Part 2: 12 Smart Ways to Save Time and Effort with Enterprise VoIP Software

Part 3: 12 Smart Ways to Save Time and Effort with Enterprise VoIP Software

Cut Costs for Equipment by Using IP Phones Instead of PCs

XML service technology allows delivering interactive content right to an IP phone display and thus using it instead of a PC. With this capability you can streamline many business processes without equipping workplaces with PCs. For example, you can:

• access
  • timely updated (due to integration with HRM software) corporate address book to find quickly a necessary contact with advanced search capabilities
  • corporate databases in accordance with your access rights
• send quick text/voice messages to the selected users/user groups
• deliver content to a user/user group
• alert your employees when a panic button is pushed or a fire alarm is detected
• set a preferable way of communication
• sign-in for/sign-out from work (due to integration with ERP software)

Your benefits: IP phone services can help you:

• save your employee time on daily tasks
• save money on workplace equipment

Another tool to get maximum benefits from your enterprise VoIP network is call accounting software.

Decrease Your Employee Telecom Costs

Modern call accounting software is not only a tool to control employee telecom costs. As call-accounting software provides you with various reports on user phone conversations that are built on the base of call detail records (CDRs) received from your IP PBX, you can use it to derive information about

• phone expenses of each user/user group
• peak phone network hours
• the longest and the most expensive calls, etc.

By grounding on these data you can

• compose an appropriate call plan to smooth out peak phone network hours
• set a number of rules to limit employee “friends & family” calls and even deny such communications at peak load hours to decrease both unnecessary expenses and network load

Moreover, you can setup your call accounting software to reduce telecom costs with

• individual limits on telephony expenses for each user/user group
• restrictions on long-distance calls and/or calls to flagged numbers (city/country codes)
• grouping calls by users/user groups and allocating expenses properly to correct budgets (enabling charge back to departments, cost centers and clients)

You can also set you call accounting software to track

• unanswered calls and control if your employees return calls in a timely manner
• calls to/from suspicious phone numbers
• calls to special extensions used for your marketing/advertising campaigns

Your benefits: call-accounting software can become your easy-to-use tool to:

• manage/decrease employee telecom costs
• enhance your client loyalty
• measure advertising/marketing efforts
• make your employees use enterprise VoIP resources more responsible
• protect employees from abuse/threatening calls
• simplify your accounting staff daily tasks related to phone bill processing
• control/improve your call-center and sales staff efficiency
• IP telephony software can also help you increase your administration staff productivity

Reduce Your VoIP Network Maintenance Expenses

The most of standard IP PBX administration interfaces are rather complicated, so you need highly skilled staff members to fulfill simple daily tasks. With special IP telephony management software you can simplify administration activities and entrust daily tasks to one, not necessarily experienced, employee.

You can also use IP telephony management software to

• do phone inventory at all your sites from a single workplace
  • with a special multi-location inventory feature or
  • by integrating IPX management software with your existing inventory solution
• remove compatibility restrictions with integration of your VoIP network components and thus cut costs for your telephony network deployment/extension/upgrade

Your benefits: IP telephony software can help you:

• save time and money on IP PBX administration
• improve your qualified administrator motivation by giving them only the tasks that demand their experience and expertise
• save effort and time on phone inventory management
• cut costs for VoIP network deployment/extension/upgrade

Conclusion

By implementing IP telephony software you can solve several important problems that impede your business growth. In particular, you can

• save your employee time and effort on daily tasks and communications, improve motivation and productivity of your contact center staff, sales personal, network administrators, managers and accountants, optimize the joint work of remote teams and thus increase your business efficiency in whole
• enhance the quality of your customer service, resulted in increased client loyalty
• cut your expenses for
  • long-distance communications
  • contact center services with a multi-location solution that helps reduce facility expenses and salary rates
  • workplace equipment by using IP phones as mini-PCs
  • VoIP network deployment, extension and upgrade by overcoming compatibility restrictions
  • IP PBS administration and support.

To solve your unique business problem you can

• choose an appropriate IP telephony solution in the market of “out-of-the-box” software or
• build a custom solution, developed in strict accordance with your requirements.

