Ask yourself this: Where would your business be without voice messaging? If you can’t reliably intercept and organize your business’ voice mail, then you can’t really serve your customers. This is one of the reasons that Talkroute exists in the first place.
The Birth of a New Kind of Phone System
When our cofounder, Paul, was building his first company, he found that when he needed to run his business remotely, using nothing but his cell phone, the tools to do so were difficult to find.
Even Google Voice couldn’t quite cut the mustard.
So, he created the tools he needed. Among other things, the ability to manage voice messages from customers was crucial.
After very little deliberation, Paul decided that many business owners were experiencing the same problem, and Talkroute was born.
You need a professional-grade solution for a professional business.
Understand that the voice mailbox on your cell phone is NOT an acceptable substitute for an answering system that has been designed to manage business messages.
When your business is new (or maybe it’s old, but you’re finally giving your phone system the overhaul that it needed) there are some issues you will have to think about, and here they are:
1. Can you store and manage ALL of your messages?
Using nothing but your cell phone to manage company calls is a risky business for a variety of reasons. For one thing, your mailbox has a certain capacity, and usually a pretty low capacity.
With a voicemail system like the one you get with a TALKROUTE ACCOUNT (wink, wink), you can store a large number of messages, indefinitely.
Not only can you store all of them, but you can manage, organize, and categorize them from your control panel. The system even allows you to assign a separate voice mailbox to each of your business’ phone numbers.
ANYWAY, back to the talking points…
2. A voicemail greeting that is meant for your friends and family will not fly with your customers.
It’s all fun and games until a customer calls and hears you impersonating a British woman—when you’re not British… and you’re not a woman. Nobody wants that.
This is precisely the reason that you need a separate voicemail platform, where you can record a professional message that doesn’t sound like Julia Child.
Here’s a great resource with some examples of voicemail greetings:
https://talkroute.com/12-fun-professional-business-voicemail-greetings/
3. Without a third-party application (when available), there is no reliable backup for voicemail messages on your phone.
You’ve got to have a record of messages for reference, and if you think you can rely on your carrier to save them—think again.
Since your personal mailbox was never meant to be utilized for the high volume of messages accrued by a business, it’s just not set up to handle it.
When using the voicemail feature included with your virtual phone system, not only can you view and manage messages from your online dashboard, but a copy is also sent to your email so they are never lost.
4. Your personal voicemail system could fail, making your messages unavailable at critical times.
The first thing to remember is that your ability to view and interact with your personal voicemail depends on whether or not you have access to the device.
Of course, you could always do the thing where you call your cell number from another line, then enter that secret code (if you can remember it), and then you can at least hear your messages (but you can’t view them).
This is not to mention the fact that you’re relying on the device, completely; the battery could die, it could be stolen, you could drop it in the toilet—anything could happen.
5. You don’t have complete control over your voice messages.
Here’s an unsettling thought for a business owner: Will your messages even be there when you want to access them?
Some carriers automatically delete messages after a given period of time, sometimes without even warning you beforehand.
It would be more than a little upsetting if one day, you need to recover a customer’s information from a voicemail message, and guess what?
It’s gone.
6. Like all the other systems your business utilizes, there is just no substitute for a dedicated voicemail platform for your phone system.
Your business simply can’t afford to take the chance that you will lose or miss messages from your customers because you were depending on your cell phone for voicemail.
There aren’t too many other things that are more vital to your business than an efficient, reliable phone system, and a dedicated voicemail platform might even be the most important.
Stephanie
Stephanie is the Marketing Director at Talkroute and has been featured in Forbes, Inc, and Entrepreneur as a leading authority on business and telecommunications.
Stephanie is also the chief editor and contributing author for the Talkroute blog helping more than 100k entrepreneurs to start, run, and grow their businesses.