Quick setup for seasonal staff, temporary numbers, special queues, temporary routings, no problem!
Every industry has a busy season, of a sort. The holiday shopping season, the tax preparation season, the summer construction season; these are just a few examples. Some businesses fluctuate more than others, and many bring on seasonal staff to help tide over the busiest time of year. You may also be the type of business that occasionally welcomes interns, sponsors job training programs, and other types of temporary staff.
Of course, one of the biggest challenges of bringing on temporary staff, whether interns or seasonal, is the constant task of onboarding. Helping your new staff get adjusted to the office and dive into the workflow quickly is the key to optimizing your time with temporary staff members. And VOIP is the perfect aspect of your stack to make onboarding and integration a smooth process.
The Intern Number
If you bring on a set number of interns each year, every time they come in they occupy the same desks. They do the same tasks and they answer the same phones. One thing you can very easily do with VOIP is to set aside a special number, or set of numbers, just for the interns. This can keep your records clean and help your clients or vendors that work with the interns always calling the same numbers when it’s intern season.
Whether you have your interns calling vendors, performing customer service, taking care of follow-ups, or updating inventory; setting aside numbers for your interns means that interns can come and go but the job stays exactly the same.
Scale Up or Down with Seasonal Staff
Businesses that hire seasonal staff often find themselves investing in too many phone lines most of the year in order to have enough during the one part of the year when your staff size swells. But with VOIP, this isn’t necessary. VOIP scales easily with the size of your company, allowing you to reserve as many active lines as you need at any given time. When your staff is small during most of the year, you can pay for and manage only the phone lines you need. And when your seasonal staff members arrive to help carry you through the busy season, you can expand your plan to as many phone lines as you need.
This not only means that you save money and logistical time during the non-busy season, but also that you can scale to however many numbers you need if a particular year is especially busy. Then, if you hold onto some of your best seasonal workers by making them permanent, you can easily hold onto their lines and release the rest when the seasonal team moves on.
Fast and Smooth Onboarding Every Year
Finally, VOIP makes it incredibly easy to onboard new team members whenever they join and no matter how quickly they leave. VOIP communication platforms have team members automatically joining your phone network, chat network, and cloud communication. No need to worry about providing devices or asking your employees to use their personal numbers for BYOD workplaces. Whether you hire remotely, in-office, or your seasonal team members are out in the field, the VOIP number will work on whatever devices are used. No SIM cards, no new phone lines, and an easy-to-access platform that any new staff member can get the hang of quickly.
All they have to do is install the VOIP app on their phones, laptops, or tablets and they are instantly able to access their assigned phone number while keeping their personal contact information completely private.
VOIP is one of the best possible tools for any business that hosts interns or hires seasonal staff because it is so easy to scale and manage. Whether you keep a few numbers on the back-burner for interns or scale as-needed for impressive changes in staff-size throughout the year, VOIP is the key to smooth onboarding and efficient cost-effective cloud communication. If you’d like to explore how VOIP plans can scale with your seasonal staffing needs, contact us today!