Tag Archives: Voicemail

Lesser-Known Benefits of VoIP Phone Systems (Part One)

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VOIP, communications, remote, phones, technology, systems

VOIP phone systems provide advantages such as transcription and call routing.

Even in the age of emails and social media, the telephone still plays a critical role in the way many companies conduct business. However, the latest technology has definitely begun to shape the way companies use the phone, as VoIP phone systems, and the unique features they provide, give new ways for businesses to take advantage of their phone systems. If you are considering making the switch to a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone system for your business, then it is likely that you have heard about the more popular benefits these systems provide such as portability and reduced costs, however, there are a variety of additional benefits of choosing a VoIP phone system as well. Here are a few of the lesser-known features a VoIP business phone system can provide.

Voicemail to Email Transcription

While staying on top of voicemails is critical in order to ensure that you are responding to clients/customers in a timely matter, listening to all of your voicemails each morning can be time-consuming. Fortunately, VoIP phone systems provide an alternative to listening to each of your messages. With voicemail to email transcription, your voicemail messages can be immediately transcribed into text and sent to your designated email, where you can read them at your leisure at a later time. With voicemail to email transcription, you can scan voicemails quickly for pertinent information, greatly reducing the amount of time you spend reviewing voicemails each day. This also makes it easy to access important information from voicemails such as names, phone numbers, and addresses without having to scramble to write everything down before the message cuts off.

Find Me/Follow Me Call Routing

For business owners who are constantly on the go, a great feature of VoIP is its find me/follow me call routing. If you do not spend the entire day chained to your desk, you may run the risk of missing an important phone call you have been waiting for. Fortunately, your VoIP phone system can help prevent this situation with find me/follow me call routing, which allows you to create a list of numbers where you can be found before a call gets sent to voicemail. For instance, you could program your phone system so that if your office phone does not get picked up after three rings, then the call would be routed to your cell phone for two rings, followed by your home phone. Only after all of the phones on your list have been tried would the call then be routed to your voicemail, increasing the chances that important calls get through to you.

Do Not Disturb

Do Not Disturb (or DND) is another great feature to help prevent important calls from going to voicemail while allowing you to maintain a certain level of professionalism. The fact is that you won’t always be able to answer your phone. Sometimes, it may even be critical that you silence your phone, such as when you are meeting with clients, so that you do not get interrupted. DND not only allows you to temporarily stop incoming calls to your phone when needed, but it also allows you to program your VoIP phone system to redirect calls when you have Do Not Disturb turned on, allowing another colleague to answer the call at the touch of a button. This can then prevent important calls from going to your voicemail.

For businesses that still use legacy telephony services, switching to a VoIP phone system could give them access to a variety of useful features that could help to boost their overall productivity. Contact us to learn more, and look out for our next post as we continue to look at some of the lesser-known benefits of VoIP phone systems.

5 Ways VOIP Services can Save Your Business Money

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Business man holding a dollar sign. Saving money with VOIP services concept.

VoIP Services can save your Business Money

Internet phones are changing the landscape of business communication. So much so that even the large telecom companies are developing their own VOIP plans just to keep up with the trends. It’s no surprise, VOIP brings voice communication back to the cutting edge of today’s technology. The whole idea of a business phone system is integrated with modern software standards and compatibility with other essential software elements like your CRM.

But VOIP isn’t just making office phones more convenient and high-tech, it is also making business phones significantly more affordable. VOIP is far more accessible to small businesses, offering price points within a small-business budget for big-business quality of service. Let’s dive into the top five ways that VOIP services can save money for your business directly.

1) Scalability

Scaling for a larger, smaller, or expanding staff has always been a major challenge with PBX business phones because it means a rearrangement of the physical wires themselves. After setup, a business could find themselves stuck paying for too many or too few channels. But not with VOIP.

VOIP allows you to reserve exactly as many employee and facility phone lines you need, scaling up when your needs increase and scaling down if your staff numbers contract. All with minimal cost and no additional hassle or expense to handle your scaling through the handy online portal.

2) Runs on Existing High-Speed Internet

Another great perk of VOIP is that it works on internet data, not a phone signal. If you have already invested in a fast, guaranteed internet connection, there’s no need to buy a phone plan on top of that. When you already have high-speed internet, that is all you need. Your computers and devices will connect and everything you need will be available at high-quality. Your internet will provide all the signal necessary to run your phones and any necessary web browsing and cloud file management inside the company.