Part 1: 12 Smart Ways to Save Time and Effort with Enterprise VoIP Software

Part 2: 12 Smart Ways to Save Time and Effort with Enterprise VoIP Software

Part 3: 12 Smart Ways to Save Time and Effort with Enterprise VoIP Software

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About the Author

Alexander Anoshin is the author of the book, “The Connected Enterprise”, from which you can learn how to reinforce your enterprise with VOIP. Alexander is the CEO of BCS-IT, which specializes in enterprise VoIP software development.

Part 2: 12 Smart Ways to Save Time and Effort with Enterprise VoIP Software

Get a Single Solution to Improve Call Processing at Your Local and Remote Sites

For dozens of years large enterprises deployed hardware attendant consoles to save effort for incoming call processing. With VoIP technologies all features of traditional consoles were transferred to software-based ones. Thus an operator can use such consoles of the both types to get incoming calls from several phone lines and route them to appropriate employees. However a software-based attendant console can help you also support:

• Quick employee/phone number search
• Quick text/voice messaging
• Call recording
• An intelligent call queuing

Moreover the foremost benefit, that a software-based console provides you with, is a remote team/at-home operator support.

Your benefits: you can deploy a single solution that integrates the advantages of many separate IP telephony applications to help your local and remote teams process incoming calls in the most effective way instead of purchasing several solutions for each site and thus save your money.

In some cases, you may need only some of the above features. Then you can get the demanded facility with a separate application, for example, a call recording application.

Get an Exact Picture of Your Customer Interactions

Call recording applications usually provide you with possibility to record all/selected conversations and manage these records.

Your benefits: A call recording application can help you:

• Settle a dispute with a client
• Get an exact picture of customer interactions
• Monitor and improve customer service quality
• Analyze a conversation with a colleague/partner

In particular, many companies prefer recording conference calls.

Save Time and Money for Communications with Effective Phone Meetings

You can use audio/video conferencing software to set up phone meetings with multiple local and remote participants in the most effective way:

• Plan meetings and send invitations
• Automatically connect conference call participants at the prescribed time
• Re-dial users if a connection is broken
• Share the documents
• Record a conference session
• Send chosen participants text messages
• Organize a polling among conference call participants
• Limit the number of full-duplex users (when tens/hundreds users participate in a conference call) and thus both avoid noise and prevent interruption
• Connect to the current conference call new participants, who use IP/mobile/analogue phones or 3rd party web-conferencing solutions (such as Skype, WebEx, etc.)

(Note that conferencing solutions from different vendors provide various capabilities.)

Your benefits: With conference software you can:

• Organize effectively the joint work of your remote team members
• Conduct meetings with tens and even hundreds of participants
• Save on equipping special meeting rooms

To save time on conference call gathering, you can send participants automatic invitations/notifications right from your IP phone, using an appropriate XML service.

Part 1: 12 Smart Ways to Save Time and Effort with Enterprise VoIP Software

Part 2: 12 Smart Ways to Save Time and Effort with Enterprise VoIP Software

——————————————————
About the Author

Alexander Anoshin is the author of the book, “The Connected Enterprise”, from which you can learn how to reinforce your enterprise with VOIP. Alexander is the CEO of BCS-IT, which specializes in enterprise VoIP software development.

Part 3: 12 Smart Ways to Save Time and Effort with Enterprise VoIP Software

Cut Time Wasted Searching for an Appropriate Specialist to Process a Client Call

Skill-based routing (SBR) software, integrated with your CRM and ERP software can help you reduce the time wasted passing a client call from one employee to another. With SBR software you can automatically route calls to:

• a manager who usually serves a calling client or
• an operator with a required skill set that can be defined from:
  • information about a calling client (such as his/her previous requests or his/her location and language he/she speaks, determined from a country/city phone code)
  • operator’s product expertise, overall skill-level and language capability.

Your benefits: SBR software is deployed to save your client and employee time wasted searching for an appropriate operator/manager in your organization, whose skills and expertise are sufficient to process the client’s request.

To save your employee time and effort to process client messages, you can also use unified messaging and voice mail service.

Save Your Time and Effort to Check Messages from Numerous Sources

If you have already got used to receive e-mails, voicemails and faxes but often don’t have enough time to check all these sources, then unified messaging and voice mail service can become your easy-to-use tool to:

• speed up daily communications
• receive timely all messages regardless of their source using your e-mail client or IP phone.

