Do you have the best voice solution for your business, and are you making the most of your phone features? Here’s the inside track from a pro on when to use Shared Call Appearance versus Simultaneous Ring, and how to use Call Transfer, Hunt Groups and Auto Attendant to improve your overall customer experience.
Do you have more phones than people?
If so, Shared Call Appearance could be a great solution for your business. Imagine a single employee on duty in a business with an office, a shop and a parts room, and phones in all three rooms. Shared Call Experience would allow the employee to answer an incoming call in the office, put it on hold and pick the call back up in the parts room to verify they have the requested part.
While Shared Call Appearance helps solve a specific phone challenge for some businesses, it is not intended as a call routing mechanism (and using it as such causes problems). There are several other features that more intelligently route calls, including Simultaneous Ring, Call Transfer, Hunt Groups, and Auto Attendant.
Are there a number of people in your business who could answer an incoming call?
With Simultaneous Ring, incoming calls ring to every phone in the simultaneous ring group. Whichever employee is free to answer the phone can take the incoming call. This is a great way to make sure that the phone is answered as quickly as possible, depending on who’s available at the time.
Do you need to transfer calls around your business?
Call Transfer is simple, but extremely useful. Just as the name implies, this feature enables any employee to transfer a call to another employee after answering it.
Do you want your phone system to handle calls differently after 5 o’clock or at the weekends?
Hunt Groups allow you to set logic-based patterns to determine which employees or phone numbers receive calls. For example, you may want an incoming call to try your desk phone first, then your co-worker’s desk phone, and then your cell phone. Or you may want the call to ring sequentially to several different employees until one of them answers, or simultaneously ring. The best part about a Hunt Group is that you can set up multiple options depending on time of day, day of the week, holidays, and more. This gives you an automatic solution for call overflow, after-hours answering, and vacations.
Do you want to give your customers the chance to route their own call?
Auto-Attendant gives your callers a recorded greeting with different options for routing their own call. For example, the caller can press 1 for Sales, 2 for Service, or 3 to leave a message, or alternatively can search by name.
Give your account representative a call if you’d like to find out more about these options, or review your phone features. We can engage a Sales Engineer to design the optimal voice solution for your business.
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