If you asked us a couple years ago why our customers ultimately decide to purchase hosted PBX solutions we would have offered you the common-sense answers you expected to hear. We would have explained that our hosted PBX systems offered increased flexibility and control over traditional systems. We would have explained how our hosted PBX solutions could scale up and down, meeting our clients ever-changing needs with just a moment’s notice. We would have explained how our telephony solutions provided the ability to tie multiple locations to a single Hosted PBX solution, regardless of how remotely they were located.
We believed our customers chose our services to take advantage of these features, and we would have told you just that. But we would have been dead wrong.
What Our Customers are REALLY Looking For
Don’t get us wrong- all of the above points certainly helped our customers decide to utilize our telephony solutions. But none of the above represents the real reason why our customers chose to install our systems.
You see… our customers seemed to expect all of the above. As much as they appreciated these features, none of them represented true selling points. Our customers seemed to think all of the above-mentioned improvements came standard. And while we pride ourselves on providing all of the above features at the highest possible quality and the lowest possible price, we understood that explaining how a hosted PBX system offers increased flexibility is like explaining how a new car comes bundled with four fully functional tires.
Our customers expected new phone systems to provide some base-line upgrades over their current solutions. They wanted something new, something they didn’t expect, something our solutions offered they had never seen before and wouldn’t have imagined.
The Perks of Our Hosted PBX Solutions
So what sort of perks piqued our customer’s interest, causing them to choose our systems for their organizations?
Well, there were a lot of perks that inadvertently ended up winning us new clients, but some of the most common selling points including video voicemail, video conferencing, presence management and colorful smart desktop phones.
All of these perks are great features, but we felt surprised when we realized they were making the difference between a sale and a polite farewell. You see, even though these are great features, and even though they really piqued our client’s interests, most of the customers who found themselves won over by these features never even ended up using them! And before you worry we sold them a bill of goods they didn’t want or need, many of our customers never expected to use these features, but still found themselves thoroughly charmed by their inclusion in our packages!
We puzzled over this for a while wondering why our customers were buying our systems on the basis of features they consciously understood they neither wanted nor needed.
It took us a little while to arrive at the answer to that question.
Simply put, we realized that our hosted PBX solution’s more exotic features aren’t remotely possibly on normal phone lines and with conventional phone systems. Our customers had never seen these features before, and their novelty signalled to our customers that they were purchasing a hosted PBX solution that was truly, visibly, undeniably superior to their current system.
We’re sure a few of our customers purchased our systems after being wowed by the perks simply because, on occasion, knowing you have the capability to use a feature seems to mean more than actually ever using it. But we believe most of our clients bought from us after seeing the perks because these customers suddenly saw how quickly technology advances, and they understood if they didn’t keep up, they’d end up left behind.
The day-to-day benefits offered by our hosted PBX solutions are the “standards” that everyone expects to receive; performance improvements that might not be as sexy as video conferencing, but that provide enormous unsung value. These plain-Jane improvements streamline operations, iron out kinks, and improve the user experience for both organizational employees and incoming callers.
But to sell these necessary and powerful improvements, to sell what really matters and what really provides the greatest benefit for our clients, we realized the importance of emphasizing the kind of flash that makes the advance of communications technology impossible to ignore.