Your benefits: with unified messaging and voice mail service you can save your time and effort to check numerous message sources and always provide your clients/partners with timely answers.

Another application that helps save your time is a presence service.

Save Your Employee Time on Daily Communications

A presence service provides:

• the real-time information about a user availability and preferable ways to communicate
• an easy-to-use interface for a user to change his/her status and set a preferable communication way.

Your benefits: with a presence service you can save time wasted calling to several user’s numbers (office, mobile, home) and waiting for the answer until the proper one is found.

If you need to speed up communications at several company sites, then you can rely on a software-based attendant console.

Part 1: 12 Smart Ways to Save Time and Effort with Enterprise VoIP Software

Part 3: 12 Smart Ways to Save Time and Effort with Enterprise VoIP Software

___________________________________________________________

About the Author

Alexander Anoshin is the author of the book, “The Connected Enterprise”, from which you can learn how to reinforce your enterprise with VOIP. Alexander is the CEO of BCS-IT, which specializes in enterprise VoIP software development.

Part 3: 12 Smart Ways to Save Time and Effort with Enterprise VoIP Software

Today’s economy requires any business to use all the enterprise resources most effectively. An IP telephony network is not an exception. This four-part series will provide 12 tips to show you how you can:

1. Automate client request processing and release your staff to fulfill more complicated tasks with a voice portal
2. Save your client time wasted waiting for the answer with an IVR application
3. Smooth out call peak hours and increase your sales with queuing software
4. Decrease time wasted searching for an appropriate specialist to process a client call with an SBR solution
5. Save your time and effort to check messages in numerous sources with unified messaging and voice mail service
6. Save your employee time on daily communications with a presence service
7. Get a single solution to improve call processing at your local and remote sites
8. Get an exact picture of your customer interactions and define the ways to improve them with a call recording application
9. Save time and money for communications with audio- videoconference software
10. Cut your expenses for equipment by using IP phones instead of PCs with XML services
11. Decrease your employee telecom costs with call-accounting software
12. Reduce your VoIP network maintenance expenses with IP telephony management solutions

Save Your Effort on Client Request Processing

With a voice portal you can process automatically up to 80% of incoming calls: your clients can log into the system with their passwords and then, in accordance with their access rights, retrieve the information from your databases or request certain actions to be performed.

Your benefits: by providing this self-serving facility you can

• Help your clients considerably reduce time spent getting information/managing their personal accounts
• Release your staff to process more complicated requests

To save your client time you can also deploy an IVR application.

Help Your Clients Waste Less Time Waiting for the Answer

An IVR application provides you with ability to:

• Process queued calls (play music, pre-recorded messages and information on the estimated remaining waiting time), when all operators are busy
• Route an incoming call to an appropriate operator by using information entered by a caller in the tone mode
• Provide a caller with access to pre-recorded voice messages and information retrieved from your databases (such as a caller’s bank account balance or currency exchange rates) by using pre-defined menu buttons.

Your benefits: you can help your clients save their time wasted waiting for the answer.

Another tool to improve incoming call processing is queuing software.

Smooth Out Call Peak Hours and Increase Your Sales

If you need to process a large amount of incoming calls and guarantee your clients that they will always receive a timely response from your client service, use virtual queuing software. With this software your client can leave his/her contact information and return to his/her business while an available operator will automatically call him/her back.

Your benefits: virtual queuing software can help you:

• Save your client time
• Compose an effective calling plan and thus improve your sales staff productivity
• Increase your sales by reducing the number of missed calls.

If you wish to enhance these advantages and automatically pass incoming calls to employees with required skills, then you can rely on skill-based routing software.

Part 2: 12 Smart Ways to Save Time and Effort with Enterprise VoIP Software

Part 3: 12 Smart Ways to Save Time and Effort with Enterprise VoIP Software

——————————————————
About the Author

Alexander Anoshin is the author of the book, “The Connected Enterprise”, from which you can learn how to reinforce your enterprise with VOIP. Alexander is the CEO of BCS-IT, which specializes in enterprise VoIP software development.