Category Archive

Call routing for a business is essentially very simple, right? A customer calls your number, and then they’re connected with a representative from your company. That’s pretty much all it is when you boil it down, but there are a few questions that you should ask yourself when designing your phone system. 1. Do Callers Need Options to Choose from? Using an IVR is massively popular with small businesses because it evenly distributes calls among staff members, helps callers get to the right person or department, and filters out telemarketing bots, among other things. It’s very effective for managing calls and makes you sound more professional at the same time; so, you really just have to ask yourself if you want your customers to wait a few more seconds before they’re connected with someone, or if ringing straight to your phones fits your business better. 2. Does Direct-Dial Make Everyone’s …

  We’re all familiar with how useful call forwarding can be for handling business calls. You can give customers one central phone number to call, and then send the call to pretty much anywhere you want, depending on how good the system you’re using is. No matter how capable your system is, though, it’s really only as good as your forwarding strategy. How you’re routing calls can make all the difference.   1. Ringing All of Your Phones Simultaneously The classic method of forwarding calls to your phones by ringing them all at the same time is effective because calls are more likely to be answered quickly. It’s uncomplicated and direct—someone calls in, and somebody will answer.   2. Ring Each Phone in a Specific Order There are usually going to be members of your staff who take calls more often than others because that’s their role, and those are …

  We all make it a top priority to never miss a phone call, but it can be just as detrimental to miss a voicemail. If a voicemail gets overlooked or accidentally deleted, you never know what opportunity was lost with that message. That’s why you’ve got to have some protocol and sensible habits in place to make absolutely sure that you receive every message your customers leave for you.   1. Don’t Rely on Consumer Voicemail Services It’s pretty risky to only utilize the voice mailbox that comes with your cell phone, or the one that comes with any of your phones, for that matter. Your phone may malfunction and delete all of your messages for no apparent reason; the caller might get the dreaded, “mailbox is full” automated response—and there are a number of other things that can cause you to miss messages when using the internal voicemail …

Some of the simplest and most common elements of your business’ phone system can be the most nuanced and difficult to make right. The welcome greeting is usually the first thing a caller will hear, making it a pretty important impression on calling customers. There are a few things to keep in mind when creating and setting this greeting. 1. Keep it Brief Depending on how the structure of your system is laid out, you may either have it set to ring your phones right away when someone dials your main business number, or to bring them to some kind of menu first. If routing calls to a menu, your “welcome” message may just be tacked onto the beginning of the main menu prompt which describes to the caller what number they need to press to be connected to the correct department—but even then, it should be brief. Your callers …

  Even though the whole idea behind a phone tree, or auto attendant, for your phone system is to simplify things and minimize errors, you can still mess it up before you even start using it; that is—when you set it up. This post will point out all of the common mistakes that people make when they’re setting up the phone tree for their phone system.   1. Too Many Options People just don’t want to stick it out if you have a ton of different menu selections, especially if their option ends up being the last one in the list. Try to keep your phone tree down to as few options to choose from as possible. If you have a situation where you need one option for each of your employees, and there are a lot of them, then it’s best to create an actual extension for them. Then, …

  Adding an auto attendant to your phone system gives you a great advantage over the typical system that simply rings your phones directly for a staff member to pick up your calls. For some organizations, sending calls directly to your phones works very well and suits the nature of the business; however, an auto attendant can, in many scenarios, save time for your employees and manage calls far more efficiently. An auto attendant has many names. You might call it a phone tree, IVR (Interactive Voice Response), or as we call it at Talkroute, a Call Menu. Whatever you call it, the auto attendant was a groundbreaking innovation that provides businesses with massive benefits. These are a few.   Block Spammers & Robo-Dialers One of the most common reasons that people want a service with an auto attendant is to use it as a first line of defense against …

Obviously, a simple phone number isn’t going to grow your business in a literal sense, but a toll free number will give customers the impression that you have a larger reach. There is a reason that toll free numbers exist today, and it goes beyond the original purpose of advertising a phone number that people knew was not going to cost them anything if they dialed it. These numbers convey a very effective message, telling them that the business attached to it is a solid, established business with a broad reach. The Power of Association In the memory of most people, a toll free number is what they always saw attached to large companies, like the phone company or a big-box retail store, to name a couple. A toll free number has a certain feel that seems omni-regional, large-scale, national. It is a programmed psychological connection of which we can …

What are call queues good for? We all know basically what they do, but is there a way to optimize how you use them? Every virtual phone service does call queues a little differently, approaching call management from different angles. The one constant is that they allow you to support multiple calls at the same time, which is even more valuable if you use them to their full potential. Part of a Balanced On-Hold Program Like the rest of your phone system, call queues are only as effective as their weakest link, and there are a couple of things that need to work together to create an on-hold program that does what it’s supposed to do—manage caller fatigue and keep them on the line. One crucial thing is that, even though the caller is just waiting for you to answer, there still has to be something happening on the line …

Does your business have a toll free number? It’s understandable if you want to project a connection with your community with a local phone number, which is a tried and true strategy. Meanwhile, there are always toll free numbers available if you want to convey an established, national feel to customers. The following reasons are why you should consider it. A Variety of Area Codes Many people think that toll free numbers only have the (800) area code, but that’s definitely not the case. A toll free number can have the area codes, 888, 877, 866, 855, 844, or 833—and they are all the same type of phone number; there is no difference except for the digits in the area code. That gives you a lot of options, so that you’re much more likely to find the number that you want, as opposed to the limited selection you’ll find in …

  Call forwarding isn’t what it used to be. It has evolved into a fairly standard feature of phone systems and is far more variable and useful than it was with the local phone company. Whether your business has one cell phone to take calls, or 25 employees, call forwarding can streamline the way you manage calls.   It Is Becoming a Standard Tool Consider the analogy of music recording technology. 30 years ago, musicians wouldn’t even attempt to add complicated features to their recorded songs, and they had no way to clean up the recordings and make them sound professional—they had to go to a big, expensive studio. Now, there are tools available to everyone which, when applied to their recordings, put them on the same level as the pros. Those tools are now standard, freely available, and routinely utilized because they simply make everything sound better. The same …