Whether it’s sales, customer care, or communications between employees and management, phones play an integral role in any modern business. However, it’s important to establish principles of how phones should be used in your business – what are their benefits? What are their drawbacks?
We outline a few ways that you can make phones a smarter and more effective part of your business strategy.
1. Using Auto Dialers
Auto dialers have been a part of sales and customer care systems for years. Many call centers use an autodialer, and employers have mused over their benefits and drawbacks.
Modern auto dialers are very different from the technology used 10-20 years ago. They allow you to more easily:
- Monitor employee performance
- Provide employees with relevant information
- Target calls to the most relevant prospects
- Select a group of agents to handle a set task
- Determine intervals between calls
- Choose which phone number you display to your clients
The advances made in this technology take the “cold” out of cold-calling. Advanced auto-dialing solutions give your employees instant access to all the information they’ll need to transform a cold call into a sales opportunity or remedy a customer care problem.
Modern solutions also remove the lag and technical hang-ups that have plagued this technology in the past. Remove the risk of glitches by upgrading your auto-dialing software and make phones work for your business – don’t make your employees work to operate their phones.
2. The Personal Touch
If clients can identify who’s calling them as a personal contact rather than a blank corporate entity, it puts them at ease when answering the call. This boosts the chance of a profitable engagement.
Smartphones can’t be used for everything. However, they have advantages when conducting business. There are 2 choices when it comes to having employees contact customers using smartphones; they either provide a work phone or let the employee use their own smartphone. Generally, the former solution is preferred by both employers and employees. There are several reasons for this:
- It allows staff distance between their jobs and their personal lives (i.e. their private phones will never be contacted by clients outside work hours).
- If a phone has a problem, it can be turned over to the employer to fix as promptly as possible.
- Performance of critical work apps and software isn’t slowed down cramped storage space.
- It lessens the employee’s chance of using their phone during work hours for personal reasons.
Providing employees with smartphones may seem like a heavy investment, but it can lead to better connections with clients and improve availability. It’s well worth it.
3. Assisting with Remote Working
We’ve become accustomed to Zoom culture and using similar video-conferencing apps to communicate while working remotely. However, many things don’t require a laptop call and messing around for a few minutes trying to get a picture right. Making sure that your employees have high-quality phones that are always available during work hours removes most of this hassle.
Not every interaction needs face-to-face interaction – conversely, emails can easily be forgotten or ignored. Phone calls are the classic business communication method and are still the best way of keeping up-to-date with your staff, even given recent advances in remote working software.
Make sure you can always get in touch with staff via phone. It’s simple, straightforward, and saves you valuable time.
Smartphones and Smarter Phone Calls
From using modern auto-dialers to ensuring your staff is available whenever you need to speak with them, phones still play an incredibly important role in a business. Upgrade yours now and keep in touch.
