IP communications supports universal access to advanced business telephony by integrating voice signals onto the data network. This innovation makes it possible for small businesses to leverage their own data network, either buying IP software or buying IP access via hosted VoIP services. Hosted VoIP services typically allow customers to add and subtract telephone system features as needed, making IP communications affordable for small businesses.
Here’s a look at the ten most important VoIP features for small businesses, from basic to next-generation:
Today’s small businesses face logistical challenges as they compete in the global marketplace. Lacking the global office network of large enterprises, small businesses rely on their data networks to bridge the geographical divide. Hosted VoIP services afford small businesses access to both basic and advanced IP communications features, bringing together remote colleagues and supporting relationships with business partners and customers worldwide.
1. Senior executives. Voice-data integration promotes a 360-degree view of the organization. Decision-makers can tap into advanced reporting and database applications for access to real-time data. IP communications technology enables executives to effect change through strategic initiatives.
2. Operations managers. Operations managers have the information and the lines of communication to streamline daily business processes.
3. Supply chain managers. The VoIP system helps managers optimize the supply chain, collaborating with suppliers, distributors, and clients.
4. Sales representatives. Remote access and wireless VPN drives VoIP value for sales representatives, who rely on reliable communication with customers and colleagues from any location. Access to real-time data and rich conferencing media also serves as a critical tool to win and keep customers.
5. Customer service agents. The contact center is one of the top beneficiaries of a robust VoIP system or service. In addition to advanced call routing capabilities, customer support representatives take advantage of customer relationship management technology and presence management interfaces to resolve customer issues.
6. Marketing specialists. The CRM system is a powerful asset for the marketing team as well, offering the ability to target promotional messaging and offers to specific consumers.
7. Project managers. VoIP’s unified communications technology helps project managers get the job done on time and below budget. Key resources include the presence management interface, data sharing, and collaboration applications.
8. IT staff. VoIP brings voice and data onto a single communications platform, dispensing with the cumbersome hard wiring of traditional PSTN phone systems. On-premises VoIP systems make quick work of moves, adds, and changes, freeing up IT personnel for higher-value projects. And hosted services remove the burden of system maintenance altogether.
9. R&D Engineers. Product development becomes easier with advanced collaboration tools. Data sharing and unified communications applications allow engineers to swap ideas with one another. Some R&D departments are using the technology to involve customers, partners, and suppliers in the design process.
10. Shareholders and investors. They might not be occupying a cubicle, but a company’s shareholders and investors stand to benefit indirectly from the business phone system. Most companies achieve dramatic cuts in overhead costs by switching to a VoIP system or service. These savings may translate into working capital to reinvest in the business, rising stock prices, and/or a healthy profit for investors.
IP communications has evolved into a powerful business tool that supports every aspect of the business. No matter where in the organization you sit, VoIP technology can help you unlock more value from existing resources.
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Five Ways VoIP Services Help You Keep Your Customers
It costs five to ten times more to acquire a new customer than retain an existing one, according to Frederick Reichheld’s influential study The Loyalty Effect: The Hidden Force Behind Growth, Profits and Lasting Value. An effective contact center is the critical element to maintaining a solid relationship with customers. For best results, make sure your contact center has the following customer-friendly VoIP services:
VoIP phone systems raise the level of intimacy in customer communications, which allows agents to connect with customers and resolve issues efficiently. To create a true customer-driven enterprise, start with a customer-friendly IP communications infrastructure.
Sources
Allantgroup.com (PDF)
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IP communications technology has transformed the economics of business communications by bringing voice onto the data network. With new productivity features on the horizon, look for next-generation business telephone systems to deliver even more value.
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Ten VoIP Call Center Features
The following VoIP features can help your business realize the full potential of today’s IP call center services.
VoIP phone systems have expanded the scope of call center services, making it easier than ever for businesses of all sizes to deliver enterprise-class customer support. Make these ten features part of your call center service and you can count on a happy customer.
Sources
Packet 8 (PDF)
Voip-news.com (PDF)
Here’s a look at the top five benefits of unified communications technology:
1. Collaboration. Unified communications (UC) features a venue where coworkers, business partners, and clients can come together and collaborate using advanced data sharing and communications devices. You can exchange ideas, share data and documents instantly, edit a document “live,” and more. Examples of virtual collaboration tools include online white boards and a shared document repository. UC is often referred to as unified communications and collaboration, which indicates its role in facilitating virtual teamwork.
