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Direct Numbers

Five services to make communicating with your customers smoother

Businessman sat at desk with two telephones.If you have customers calling you on your phone then here is a list of some handy tools out there that are available for your company. It doesn’t matter if you are a one man band or a large corporation, these are affordable services that do not require any kit and will make your life a lot easier.

 

1)      IVR (Interactive Voice Response) – The recorded auto attendant doesn’t have to be dreaded. Let the IVR do all the hard work and send callers to the correct department which will free up your customers and your time. Just don’t make your menu choices too long and convoluted.

2)      Call queuing – Don’t miss those all important customer calls. The worst thing a caller can get is an engaged tone. Queue your customer calls and keep them on the line. Just make sure you have enough staff to answer as people don’t want to queue for too long. That’s bad!

3)      Fax to email – Be greener and cleaner. Don’t waste paper. It’s far more secure way of sending a fax and you can save the files electronically.

4)      Time of day routing – If you’re open Mon to Fri 9am to 5pm then route all out of hours calls to another call centre, voicemail or even to your mobile. Stay in touch with your customer calls.

5)      Call whisper – we love this service. Record an audio prompt that only you hear which alerts you that it’s a call through your business number. Great if you use your personal mobile for business calls.

 

These are just a few virtual tools you can employ on your customer phone calls which are easy to set up and control with our great online management portal. Be in touch with your calls, your customers and your staff. To demo any of these services and see how you can get your business connected speak to Direct Numbers today.

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Call Queuing Systems

Call Queuing – Don’t Lose Your Customers

Customer calls are so important to any business and if your customers can’t get through to you then you really need to do something to sort this out. So what are the options open to you?

If you are a business and you can’t always get to answer every customer call or if you are out of the office a lot then you need to make sure that every inbound customer call is received and acted on. Gone are the days of having to invest in expensive call handling kit as these days the same services can be offered on a virtual service. Just point a 08 or geographic number to your existing landline or mobile and set up a call queuing service. You can specify the hold times, apology messages, hold music and more. Plus if you are using the right system you can see how many customers you have queuing on the line.

If you are a business with a high number of inbound calls then you can’t live without having a call queuing service set up. There is nothing worse than calling a company and getting a constant engaged tone. Make sure you are routing your customers to the correct department with the help of an IVR (Interactive Voice Response) set up on the line. This makes a powerful tool for your business and no customer service department should be without it.

A simple case study to show how this would work, an online shopping site gets a lot of customer calls during office hours. Their 10 strong customer service staff can’t always answer all the calls so they put an IVR and call queuing service on their 0800 freephone number. Now when customers call through they hear a welcome message and are given options to speak to sales, customer services or support. If the lines are busy once they have made their choice they are placed in a queue and hear on-hold music and apology messages until their call is answered. The customer service manager can monitor how many calls are queuing by using the online management tool. The customers are kept on the line and are not faced with the dreaded engaged tone.

By having a professional front end phone system a small business can take on the image of a much larger professional company. You’ll also be able to monitor your calls and analyse your call stats to see when your busiest times are or how many calls aren’t getting answered in time.

If you want to change the way you receive your customer calls or would like more information on call queuing or IVR services then please visit

https://directnumbers.co.uk/telecom-services/call-queuing