business Phone System Feature Checklist
In order to guarantee that you’re getting the very most out of your small company’s telecom solutions, we’ve created this list of essential phone system features to be on the lookout for.
These awesome small business phone system features include:
Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
Interactive Voice Response (IVR) is an automation feature that utilizes things like speech recognition, pre-recorded messages and dual-tone multi-frequency technology to interact with your incoming callers.
This means that IVR is essentially a virtual receptionist that greets your callers and presents them with a detailed menu of call options. IVR will then analyze inputted responses and route callers to their unique best places within your phone system.
This makes it easier and more simplified for your callers to reach the right departments, agents and information sources when they contact your business. IVR is also known for reducing call queues, minimizing call transfers, and improving your first-call resolution rates.
Skills-Based Call Routing
One of the best ways to route your incoming calls is through skills-based call routing, because this helps ensure that your callers get in touch with suitable experts at your business.
A common example of skills-based call routing is when a customer makes a query in Spanish, and then is subsequently redirected to a call agent that speaks Spanish. Angry customers might be directed toward call agents that specialize in conflict resolution, and other specific caller questions could be routed to agents that meet specific qualifications.
This feature goes a long way to boost a company’s customer satisfaction, because all of your calls will be handled by adequate agents that are fully capable of resolving a caller’s unique needs.
Call Monitoring
It’s important to remember that it only takes one bad experience for even your most loyal customers to part ways with your brand, and the vast majority of your customers will leave your brand after two bad experiences.
Call monitoring is a valuable small business phone system feature because it helps call agents and team members to deliver top-notch customer experiences over and over again. This feature essentially allows managers and supervisors to oversee calls in real-time, and they can even provide support when necessary.
The three main types of call monitoring include:
- Call listening
- Call whispering
- Call barging
There are countless scenarios in which these call monitoring features can be incredibly useful, and it gives supervisors more agency to ensure that customers are treated respectfully and efficiently.
Call Recording
Call recording is another absolutely essential phone system feature for your small business, because it allows you to record your customer calls and store them for training and compliance purposes.
By analyzing call recordings, you can more easily identify your team’s customer support weaknesses and tailor your training strategies toward minimizing past mistakes.
Whether your team is struggling with certain customer questions or aren’t being as friendly as they should be, your call recordings will provide invaluable insights toward optimizing your team’s messaging and customer support strategies.
Call Analytics
It’s difficult for business leaders to gauge their customer support team’s performances, unless they invest in advanced call analytics within their VoIP phone system.
These call analytics will include valuable key performance indicators (KPIs) and statistics—all within an easy-to-use dashboard. This data is crucial when it comes to making informed decisions about your company’s support strategy, and you should be on the lookout for the following KPIs after making telecom investments:
- Total missed calls
- Average answering speed
- Total call volumes
- First-call resolution rates
- Call abandonment rates
- Average talk time
Workflow Automation Tools
It’s normal for repetitive manual tasks like data collection and entry to impede upon your team’s productivity, and it’s also common for these tasks to diminish your team’s motivation and overall happiness.
This is why workflow automation is so important toward fueling your team’s efficiency and minimizing errors. With Data Talk, you can establish automated workflows for all sorts of typical business activities, including text-to-speech transcriptions, follow-ups and ticket creations.
Call Transfers
Transferring calls is nothing new within the telecom world, but there have been many tech-savvy advancements throughout recent years that have made transferring calls easier and more seamless than ever before.
Data Talk’s call transfer features provide extra layers of intelligence, including things like warm and cold transfers. Warm transfers give agents the ability to brief one another on a call’s context, which can detail specific caller issues. Cold transfers will transfer calls without these briefings.
Smart Dialing
Smart dialing is a really great feature for small businesses that make a lot of outbound calls, mainly because it helps connect your team with high-quality leads while also boosting overall productivity.
Smart dialers will analyze your CRM platform, your website and other helpdesk tools in order to locate specific customer numbers and add them to your call queue. You’ll be able to pair smart dialing capabilities with click-to-call extension tools, which makes it possible to make simultaneous calls and manage the quality of your leads.
Call Queuing
Another essential feature for your small business phone system is call queuing, because this organizes your inbound calls into a virtual queue that’s based upon your own predefined specifications and rules.
For example, you can organize calls within a queue based upon caller wait time, priority, issue type or agent skills. Call queues are important for managing expectations and maintaining transparency among your customers.
Callers waiting in a queue can also hang up and maintain their place in line, until your team calls them back when it’s their turn. This goes a long way with most customers, because it allows them to maximize their time while also reducing frustrations.
Enhance Your Customer Support With A Small Business Phone System Hosted By Data Talk!
There’s absolutely no denying how your company’s customer support is vital for your long-term success, and that your team’s success relies heavily upon your phone system’s overall capabilities.
Data Talk is a telecom industry leader that’s supported businesses of all sizes for over 60 years, and our specialists are here to set you up with a small business phone system that puts your team in the right direction toward sustainable growth and development.
Reach out to us online or give us a call at 614-784-7100 to schedule your next consultation appointment with our team and learn more about the many tech-savvy phone system features that are available to your business!
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