2. Communication. UC enhances business communications by bringing all available devices and modalities under one roof. The implications go beyond access--with UC, you can seamlessly transition among all available communications modalities “live.” With a click of a mouse you can escalate an instant message (IM) exchange into a phone call or even a conference call, bringing others on board. The graphic user interface facilitates the transition.
3. Access. Because UC operates across all communications devices, users enjoy unprecedented remote access to the system. Connect to your company’s internal network via wireless using your PDA, laptop, netbook, or home computer. Unified messaging ensures that all your messages--voice, email, and others--reach you in your chosen format.
4. Business process integration. UC expands the integration between data and communications applications, promoting continuity across all business processes. Via the UC interface you can access all available business process applications--enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management (SCM), and other data management and reporting utilities.
5. Presence. A unique innovation of UC technology is the real-time presence interface, which allows you to view the availability of all other users and their communication preferences. This cuts wasted time tracking down available users and leaving messages. For example, a customer support specialist can use the presence application to identify an available expert qualified to answer a particular customer question.
These five advantages represent only the greatest hits of UC technology. Other benefits include increased productivity, reduced travel, and cost savings. The next generation of unified VoIP promises more features and collaboration tools to enhance the way we work and communicate.
Sources
Mitel (PDF)
]]>Ten Benefits of Hosted VoIP Services
Here’s a look at ten reasons hosted VoIP services could be the right choice for your business:
Together, these ten benefits present a solid case for choosing hosted VoIP services. For smaller companies looking for enterprise-grade communications and larger companies seeking flexibility, hosted services offer an unbeatable value.
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]]>Those are great questions for business decision-makers to be asking, because business spending has been extremely challenging of late. Research firm The Gartner Group predicted in March of 2009 that business spending on IT products may decline by 3.8 percent during 2009. Small business optimism, meanwhile, has plunged to truly sad depths.
In such a harsh business spending climate, can appointment setters still be worth their fee?
Appointment Setters the Bargain of the Century--If an Upturn Is Around the Corner
Appointment setting services provide a powerful, low-cost way to build an initial relationship with prospects who may someday turn into clients. Ironically, a dire recession may be the best time of all to make appointment setting phone calls.
After all, not so many people are calling during a tough economic time. The phone is not ringing nearly as often as it does during boom times. Companies that do continue appointment setting campaigns may find increased receptivity from less busy business owners.
Additionally, these quiet times are historically only preludes to the next business spending upturn. The NFIB Small Business Economic Trends Report, issued in April of 2009, noted that capital spending and inventory levels are at or near record lows--and have remained at those lows for record spans. Can this drought continue for much longer?
If and when all this “pent-up demand” comes online, it is natural to expect that companies that have built relationships during bad times will be well-positioned to sell when in fact prospects do start buying.
Appointment Setting Pay Must Stay Connected to Appointment Setting Performance
However, the above “yes” must be viewed through the prism of conservative business practices. That is to say, companies that choose to use appointment setting services must not overspend on appointment setting services. More than that, it must be verifiable that appointment setting is worth the cost.
But how can appointment setting efficacy be determined if traditional measures of success such as increased sales are not reliable because of negative macro-economic spending trends? This is a huge challenge for both the appointment setting client and the appointment setting service itself: how to know when an appointment setting campaign is working when sales are not going up right now.
One way to approach this thorny matter is to connect appointment setting pay to factors other than increased sales. The particular metric used may depend upon the needs of the client. For instance, one client may measure success by number of prospects contacted per day. Another client may focus more on contacting only the most qualified leads.
Whatever metrics are decided upon, the upshot is the same--other metrics should be employed when increased sales is not telling the whole story.
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What Does an Appointment Setting Service Do?
An appointment setter’s goal is simple: to get a salesperson in front of a potential buyer. Research shows that sales go up considerably when done face-to-face, although conference calls can be arranged as well. Appointment setters cold-call a large list of prospects, pinpoint businesses in need of specific services, and identify decision-makers who are ready to meet. This is a crucial but time-consuming process, which is why using an outside service allows businesses to concentrate on their core functions.
Strengths to Look For
The number-one ability an appointment setter must possess? A relaxed but effective pitch that makes potential buyers want to know more about a service. An appointment setter should also master sales skills such as working with gatekeepers, knowing how to handle objections, and gathering business intelligence quickly and efficiently. Excellent phone manners and respect for the customer are also integral to success. A first-rate appointment setting service emphasizes these proficiencies when training their representatives.