3) No Physical Equipment Installation

The next money-saving opportunity is dodging the physical installation. Every time a business makes a change to a traditional PBX system, a technician needs to run a line, remove a line, update the box, and so on.  Physical equipment installations are not just distracting and time-consuming, they are also costly. With VOIP, you don’t need to pay for technician time or wait for the installation to be complete to get on with work. Instead, you can make the changes you need to in the platform and that’s that.

4) Don’t Buy Company Phones or SIM Cards

Even for your remote employees and employees in the field, you no longer have to consider buying company cellphones or SIM cards to keep your team connected on your managed phone network. In fact, employee’s own devices can work as their VOIP hub and answering point as a number that is separate and parallel to their personal phone number. VOIP does use a SIM card, but not in the way you’re used to. It uses the card just to get an internet connection on the phone.

5) No Service Downtime

Finally, we come to a very important point. Because VOIP is so flexible by nature and lines can be answered from any device, you also can completely dodge most issues that would cause communications downtime. If you know maintenance is scheduled for your office or the entire team, you can simply have everyone transition to working from their laptops and phones to take calls from the same numbers as far as clients are concerned. There is no need to suffer through worrying, customer-losing downtime when your lines transfer easily from one device to the next.

To discover how much savings you can achieve with VOIP, contact us today!

The Benefits of Voicemail to Email

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Phone keys mobile communication - Voicemail to email concept

Can you get your voicemail when your not in the office?

Voicemail is an important part of business communication, but it can be a nuisance to manage. Why should you have to replay all your messages to find the one you need to hear again? What do you do if you press the wrong key and accidentally delete an important message? The good news is that there’s a VoIP feature that lets you receive all your voicemail in your inbox. This feature, logically, is called voicemail to email.
Messages in your inbox
When you enable the feature, your VoIP system forwards each message to your inbox as an audio attachment. The subject line and text will tell you when it arrived, what number, and the caller’s name if it’s available. You can choose to delete messages from your voicemail automatically when they’re sent, or to leave them there. Leaving them gives you extra flexibility, but auto-deletion guarantees your voicemail will never be full.
Once the messages are in your inbox, you can employ all the tools that are available for managing email. You can sort them into folders, mark them as high-priority, and forward them. You can set up filters to highlight messages from some callers and mark others as spam.
Sometimes an old voicemail message is the only place you have an important piece of information, such as a caller’s phone number. Being able to get back to it easily can save a business deal.
The limit on your messages is only the limit on your inbox. That’s usually a very generous cap, but voice attachments are large, so you may need to delete or archive old messages.
Messages as audio files
The attachment holding the voice message is an audio file, usually in MP3 or WAV format, so you can treat it as an independent file. This is useful for archival purposes. You can save the attachment as a file, delete the message from your inbox, and have a permanent record. This way you can save as many messages as you want, organizing them into folders using any scheme. For instance, you can save all voice messages from a supplier and save having to ask questions they’ve already answered.
Transcription to text
You can choose to have the VoIP system put a text transcription of each message into your email. This will save time when reviewing your messages, especially if you’re in a noisy environment where it’s hard to make out what the caller said. Copying down phone numbers while listening to voicemail is seriously annoying. Having the number in the transcription is much easier.
Not all voice transcriptions will be equally useful. If the signal-to-noise ratio is poor, the transcription could be spotty. Even so, it will often give you enough of the message to tell whether it needs your immediate attention or not. Sometimes the transcription could even pick up words that you have trouble identifying.
Extra convenience
Letting your VoIP service send your voicemail to your email makes the messages far more convenient to handle. All your communications are in one place. You can review the messages at your desktop as well as your phone.
If you know your associates are using voicemail to email, you can be more confident that they’ll get your voice messages and notice them. People are apt to ignore or lose messages on their phones, but if they’re getting them in email, they’ll pay more attention to them, and you’re more likely to get a response on the first try.
SystemsNet offers hosted PBX and VoIP, with features including conferencing, auto attendants, “follow me,” voicemail to email, and much more. Contact us to learn how you can have a better business phone system.