Your phone system can do a lot more than make and receive calls or retrieve your voicemail. It can gather all kinds of data to make your business more effective. It can help safeguard your network. It’s there, and you’re paying for it. You might as well make sure that it’s doing all of the work it can for you. 

It can make your billing more accurate

Your phone system keeps track of all kinds of data that you’ve probably never thought to access. I knows who called what extension and how long every call lasted. If you bill for things like phone consultations, or just want to know how long an average call lasts, you can get a report every week, every month, or even every day, that will give you exactly the numbers you need. Employees don’t need to tediously track every minute of every call, and you never have to worry about over or under billing.

Learn from call data

Call data allows you to see the average call time for a specific group of phones, like your sales force, to see how long the average call takes. You can see if someone is rushing people off the phone or if someone is consistently dallying on their calls. Call recording data can help you train better, sell more efficiently and improve customer service.

You can see if someone is making personal calls or letting everything go to voicemail to be returned at another time. You can identify clients who call technical support more often than they should and target them for a little extra education, or even review their equipment and services to make sure that it’s still meeting their needs.

Data driven business decisions have a huge potential to give you an advantage in the marketplace, especially if you’re competing with businesses who don’t use the data available to them.

It can save you money

Hybrid and hosted VoIP systems are installed with little or no upfront cost to you. You pay a low monthly fee for the services that you want and need.  You don’t have to spend months and months recouping the costs of an expensive phone system. If you’ve got an older phone system installed, or you haven’t reviewed your communication costs, it’s quite likely you could be saving money simply by shuffling things around. You may benefit from adding features that would increase the efficiency of your business like an auto attendant or follow me ringing.

Local and long distance calls are also completely included in VoIP service. You’ll never pay extra no matter area code you dial. International are also much cheaper than with traditional phone service.

It can improve the performance of your internet connection

Some hybrid systems include features like local caching that will allow frequently visited sites to be accessed at LAN speeds. They are stored locally for fewer and shorter data round trips. There’s no more apologizing to customers because, “The network seems to be slow today.” You can access the information you need like it was on your hard drive and not halfway around the world.

You can store important files centrally so that they can be accessed anytime by anyone. Important documentation and data is never more than a few keystrokes or swipes on your smartphone away. It’s like having your own, personal, ultra-secure cloud at your fingertips.

It can keep you connected in an emergency

Because VoIP systems don’t use POTS lines to make and receive calls they can failover to any available data connection, even 3G or 4G cell connections. Should disaster strike you’ll be able to make and receive calls and keep doing business. You’ll be able to maintain access to emergency services longer and more reliably and if you do have to close you’ll up and going again faster than the competition.

A long-lasting backup battery will keep you connected even if the power goes out. You can’t ask for a more robust communication solution in a crisis.