Quality versus Quantity
Of course, an appointment will only lead to a sale if the buyer and seller can truly benefit each other. Therefore, the quality of leads an appointment setting service generates is more important than the quantity. A successful appointment setting service will run a campaign tailored specifically to the business utilizing them. In the age of specialization, it’s also important have knowledge of and experience in the industry the appointment setter is representing.
Questions to Ask Appointment Setting Services
Get answers to these questions before choosing an appointment setting service:
Choosing the right appointment setting service can give time back to a sales team--and ensure a high return on investment.
Sources
Ecommerce Times
VendorSeek.com
It is a well-known phenomenon that evolving and new technologies can create a variety of ways to run a business or even a life. This can result in both a positive and/or negative impact on the way we work and live.
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On the negative side, the breadth of applications can cause confusion as multiple parties suggest different ways to get the most benefit from the technology. And while most of the suggestions probably have some merit, it takes time before standardization occurs and the technology becomes universally applicable.
In a way, that’s what we’re seeing with Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) – a development that is pretty much universally viewed as a good idea, but one that is also being clouded by the sheer volume and diversity of opinions as to what it’s good for.
With that in mind, let’s get back to the basics of VoIP and see if we can understand if there is a common denominator for what makes it good.
The essential point about VoIP is that it adds functionality to voice. It is voice plus whatever else you want to do. How the technology achieves that isn’t really relevant, as long as it stays affordable. What really does matter is that voice plus contributes to the financial benefits every single organization wants to realize from technology. It enables you to do more with less--much more.
Improving Service Levels
With the current economic climate biting hard in all areas, one way in which voice can make a real difference is increasing the efficiency of IT users across the organization. VoIP does this by effectively turning your telephony system into a self-help service.
In a typical IT help desk, at least 30 percent of inbound calls are for routine queries such as password resets and account unlocks. By using VoIP to facilitate self-service, help desk operatives can be freed up from mundane tasks and instead redeployed to work on second and third-line support roles, which can often add a lot more value back to the business.
The immediacy of self-service also has a positive impact on customer satisfaction, as users often prefer the ability to log calls and resolve problems without the need to wait on hold or explain issues to human operatives. While external customers sometimes bemoan the inability to talk to a human, it seems employees often prefer it that way!
Beyond the IT Department
The same increase in productivity and customer satisfaction applies in other areas of business operations, such as Human Resources, where routine queries about leave or payroll issues can be serviced by voice-enabled self-help technologies.
Even the approval of leave applications can be handled by the system. The evidence provided by customers using FrontRange voice solutions suggests that, provided employees can make contact by voice, rather than keyboard, then both acceptance and satisfaction with the self-help system are high.
Ultimately, voice-enabling routine activity allows multiple departments to improve efficiency and productivity across the entire organization.
Looking for the Big Savings
One of the factors that makes VoIP so appealing is that no matter where you make the initial investment, be in the service desk or as part of your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution, the technology can be introduced to other parts of the organization to increase its overall return to the organization.
Imagine, for instance, that you’re about to make a PowerPoint presentation to a customer. As you’re setting up in his board room, you find the presentation you are about to give won’t work because the version of PowerPoint on your laptop is older than the one your corporate marketing team used to create it. No problem, because your own office is voice-enabled. You phone the help desk, which re-provisions your laptop using 3G via your company’s virtual private network (VPN). Within a matter of minutes, the system has checked company policies and established that you are allowed to have PowerPoint 2007, checked that your laptop is out of compliance, done an automated reinstall or self-healed the laptop, checked that everything is working, and turned your machine back over to you.
In the process it has logged an incident, which will, in turn, form part of a management report that will help executives make decisions about the sales pipeline, operations, and long term strategy.
And there’s so much more that voice plus makes possible. The critical consideration is not to simply look at voice for its own sake – but identify how voice plus can make a real tangible difference to existing areas of your business.
Steve Feeney is UK Strategy Director of FrontRange Solutions.
Office telephones are so pervasive that they are taken for granted in the same way that desks and chairs are taken for granted. After all, how much work could get done without desks, chairs and telephone systems? Yet those little dark gray boxes that look pretty much the same from office to office and company to company conceal all sorts of technology, features and choices. Read full article >>
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]]>The acronym VoIP stands for voice over Internet Protocol. This phenomenon allows one to make phone calls using an Internet connection rather than a standard telephone line. Since it is recently conceptualized, there will be a growing number options and services provided, being several immediately present. For instance, some services may limit the user to calling others with the same service, while others allowing you to call any telephone number, from local, national, to international. VoIP can be a very convenient means of communication especially for those whose jobs warrant them to use the Internet in conjunction with communicating to others. Read the full article >>
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