If you’ve run a small business and only ever had one or two phone lines, then you might not be aware of some of the Business Phone Features available on innoTel’s Hosted PBX phone service.
Business Phone Features
To know which Business Phone Features are right for your business, you first need to know what features are available and how they might help you communicate better with your customers. The following isn’t a comprehensive list, but we find that the following features are often overlooked by small businesses, either because they didn’t know they existed, or they thought these Business Phone Features were strictly for larger businesses.
Out of Hours / Time
What happens to calls that come in after you’ve left for the day? Do they simply ring out? Do they go to your voicemail?
With the Out of Hours feature, you can choose what happens to those calls and when it happens.
For example;
- During opening hours between 9am and 5pm, you want calls to ring on your phone as normal.
- Between 5pm and 8pm and on Saturdays between 9am and 5pmm you’re happy to take calls but would like them diverted to your mobile
- And all other times you’d rather those calls go to voicemail so you can deal with them later.
That and more is all possible with our Out of Hours feature. You can set as many time conditions as you like to suit the way you run your business.
Voicemail to Email
Want more control over your voicemail? Our Voicemail to Email feature quickly delivers any Voicemail as a recording attached to an email to your nominated email address. The email will also contain the date and time of the call, along with the callers number (if available).
Ring Groups
Do you have more than one phone in your office? Want multiple phones to ring based on the number you customer has called?
For example;
Mary runs her boutique recruitment business and has 3 other employees, each with a desk phone. Mary wants each of her employees to have their own phone number, but also wants all of the phones in the office to ring when an incoming call comes into the main reception number.
With Ring Groups, that’s simple! You can setup as many ring groups as you like and you can also choose between whether the phones ring all at once, or whether it rings Mary’s phone first, then Jane’s phone, then Emily’s and so-on in a round robin way until someone picks up the call.
Ring Groups are often used when a full Queue isn’t required and there aren’t a lot of incoming calls.
Call Block
Being harassed by particular callers? As long as their caller ID is available, you can block specific phone numbers and not ever have to hear from them again!
Call Queues & IVRs
Call Queues are the next step up from Ring Groups where there is a higher number of incoming calls. Calls wait in the queue until an agent or employee is available and then the call is delivered to that agent. While the caller waits in the queue, music on hold is played along with any advertising you would like to add in to the mix.
IVRs
Interactive Voice Response, or IVR for short are those menus you hear when you dial the phone numbers of utilities, banks etc. You know, the ones that ask you to press ‘1’ for sales, ‘2’ for customer service and so-on.
IVRs are great for businesses that have departments and want to ensure the customer gets to the right people and department as quickly as possible. IVRs are usually coupled with Queues and Music on Hold for a complete solution to ensure customer enquiries are handed promptly.
This is just a very small sample! There are many more Business Phone Features that come with our Hosted PBX phone service