In order to increase customer engagement, the sales process needs to be perfected so that the business could sell the maximum number of products or services. In today’s competitive market, only those businesses can survive that have the best sales process. This does not limit to cost, excellence, or reliability. Increased customer engagement is also an important factor that is essential for conversion. Communication is the secret ingredient that can spice up your recipe for customer engagement. This means that along with emails, advertisements, and social media, phone calls can also serve as an important sales conversion tool and can highly benefit your sales department.
Understanding Cloud Based Phone System
Most of the advanced business phone systems, particularly the cloud-based phone systems are based on VoIP technology and it offers a wide range of features that can benefit your business. A cloud-based phone system is a phone service that operates over the internet to access the server and phone system. It is a VoIP phone system, which is hosted on a single or multiple safe off-site data centers. A common example of a cloud-based phone system is host PBX (private branch exchange). This VoIP phone service allows one phone number, either a local number or UAN (universal access number), to be used to reach all employees of an organization.
For instance, your business is based in Los Angeles, and you have a remote team member that works in Pasadena and a virtual assistant from Long Beach. Now, if you have a cloud-based phone system, it will provide you with an Auto Attendant feature, which you can avail to transfer calls to your different team member based in remote locations. An auto attendant is one of the unique features offered by a cloud-based phone system. It is the automated voice recording that guides your caller to press the required button for their desired option. In addition to that, it offers your clients a more personalized experience when they call your business, you can have someone to live answer your incoming business phone calls. You can conveniently set up the auto attendant feature of your cloud-based phone system to transfer the call to an external live answering service of your choice.
Unique Features of Cloud-Based Phone Systems
In addition to the regular features which you may expect from any traditional business phone system, cloud-based systems can leverage their internet-based service to provide your business with some exclusive benefits. One unique feature of cloud-based service is ‘WebPhone’. It is an internet browser-based smart application that allows you to make calls right through your web browser. Another unique benefit a cloud-based phone system offers is that it allows you to integrate your phone system with your CRM (Customer-Relationship Manager) software. Your cloud-based phone system is capable of accessing your CRM software and log any call you make. This allows you to have more free time that you can use to further enhance your customer experience. Most of the benefits of having a cloud-based system are associated with freeing up the time and resources, the two commodities any small or large-sized business desire to further enhance productivity, sales, consumer experience, and eventually overall revenue. With a cloud-based phone system, it is extremely convenient to acquire a toll-free number or procure additional phone numbers for your business. A cloud-based phone system allows you to have virtually unlimited incoming and outgoing calls without having to worry about bandwidth concerns that you may experience when using a cell phone service.
Moving your phone system to cloud holds a natural benefit within the business communication setting. Because a cloud system is delivered over an Internet connection rather than a copper wire phone line, the features are also delivered in a virtual manner. This means that the voice features you can access are not restricted with the kind of server or quantity of available ports in your onsite phone system. By moving your phone system to the cloud, you can have a virtually unlimited number of auto attendants, voicemail boxes, extensions, and conference bridges according to your communication requirements. As compared to a traditional phone system, upgrades of a cloud based phone system are controlled by the service provider. This means that there is no additional cost associated with substituting the old system for a new system in order to benefit from the recently updated features. A cloud based phone system tends to provide its users with smarter, intelligent, automated features that enhance business operations on a larger scale across the organization. Due to this added automation, moving your phone system on the cloud will allow you to save almost half hour of productivity for each employee on a daily basis.
Business Phone System and Sales
The saying, ‘time is money’ is practically true for any small or large sized business and particularly for the employees working and responsible for creating and increasing sales. Members of a sales team are usually on the go and often work hard to meet sales targets. The cloud-based phone is the key that empowers these individuals with the required technology allowing them to perform in an efficient manner. Following are some of the benefits a business can avail by moving their phone system to the cloud:
Unified Communication
Cloud-based phone systems offer unified communication that allows for the integration of your CRM (customer relationship management) solutions and communication system. While CRM solutions serve as a valuable resource for management and analysis of the consumer informed throughout the sales lifecycle, unified communication through a cloud-based phone system further enhances their effectiveness. Unified communication eliminates the requirement to switch across different systems. It further provides employees working in sales with §instant and convenient access to important clients’ contact records. Cloud-based phone systems offer various unique features for unified communication such as screen pop-ups, easy click to dial feature, and quick access to contact history. This allows salespersons to perform in an efficient manner, providing the customer with a personalized experience.
