A reliable telephone system is a vital asset for your business, providing your team with the tools to communicate simply and easily with customers, prospects and each other.
A good telephone system should be affordable, provide good call quality and most importantly, be easy to use. Telephone systems are important as they allow your business to offer a personal and efficient service between your business and customers.
The importance of a phone system cannot be overstated, and here’s why…
1. Providing great customer service
Giving your customers the best customer service is a key part of running any business, and a good telephone system will afford your team the tools required to maintain a high level of customer service.
Features such as seamless call transferring, call waiting and conference calling are built right into our business telephone systems—giving your team the ability to professionally communicate with your customers.
With VoIP, your business telephone system will also benefit from higher quality calls. Higher quality calls means better over the phone experience for customers and staff, and HD audio calls is something many people come to expect.
2. Cost Reduction
When choosing a business telephone system, budget is of course one of the biggest factors to consider. A good telephone system should be built to match your budget, but also to match your requirements.
Gone are the days of expensive hardware lease agreements, long 7 year contracts and costly hardware upgrades.
One of the most important parts of upgrading your phone system is fitting to a budget. Most modern telephone systems, including VoIP and 3CX offer a per-user cost, which means that you’re only paying for the number of users you need, and no more.
3. Making a professional impression
Telephone systems in a business are important as they allow you to present a professional impression to callers.
Features such as auto attendants, call queuing, customisable messages played to callers, hunt groups and more allow you to create a fully bespoke call flow, which improves the experience of your callers, and gives them a professional impression of your business.
Advertising using a local telephone number, as well as non-geo numbers also give your potential customers a good impression of your business before they’ve even dialled the phone.
4. Time Saving
Saving your team time doesn’t sound like a feature of a telephone system, but with the right communications solution in place, it’s most certainly a by-product.
Features such as CRM integration, call transferring with call announcement, customisable call flow, click-to-dial and more all enable your employees the ability to reduce time spend doing general telephone administration duties.
By integrating with other software, such as a CRM, you can have contacts automatically pop-up on your computer when they call in, saving time searching through your CRM. You can dial directly from the contact by clicking on their telephone number, and you can even log past calls against a customer to improve record keeping and save time by eliminating data entry.
5. Home working
COVID has changed the way businesses work. By forcing home working in many businesses, it meant that companies across the UK had to adapt, and part of that adaptation was their telephone systems.
A telephone system optimised for home working is important nowadays due to the need to adapt to COVID cases, isolation and giving workers the ability to work flexibly.
6. Protecting your business
A telephone system is important as it protects your business. It sounds silly, but a telephone system with call recording does exactly that—it provides a level of protection against miscommunication between you, your customers or your suppliers.
While most businesses hope they never have to use it, call recordings do provide a safety net for those tricky situations, and if you can use them to prove something was (or wasn’t) said, then your telephone system is already invaluable.
Call recordings can also be great for listening back to a conversation to make sure you haven't missed anything, or perhaps checking measurements, or double checking that you’ve taken down an email correctly!
7. Capturing leads
Arguably, one of the most important reasons for having a telephone system in your business is capturing any incoming sales leads.
Incoming sales are the driving force of many businesses, and it is very frustrating for potential customers if they can’t reach your business on the phone. Chances are, if a prospect can’t reach your business, they’ll go elsewhere and you’ll miss out on their custom—who knows, that could have potentially been your largest client?
Just think how many times you’ve called a business and you’ve been met with a dial tone, and how frustrating that is—a good telephone system removes that issues and ensures all callers have a destination to go to, meaning you don’t lose out on potential business.
8. Increase revenue
Having a telephone system is important and it will help increase your businesses revenue.
How can a phone system increase revenue? Good question.
Giving your sales team all the tools available to make sure they can communicate with customers and prospects is essential. With everything they need, your sales team can quickly reach out to prospects, create conference calls with multiple team members, and even work from home.
CRM and computer telephony integration (CTI) also help to cut down on time sped doing general administration and data entry, and give the team more time to focus on sales and customer care.
A good telephone system is also more likely to generate incoming business, as potential customers will find it easier to reach sales staff and customer services—reducing wait times, keeping customers happy and generating repeat business.
Having a reliable and easy to use business telephone system is important as it generally helps your business run smoother. It optimises workflows and even reduces your running costs.
To find out more about the different types of telephone system available to your business, speak with a member of our team today for honest, no-obligations consultation about your telephony.
