Why your telephone system is restricting your growth

In this blog, our Voice Consultant, Martin Bacon, summarises how your outdated system may be costing you business opportunities. In this article, he covers:

• How are great customer service and modern voice systems linked?
• Why improved productivity will boost your profitability?
• How can the right communications technology give you a competitive edge in a saturated industry?

The telecommunications industry is rapidly changing in the UK and if you communications plan isn’t up to speed, your business will soon fall behind.

By 2025 BT will switch off the PSTN network, which means your business needs to upgrade to IP telephony. While the pandemic accelerated the adoption of new technology, you should focus on future-proofing your organisation as it's no longer an option but a necessity.

During the last couple of years, I came across many businesses who were postponing this switch to hosted voice. Among the reasons for the delay were costs and adoption. Unfortunately, these were the organisations who were unprepared when the pandemic and lockdown hit the UK.

Read on to learn why your phone system is restricting your growth and how you can unleash the true potential of your business without investing in offices, resources and equipment.

The importance of great customer service

Did you know that 53% of customers are irritated if they don’t speak to a real person immediately? If you are a consumer facing business, missing calls may mean lost business. Poor service can put customer loyalty at risk, so a reliable voice system is a must nowadays. Remember, it’s always better to retain existing customers, rather than constantly focusing on winning new ones.

Many customers are now moving to the next level of servicing their customers with an omni-channel light weight contact centre solution. With efficiency being the key driver, the ability for a single person to handle voice calls, emails, web chat and other medias all in a single solution has meant that all methods of customer contact can be covered swiftly with full reporting and managerial supervision no matter where the agents are located.

Business continuity planning should include your communications strategy

Relying on an on-premise PBX may limit your ability to work from anywhere or limit your remote workforce. Unlike Cloud Communications platforms, which feature built-in redundancy and support seamless working from any location, an on-premise phone system significantly increases your risk of a costly outage. When the pandemic hit, some organisations realised they have to redirect calls but their system wouldn’t allow flexible working.

With a cloud voice system, you can just plug your phone in at home and use the broadband to make business calls, no change in the end-user experience or in the customer experience. Many of our customers even chose to ditch the traditional handsets all together and use the softphone/ desktop/browser apps. All you need is a headset and a business mobile/ laptop to work from anywhere in the world.

Reducing costs and flexible pricing

With an on-premise PBX you tend pay for the system all upfront and pay an annual support charge, which requires vast investments and little flexibility. If your team grows or you need to onboard people only for a certain project and limited time, it’s difficult to add new users. Changes to the system are usually time consuming if done in-house and expensive if outsourced.

Cloud solutions, on the other hand, are normally only charged on a per-user-per-month basis, which means you only pay for what you need. Businesses can use the cloud as little or as much as they want. When your business grows, it grows with you.

Plus, calls are made over the internet so you can save big on your phone bill, especially if you make a lot of internal calls. Cloud models are much more efficient and reduce your electricity bills, office requirements and footprint.

Seamless experience and easy integrations

Employee productivity is a big factor for success. Driving efficiencies is often the primary reason why firms replace a PBX with modern communications solutions.

Many of our customers are maximising and improving employee and customer experience by integrating all their systems to work seamlessly together, including their phone and CRM platforms. You can save over 10 hours/ month per employee and if you are using modern reliable systems, chances are your integration has been pre-built and is practically ready to go with no investment in servers and everything can work without the need for a handset if desired.

At Chess, we help organisations to connect their people and to transition to a modern system suitable to their requirements, which enables them to work from anywhere and continue to serve their customers. We use a tried and tested methodology to consult you on your cloud journey.

We offer all our customers a free consultation to help them agree on their strategy and take back control of the situation. We can then understand what your business needs and help you decide the best course of action for you to take. So act now and avoid the chaos.