Warren Hawkins, MD, Euphoria Telecom.

Your telephony system may not be the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about business growth, but its intersection with marketing, customer service, sales and business strategy makes it a powerful tool.

Your business phone system is not just a piece of technology or a communication tool, but also a strategic investment into the growth and efficiency of your business. Effectively using its capabilities and features can enhance customer service, streamline operations and build business efficiencies.

Customer growth strategies

The journey to service excellence starts with each customer touchpoint. Your phone system plays a pivotal role in how you can deliver the kind of service that people want to talk about.

Making use of analytics and reporting tools, like call waiting times and customer satisfaction ratings, that are built into your system can deliver valuable insights and metrics. These can help identify strengths and weaknesses in your customer service offering, helping you to optimise resource allocations and make decisions that improve the overall customer performance.

Building business efficiencies

Small and medium sized businesses which are still in their early growth phases will be focussing on improving professionalism and advancing operational efficiencies.

A cloud-based telephony system can support this because it enables teams to work from anywhere. This can be a major advantage for businesses with a distributed workforce or those looking to attract remote talent. It allows them to go fully remote or hybrid and reduce the size of the premises they need. Connecting the system to other communications tools, CRM software and productivity suites further enhances efficiency, as work is centralised in one place.

System features like skills-based call routing can ensure customers reach the most appropriate person faster, reducing call waiting times and the need to transfer calls.

Improving accessibility can also improve efficiency. Some systems enable you to turn your mobile device into an extension of your business number. This removes the need for staff cell phone allowances or pesky cellphone claims because calls are being made directly through the company phone system.

For small businesses and sole proprietors, this also makes it easier to take calls and connect with customers. A contractor for instance, could take calls made to the business’ phone number while on a building site. Said contractor might then choose to hire someone to work on a second building site and grow their offering rather than have to hire someone to answer calls in the office.

Helping to scale new branches

A single cloud-based telephony system can be used across multiple branches and other business locations. The beauty of this is that all calls can be routed through the main branch reception, so you won’t necessarily have to hire people in every branch just to manage phone calls.

Also of value is inter-extension functionality across branches. This means that free calls can be made between branches.

Flexible and scalable

Because VoIP systems do not rely on hardware and on-site connections, they’re simple and cost effective to scale up and down as required. If your business grows and you need to add users to the system, this is easy to do. Likewise, you can adapt to seasonal ebbs and flows.

For example, retailers might want to scale up their capacity ahead of Black Friday and throughout the Festive Season, to cover the increase in business and calls. This can easily be done because it does not require physical infrastructure changes. When the rush is over, they can just as easily scale back again.

Understanding what your telephony system offers and how its features can enhance value for your business and your customers is key. Used at its full capability, the system and the insights it is able to deliver should be a powerful tool in developing a business strategy that drives growth.