6 Ways Your Phone System Is Killing Your Business

Can your phone system fully support your business? Communication is a big deal for every business. Poor customer service leads to unsatisfied customers, which then leads to a decrease in sales and revenue. Productivity dwindles when employees have difficulties communicating smoothly and effectively with colleagues and clients. Does this sound like you?

Of course, there are inevitable problems confronting every business, but regarding your business phone system, you may be going through unnecessary issues that an advanced VoIP PBX system or some smart features can solve.

Here are 6 common situations that your phone system is harming your business and the practical solutions to get rid of them.

1. Frequent Busy Signals

“Beep–” The annoying sound almost tells the caller to hang up. How many potential customers are lost because of it? According to Voice Response, Inc., about 34% of callers who hang up won’t call back, ever.

If you are using the traditional landline phone system, chances are that a busy signal arises when someone calls a phone that already has its single line in use. The capacity for simultaneous calls on VoIP phones is much higher. Additionally, with a VoIP PBX system, you can also leverage some smart features to realize short wait time and a pleasant on-hold experience.

Play music to keep customers on hold.
Ring multiple employees simultaneously.
Route the call to queue up.
Encourage the caller to leave the voicemail

2. No Professional Greetings

For many customers, a phone call is the first interaction they have with a business. Interactive Voice Response (IVR) is nothing new. While it may seem like a feature that is exclusive to larger enterprises or call centers, it’s common for SMEs to leverage it to get each call off to a good start by having a standard customer-friendly greeting. However, have you ever thought that poorly designed auto attendant script can drive away potential customers instead? Below are the top 3 IVR mistakes to avoid:

Overwhelming your customers with too many options
Cornering your customer without letting them speak to a real person
Burying the most important information in the menu

3. Inefficient Call Flow

The phone rings but no employee answers because they’re either busy or assume that someone else will take the call. Are you bothered by this too? That is because you have inefficient call flow or even no structure to your call flow. Gradually, employees go deaf to the ringing. VoIP phone systems offer an abundance of features that are extremely useful in building an organized and efficient call flow, such as:

Directing turning calls to the original extension with AutoCLIP
When the original called party is unavailable, redirect an incoming call to the other destination with Call Forwarding.
Share and distribute calls among employees in particular departments with Ring Group
Distinguishes calls from different inbound routes with Distinctive Ringtone
And more …

4. Employees Chained to the Desk

Can your employees be reached timely even when they are on a business trip? Can your employees take work calls from personal devices yet present the company number? Like it or not, the BYOD trend is inevitable. If everything you do with your current system takes place on-site, you are in drastic need of mobility, and even unified communications. If your service provider fails to offer a desktop or mobile softphone that enables your employees to have a consistent communication experience across multiple devices, it’s time to look for other options.

At Yeastar, we offer free UC softphone to enable anywhere anytime business communication. With Linkus softphone, you can make and receive calls with a uniformed corporate number, setting up call forwarding rules, check call history, and voicemails from your cell phone or desktop. Better yet, IM, presence, and CRM integration is also available to assist team collaboration.

5. Being Vulnerable to System Outage

You should always have a Plan B, or even a Plan C if needs be. Despite all the advantages, VoIP is not 100% risk-free. Even for small businesses, lacking a failover plan in event of a system outage could have immediate and hurtful consequences. Studies found that North American businesses lose $700 billion a year to IT downtime. There are several ways to ensure that calling is never interrupted. Below are 2 popular options offered by Yeastar for your reference.

Your phone system can be backed up with a resilient hot standby, where a redundant PBX server mirrors your primary phone system in real-time and take over instantly upon failure of the primary phone system.
In case of a short disruption of Internet service, a pre-configured 4G LTE failover on your phone system can provide immediate cost-effective alternate connections.

6. Overlooking Basic Security

Have you ever found yourself the victim of VoIP hacking? You might have faced hours of downtime and a complete system rebuild after then. VoIP attacks can come from the internet and telephone lines, expose your business to toll fraud, theft of confidential information, and eventually hurt your wallet. Here are some basic steps that you can perform to safeguard your phone system from the most common VoIP attacks.

NEVER use the default password
Restrict administrative login to predefined IP addresses
Place your phone system behind a business-class firewall
Set up call behavior monitoring algorithms
Update your phone system on a regular basis

You might not think much about how your phone system can affect your business before, but you should now. When your phone system can’t keep up, your business can’t too. See if you fall into any of the above situations, put an end to it, and unlock the full potential of your business. Furthermore, If you are still using a traditional landline system, VoIP is worth the investment; or you can opt for a cloud-based phone system that requires no hardware.