How to Save Time, Money and Effort with Enterprise VoIP Software

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Copyright © 2010 Alexander Anoshin


Today's economy requires all business to use all the enterprise resources most effectively. An IP telephony network is not an exception. From this article, you can learn how to:

automate client request processing and release your staff to fulfill more complicated tasks with a voice portal;

save your client time wasted waiting for the answer with an IVR application;

smooth out call peak hours with queuing software;

decrease time wasted searching for an appropriate specialist to process a client call with an SBR solution;

save your time and effort to check messages in numerous sources with unified messaging and voice mail service;

save your employee time on daily communications with a presence service;

save time and money for communications with audio- videoconference software;

cut your expenses for equipment by using IP phones instead of PCs with XML services;

decrease your employee telecom costs with call-accounting software;

reduce your VoIP network maintenance expenses with IP telephony management solutions.

Save your effort to process incoming calls and help your clients save their time IP telephony software provides you with several tools to reduce both your efforts to answer incoming calls and time that your clients spend to get the response from your client service.

A) With a voice portal you can provide your clients with an authorized access to your corporate databases and thus

automate processing of up to 80% of incoming calls;

release your staff for more complicated tasks.

B) An IVR application can help your clients

choose an appropriate operator to process their requests;

access pre-recorded voice messages and retrieve information from your databases (such as a caller's bank account balance or currency exchange rates) by using pre-defined menu buttons, and thus save your staff time and effort.

C) With virtual queuing software your clients will receive a timely response from your client service even if all operators are busy: they will just call, leave their contact information and return to their business while an available operator will automatically call them back. This is a convenient way to smooth out call peak hours.

D) Skill-based routing (SBR) software can help you automatically route an incoming call to:

a manager who usually serves a calling client or

an operator with a required skill set that can be defined from:

+ information about a calling client (such as his/her previous requests or his/her location and language he/she speaks, determined from a country/city phone code),

+ operator's product expertise, overall skill-level and language capability and thus reduce the time wasted passing a client call from one employee to another.

Save your Time on Daily Communications

A) With unified messaging and voice mail service you can save your time and effort to check numerous message sources by collecting all messages in a single mailbox that you can access both from your e-mail client or IP phone.

B) A presence service can save your time, wasted waiting for the answer of unavailable users, by providing the real-time information about a user status and preferable ways to communicate.

Get an Effective Tool for Long Distance Team Communications

With audio/video conferencing software you can substitute phone meetings with multiple local and remote participants for face-to-face ones and save on equipping special meeting rooms and travel expenses. In particular, conferencing software can help you:

plan meetings, automatically send invitations and connect the participants at the prescribed time;

share the documents;

send text messages;

organize a polling;

record a conference session and not only.

Cut Costs for Equipment by Using IP Phones Instead of PCs

The XML service technology allows you to deliver interactive content right to an IP phone display and, thus, to use it instead of a PC. With this capability, you can streamline many business processes without equipping workplaces with PCs. For example, you can:

access corporate databases in accordance with your access rights;

find quickly a necessary contact in a corporate address book;

send quick text/voice messages;

deliver content to a user/user group;

alert your employees when a panic button is pushed or a fire alarm is detected;

set a preferable way of communication;

sign-in for/sign-out from work.

This way you can also save your employee time on daily tasks.

Decrease your Employee Telecom Costs

Modern call accounting software is not only a tool to control employee telecom costs.

As call-accounting software provides you with various reports on user phone conversations that are built on the base of call detail records (CDRs) received from your IP PBX, you can use it to derive information about

phone expenses of each user/user group;

peak phone network hours;

the longest and the most expensive calls, etc.

By grounding on these data you can

compose an appropriate call plan to smooth out peak phone network hours;

set a number of rules to limit employee "friends and family" calls and even deny such communications at peak load hours to decrease both unnecessary expenses and network load.

Moreover, you can setup your call accounting software to reduce telecom costs with

individual limits on telephony expenses for each user/user group;

restrictions on long-distance calls and/or calls to flagged numbers (city/country codes);

grouping calls by users/user groups and allocating expenses properly to correct budgets (enabling charge back to departments, cost centers and clients).

You can also set you call accounting software to track:

unanswered calls and control if your employees return calls in a timely manner to improve your client satisfaction;

calls from suspicious phone numbers to protect employees from abuse/threatening calls;

calls to special extensions used for your marketing/advertising campaigns to measure these efforts.

Reduce Your VoIP Network Maintenance Expenses

The most of standard IP PBX administration interfaces are rather complicated, so you need highly skilled staff members to fulfill simple daily tasks. With special IP telephony management software you can simplify administration activities and entrust daily tasks to one, not necessarily experienced, employee. Thus you can both:

save time and money on IP PBX administration;

improve your qualified administrator motivation by giving them only the tasks that demand their experience and expertise.

You can also use IP telephony management software to

do phone inventory at all your sites from a single workplace:

with a special multi-location inventory feature or

by integrating IPX management software with your existing inventory solution and save your effort and time on phone inventory management;

remove compatibility restrictions with integration of your VoIP network components and thus cut costs for telephony network deployment/extension/upgrade.

Conclusion

By implementing IP telephony software you can solve several important business problems. You can

save your employee time and effort on daily tasks and communications;

improve your staff motivation and productivity;

optimize the joint work of the remote teams;

enhance the quality of your customer service;

cut your expenses for:

long-distance communications;

workplace equipment;

VoIP network deployment, extension and upgrade;

IP PBS administration and support.

About the Author:
You can learn how to empower your enterprise with VoIP in the book, "The Connected Enterprise", here http://bcs-it.com/books/connected-enterprise/ The free e-book, just as the article, was written by Alexander Anoshin, the CEO of BCS-IT, who specializes in VoIP solution development for enterprises.


Read more of Alexander Anoshin's articles.