Is Your Phone System Suffocating Productivity?

In today’s world, we’re all connected with our cell phones. But, many businesses are still using dated phone systems in-house expecting them to keep up with their day-to-day operations. As companies are now open to hiring remote employees while still supporting traditional in-office work, keeping up with a dated phone system can impact revenue, customer experience, and employee productivity alike. 

While evaluating your technology needs, it’s important to evaluate how hard your phone system is working for you. With a poor phone system, your productivity can suffer. 

Poor Call Quality

If you have frequent system outages or regularly “lose” people when they call into your office, that’s a sign your phone system can’t keep up with demand. 

85% of callers who can't reach a company on the first try won't call back, and if they have a poor phone experience, there's a strong chance you’ll lose their business if your employees are unable to clearly connect with potential and current customers during this small window of opportunity.

When you're paying for a business phone system, things like static, dropped calls, and crackling shouldn’t be an issue. 

When Phones are Down, so is Your Revenue

Sometimes outages are unavoidable, no matter how great of a phone system you have. How your company is able to react to these outages is what keeps revenues up even when phones are down. 

If your company cannot switch and conduct business during an outage by routing calls to personal cell phones, you are losing business. No matter how long the system is down it’s time that business is put on hold. Fixing this problem costs IT time and pulls your employees away from other work. 

Lacking Customer Experience

Company directories are helpful for routing calls to the right person, however, if your system gives multiple prompts without giving them an option to simply speak to an employee, many people will hang up due to frustration. 

Customers are quick to make a correlation between a poor phone system and a poor overall business. If customers easily connect with customer service or talk to their account manager they may feel like they are not cared for and that their business doesn’t matter. 

It's Hard for Employees to Use

With many older systems, employees may have to look at a cheat sheet to perform simple tasks. The harder a system is to use, the less likely your employees are to adopt the technology and use it the way it was intended. 

Phone systems that aren't easily scalable can make it harder for businesses to grow. On-premise phone systems may require you to hire in-house IT technicians to perform basic tasks. Businesses that expect constant growth can expect increased costs as they add new employees. 

A Cloud Communications system that scales with your business gives you the ability to add new users and new locations quickly and easily without interrupting the business’ day-to-day operations. 

System Features are Limited

When phone systems were first introduced, many businesses only needed the ability to transfer calls and host conference calls. Now your system needs to be able to act as a voicemail, sync contacts, and route calls to other phones.  

Call functionality isn’t for what your employees can do during a call. It also pertains to what happens to the customer during a call. When you send a customer to a queue, do they hear music or advertisements on hold? According to an AT&T survey, customers who listened to hold music thought a 30-second wait lasted just 15 seconds, while those who listened to silence thought the same wait lasted 90 seconds. 

Your employees may suffer from limited call functionality. Conference calls with low per-person caps may hinder meetings. The lack of voicemail decreases efficiency for your team. 

System Can't Scale

Many companies experience periods of rapid growth and an outdated phone system will not be able to keep up with these changes. Your team may have limitations surrounding handsets and system capacity limiting expansion without adding additional hardware. Many businesses have multiple locations or a mix of in-house and remote workers, and using a dated system may make it difficult to connect everyone without some serious issues.

Outdated phone systems or phone system failure can directly impact your business’s ability to scale as well as productivity overall. Like your data and managed IT backups, you should have a backup plan for your phone system. Working with a technology partner that not only provides the best phone solution for your business but can also support needs when they come up with leads to profitable, scalable solutions.