While gearing up for the 5th major release of DLS Hosted PBX, I was inclined to consider which of our Hosted PBX features were among the most commonly used, with a hope and belief that many of our prospective customers would find this information useful. Every business strives to increase productivity, and reduce costs, right? There are certainly many strategies with which you can achieve this, but one of them is likely to involve optimizing your communications.
Nearly every interactive communication in your business begins with a business phone system also known as PBX. A phone system connects and routes calls between various callers inside and outside of your company. DLS Hosted PBX is a “phone system” provided as a service that operates at an external location, via the Internet.
Most Commonly Used PBX Features
So what are the advantages of using our Hosted PBX service over your on-site phone system that requires physical installation, configuration and maintenance? How does a Hosted PBX phone system increase productivity for your business and reduce operational expenses? In order to explain this, allow us to take you through some of the features of our Hosted PBX service that most of our customers find useful.
Auto Attendant
Auto attendant can’t make you tea but it also won’t ask you for a raise. It can, however, answer multiple concurrent calls and present callers with different routing options depending on the number that was dialed. Can your receptionist do that? Not likely. That’s why auto attendant is one of the coolest and most popular business phone features in use today.
When properly configured, auto attendant provides your business with a professional image, leaving a good impression on every caller. Automated attendant can be set up anywhere in your call tree, to be accessed by users. Based on the option selected by the user, the phone system will route their call to specific hunt groups or extensions.
Location Independence
Today’s business professional is often on the go, working from a home office and/or multiple office locations. With DLS Hosted PBX you can be “in the office” anywhere with a half-way decent Internet connection. Beyond the flexibility and convenience that’s offered, DLS Hosted PBX also provides you with an opportunity to save money. Let’s say your business has more than one office or storefront location. Calls between these locations will cost you nothing extra. Everyone in your business can use your Hosted PBX system from anywhere. They can work from home or from any location, using their Smartphone or any high speed Internet access point.
And now with the DLS Hosted PBX 5.0 release, your phone system can be configured to independently support multiple companies or separate store fronts.
LOCAL numbers anywhere
What area codes are associated with your current phone number? The local codes, right? If your number had another code, your business will appear to have a presence in that market, making it possible for you to attract more customers in that region. With a hosted PBX adding local numbers in various markets is easy.
So where are most of your customers? With Hosted PBX, you can establish a number with the area code for this region, allowing customers to bypass dialing a toll free number. Making this move can potentially increase your sales, while saving you money on toll charges.
Find Me/Follow Me
How often do you travel for business? If you travel a lot, you are going to love this Hosted PBX feature. Call Find Me/Follow Me allows you to create a list of different phone numbers where you can be reached. Before your call goes to voicemail, it rings through to every number on your list. This feature can also be programmed to detect voicemail and route a call differently if voicemail kicks-in.
What happens when someone dials your number? The first number on the list rings first, then the second, the third and so on. As an example, your office phone might ring first. In case you do not pick up, the call will be transferred to your cell phone or a group of phones.
Getting Voicemail Delivered to Your Email
Receiving an email alert on your Smartphone when a new voice message is left on your office phone keeps you connected to your business. Being able to play back your voicemail on your computer or mobile device while on the road is priceless. DLS Hosted PBX delivers voicemail directly to your Inbox as an attached audio file. And if this isn’t convenient enough, you can also play back that voicemail from the DLS Hosted PBX web portal.
Call Recording
Corporate training and legal requirements often make call monitoring and recording a necessity. DLS Hosted PBX provides the coverage that you need, with the required functionality to listen in on live inbound and outbound calls, in addition to archiving voice streams for future playback. Not only can calls and conferences be recorded, but they can also be transcribed by a reputable 3rd party transcription service. For these reasons, this feature is highly popular with our clients.
Call Queues
Call Queues are designed to increase efficiency for business communications. With this feature, calls are either routed to the next available agent with the lowest average talk time per call, or the calls are routed based on custom rules that you define. And what do your callers hear while waiting on hold? Whatever you want, from music to promotional messages and everything in between. You can also provide call queue information regarding the number of callers ahead of them, which may also be displayed on agent screens.
Reporting Gets Valuable Data about Your Calls
Can call data be valuable and help you make improvements? Without a doubt! It’s probably the single most important source of information for analyzing productivity across your business. DLS Hosted PBX call reporting provides invaluable insights regarding your company’s phone usage, including detailed information for numbers, extensions, auto attendants and voicemail, among other things. The information provided can be used to evaluate performance and make adjustments, as required.
Campaign Tracking
If you really want to know how effective your advertising campaigns are, you can figure it out, by assigning different numbers to each one. At the end of a specific period, you can review your call reports, to determine which campaigns were the most popular, which can be easily seen, based on the numbers with the highest call volumes.
Call Conferencing
Holding a voice or video conference with multiple parties is a great way to connect and collaborate with business colleagues and customers, regardless of their location. When you use our call conferencing and call recording features together, you also gain the benefit of archiving, reviewing or transcribing your voice and video data at a later date, which is very useful for training and project documentation purposes.
Plus One: The Obvious Reasons
- A Hosted PBX system eliminates the burden of buying and maintaining phone equipment for your business. Your service provider has the responsibility instead, providing all hardware, software, upgrades and support for your phone system. Your provider periodically rolls out new Hosted PBX features all the time at no cost to you.
- Your business benefits from an ever increasing level of quality in VoIP technology, without any additional investment, as Hosted PBX providers must continually upgrade their platforms to stay competitive in the marketplace.
- Your Service provider is also your phone carrier, providing the convenience of a single bill for all of your phone services that can be easily accessed online and downloaded at any time.