{"id":6229,"date":"2023-05-05T08:30:24","date_gmt":"2023-05-05T12:30:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nexela.wpenginepowered.com\/?p=6229"},"modified":"2023-05-01T05:33:59","modified_gmt":"2023-05-01T09:33:59","slug":"is-your-phone-system-hurting-your-chances-with-new-prospects","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nexela.com\/?p=6229","title":{"rendered":"Is Your Phone System Hurting Your Chances with New Prospects?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>\u201cPlease listen carefully as our menu options have changed\u2026\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Sound familiar? It\u2019s one of the most common catchphrases of the modern business phone system prompt. It might be a little cliche, but at least it\u2019s not among the worst sins your phone system could be committing that is preventing your business from potential success.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<h2>Is Your Phone System Betraying Your Business?<\/h2>\n<p>Put yourself in the shoes of one of your customers or clients. In fact, don\u2019t even do that. Wear your own shoes. We\u2019ve all experienced some of these painful moments when calling other businesses\u2014it\u2019s your responsibility as the decision-maker in your organization to make sure you don\u2019t put your customers through the same thing.<\/p>\n<h2>The Problem: You are Wasting The Caller\u2019s Time<\/h2>\n<p>Nobody has ever called a business to listen to automated marketing messages, taglines, catchphrases, or royalty-free hold music. The goal of your phone system\u2019s auto attendant is to quickly and efficiently direct the caller to the person or department they need to speak to. Obviously, if you have limited people to answer the phone, or you need to put somebody on hold to transfer a call, that is simply the nature of the beast, but you really want to minimize the amount of time they spend dealing with the system.<\/p>\n<p>That means keep your auto-attendant messages clear and short and simple. Avoid long, drawn-out messages as much as possible, and try to offer the most common or pressing destinations first.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>We\u2019re not knocking the marketing messages and hold music either\u2014go ahead and put that to use when the line is ringing or when someone is being transferred, just avoid making someone sit through it before they can even choose their destination in the system.<\/p>\n<h2>The Problem: Your Options Aren\u2019t Clear<\/h2>\n<p>Your clients and customers aren\u2019t always going to know who they need to talk to when they call you, especially if your departments aren\u2019t familiar to them. For example, let\u2019s say you are a car dealership that has separate sales, service, and finance lines.<\/p>\n<p>If you have cute internal names for these departments, such as your \u201cdriver happiness department\u201d and your \u201ccertified gearhead team,\u201d it might confuse someone who isn\u2019t intimate with the inner workings of your organization. It\u2019s definitely cute and looks great in your marketing, but for a customer or prospect trying to navigate your phone system, it\u2019s just going to be confusing.<\/p>\n<p>Instead, you would want your phone system to announce these departments like this:<\/p>\n<p>\u201cDial 1 for our sales team, dial 2 for service and maintenance, and dial 3 if you have billing or financial questions.\u201d<\/p>\n<h2>The Problem: You Can\u2019t Record, Transcribe, or Review Calls<\/h2>\n<p>If a customer calls with a problem, or a call otherwise doesn\u2019t go well, it\u2019s important for management to be able to review the call to evaluate. Being able to quickly bring up recordings and transcriptions will help uncover details to remediate and correct the problem.<\/p>\n<p>On top of that, meetings over the phone can be complicated, often with a lot of different things being discussed that a single note-taker might miss. Being able to pull text transcripts from a call can make this a whole lot easier and prevent things from being lost in the mix or forgotten.<\/p>\n<h2>The Problem: Remote and Hybrid Staff Have Limited Functionality or Horrible Voice Quality<\/h2>\n<p>If this is the case, you are likely using a much older phone system, or there is something wrong or misconfigured. We remember way back in the day when traditional phone systems started offering the ability to remotely connect to them. It was essentially like calling into your phone system and then using it to call out\u2014it was a neat feature, but it often made the audio much worse, and it could be pretty finicky. Fortunately, modern phone systems don\u2019t tend to have this problem, especially cloud-hosted solutions.<\/p>\n<p>If you have remote or hybrid staff, or you have traveling sales people or multiple locations, having a phone system that compliments this can really add some huge benefits to the way you communicate. Your staff can use their smartphones or laptops to take and receive calls, they can transfer calls to other members of the team even when they are a thousand miles away, and everything will be much more seamless for the customer.<\/p>\n<h2>The Problem: You Are Paying Too Much to Support Your Phone System<\/h2>\n<p>Phone systems, especially legacy phone systems, are expensive. The cost of implementing them, upgrading them, and supporting them is often a major expense for most businesses. Like most on-premise technologies, they aren\u2019t supported forever either, which means your business will need to pay out-of-pocket eventually to replace an older system with something newer.<\/p>\n<p>Modern hosted cloud VoIP solutions don\u2019t work that way. You don\u2019t need to install a phone system in your office, you simply pay for the number of lines or users. Sure, you still might need to purchase handsets and headsets, but most modern systems also include smartphone and Windows apps so you can make calls from any device. There\u2019s no shelling out major money for upgrades or to repair and replace hardware\u2014everything is in the cloud.<\/p>\n<p>VoIP also tends to give you more features for less, whereas more traditional phone systems would nickel and dime you for the services and capabilities you need. It\u2019s a win-win!<\/p>\n<p>Want to ditch your unsavory, overpriced phone system without going broke? Give Nexela a call at (215) 525-3223 today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cPlease listen carefully as our menu options have changed\u2026\u201d Sound familiar? It\u2019s one of the most common catchphrases of the modern business phone system prompt. It might be a little cliche, but at least it\u2019s not among the worst sins your phone system could be committing that is preventing your business from potential success.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":6224,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54,50],"tags":[69,143,148],"class_list":["post-6229","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","category-blog","tag-best-practices","tag-communication","tag-voip"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.6 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Is Your Phone System Hurting Your Chances with New Prospects? | Philadelphia, PA | Nexela<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/nexela.com\/?p=6229\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Is Your Phone System Hurting Your Chances with New Prospects? | Philadelphia, PA | Nexela\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"\u201cPlease listen carefully as our menu options have changed\u2026\u201d Sound familiar? 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