Video Conferencing
While in-person meetings have always been considered as a great way to establish a lasting association with a new client, it is often hindered due to logistical challenges. A business deal may need different decision-makers present at distant locations or may require multiple meetings being held far away and frequent traveling is not a convenient option. Under all these situations, a cloud-based phone system offers convenient HD video, audio or web conferencing solutions, making it a must-have technology for every business looking to increase its competitiveness particularly in sales. Cloud-based phone system offers the flexibility to hold video conferences between more than 100 different individuals at different locations at the same time, which is truly a great advantage. The cloud-based phone system also provides with the opportunity to deliver interactive and personalized demonstrations to potential clients and even allows for real-time sharing sales contracts and other important documents with an individual regardless of his/her location. The best part is that cloud-based phone solutions cost even less than a fraction of the cost of frequent traveling to distant locations.
Smart Business Operations
A great part of being successful in sales is to have the capability of analyzing significant information and to be capable of sharing that information through practical intelligence. Call history logged by a cloud-based phone system can provide you with a great deal of information related to your sales performance that is not achievable in case of data that comes from a system, which solely depends on data entry. Cloud-based phone system offers built-in call history reporting, which empowers sales team members and management to extract reports on an individual basis as well according to the team, department, or location. It further allows gathering important calling information such as the number of calls received, made, and the duration of calls during a specific time period. With cloud-based phone systems, these reports are highly accurate and empower the user to drill down to a rather granular level for improved evaluation and enhanced performance.
Readable Voicemail
Many businesses rely on voicemail in order to make their customers feel heard particularly when they are not available to answer a customer’s call. Specifically for salespersons, who are constantly on the go, it could become a hassle to find a quiet place in order to listen to the voicemail or write down the message if it includes important details of a customer. A cloud-based phone system can save the sales staff from all these hassles by offering a convenient option of receiving voicemail recording in text format. This means that voicemail recordings will be transcribed so the on the go sales representatives can read them in a fast and convenient manner while maintaining complete discretion when they are already meeting another customer. This allows for saving time and reduces the stress of listening to voicemails on the go.
Live Chat for Internal Customers
Live chat option for internal customers can be truly beneficial for the sales employees whether offered as a separate chat client or embedded into the cloud-based phone system portal or video conferencing software. It happens quite often that the salespersons or client, they are attempting to make a sale to have a question that could either make or break a deal and requires an immediate answer. Live chat option allows for sending a quick text message to the sales manager or a fellow coworker in order to get a quick reply. This is a much better way of instant communication as compared to sending emails that have a greater chance of being overlooked.
Smart Applications for Business
There are a number of useful business applications available that offer great benefits for business professionals including sales executives. Because of its online nature, cloud-based phone system allows support for a number of user-friendly smart applications to calculate the margins of every deal in advance in addition to other important revenue-based metrics, which are always beneficial to know before approaching a client when making a sale.
Advantages of a Cloud-Based Phone System When Making Outbound Calls for Sales
Custom Call ID
When expanding your business reach to international markets, having a cloud-based phone system allows you to have a local calling number in your plan to connect with your customer in a specific market. Using a local calling ID can make a great impact and can ensure that your customers will answer your calls as most of the international calls from unknown numbers go unanswered.
Advantages of a Cloud-Based Phone System When Receiving Calls for Sales
Call Queuing
This feature of a cloud-based phone system assures that the customers will never hear a busy tone. For incoming calls when all the operators are engaged, call queuing feature will place rest of the incoming calls in the queue until an operator is available to answer the call.
Remote Work Mobility
Considering that the sales representative can be on the go, a cloud-based phone system allows for answering the phone from anywhere using their own mobile phone. This feature is known as softphone and allows a sales executive to have all the office phone system features in their reach no matter where they are present physically.
Calling Groups
Cloud-based phone system offers a feature to set up all incoming calls for sales purposes to ring simultaneously on all devices of your sale executives. This assures that no sales opportunity will be missed and it will also motivate the sales executives to quickly answer a phone call in order to have an opportunity to make a sale and earn more commission.
Customer Calling-ID
This feature of a cloud-based phone system allows the members of the sales team to identify the customer for his/her number to know if it is a returning customer or a new one. This allows answering a call with a personalized greeting message to offer the customers with an enhanced experience.
