Answering solutions that help your business grow

When planning a budget for a business, you have to provide your company with what’s necessary and cut the dead weight. If your secretary is constantly busy, and you need help directing all of the incoming phone calls, you may be considering hiring someone else for answering services. With updated phone systems, you can set up an advanced answering system for all levels of your company at a much more affordable rate. Using Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), you can establish an answering system with many helpful features.

Personalized Options

For professional appearances, you want your call menu and all of your answering services to be completely customized to your business. At-home subscribers may not care if they have an automated standard answering machine, but customers and clients want to feel like they can reach a human even when no one can answer the phone at the moment. You want to be able to customize all of the greetings and provide appropriate answering options for all of your callers. This will enable them to efficiently reach the people they are trying to reach and you to run the office with less hassle.

Adjustable for Departments

In most moderately sized companies, there is more than one department. In addition, the more employees you have, the higher the chances that different people will be working different shifts. With a quality business phone lines, you can have a customized answering recording for each sector and shift in your company. Try to find providers who can handle the size and complexity of your company.

Say that Jim is the human resources contact on Monday and Tuesday, but Kelly works the department Wednesday through Friday. With a good answering system, clients calling that department on Jim’s days will hear his personalized greeting, and those calling during Kelly’s shifts will hear hers. Clients may not be able to reach you all of the time, but they will appreciate knowing that your answering services are always as current as possible. They want to feel like the company is keeping up with them as well, so knowing if they missed Jim or Kelly will make them feel more connected to your business.

Flexible Settings

More important than a customizable program is one than you can go back and readjust. As your company changes, so may some of your employees and departments, so you want to be able to update all of your settings as necessary. A desirable business answering system will be advanced enough to offer several layers of answering services, but should still be very easy to navigate from your computer. You should not have to learn a whole new system to change your voicemail greetings and call directing services.

Multiple Greetings

If you want a different greeting to play for people calling after business hours, a VoIP system can provide that. You can program your hours and certain dates so that people calling at different times will hear different greetings. This will allow your callers calling during odd hours to know exactly why they couldn’t reach you, and when the best time to try again would be. Holiday greetings can also tell constituents when you will be resuming operations for the New Year. This may help you achieve more relevant voicemails as well, because people will know whether or not they will hear back from you that day. Your greetings can often be several minutes long, so you can pack in a great deal of information during off hours.

Calling Privileges

One of the most challenging things about running a business is being able to separate work life from home life. To make that easier, you can use your answering system to block all but pre-approved numbers from reaching you after-hours, on vacation, or over the holidays. Anyone not approved will be automatically directed to voicemail without tempting you to interrupt your well-deserved time off. You can always monitor your voicemails at a convenient time and call back the appropriate people, but only those who your settings have allowed through will actually be able to reach you during off hours. This will hopefully encourage many to wait for the next business day to try to contact you, but they will at least have the option to leave you a succinct message with their concerns.

You may not be able to get rid of a secretary altogether, but a quality business phone system will make things run much more smoothly for you at the office. Find a provider with a plethora of options and an affordable rate, and you can ensure that all of your incoming calls make it to the right destination automatically. A nice answering system will provide a professional front for your business, and it only takes the effort of setup to get started. Consider how upgrading your phone system from a traditional landline system might benefit your company.