5 Signs Your Traditional Phone System is Broken (and How to Replace it with an Efficient, Virtual phone system Solution)
It’s happening again.
As you walk into your company, you notice a salesman repeating, “Hello, hello…” on the phone and eventually puts it down.
Probably you lost a prospect and potential revenue.
On the other hand, your customer service was trying to solve the problem of an existing customer but the call disconnected in the middle of the conversation.
Are you still using a traditional phone system?
Is your business phone system can’t keep up with the demands of modern consumers?
Here are five signs your phone system is broken and how a virtual phone system like VoIP puts your business back on track with 3X efficiency.
Sign #1: You Are Missing Calls
How many calls are you missing?
You probably don’t have any idea.
The traditional phone system works on a few copper lines. If all your phone lines are busy, the caller will get a busy signal or constant ringing.
Also, traditional phone systems don’t give you the list of calls your business missed. So you can’t build a backup plan to call back or at least send a message.
Results?
You lost a potential customer and a business opportunity.
Virtual phone system to the rescue
Virtual phone systems like VoIP come with several call handling features to help you attend maximum calls and follow up with missed calls.
Some of the prominent features are:
- Call Queue: If all your representatives are busy, it puts a new call in the queue and transfers it to the next available employee as soon as possible.
- Missed Call SMS: This feature auto-sends SMS to users whose calls you missed. It’s a gesture showing your care for your customers.
- Call Forwarding: If a sales rep is not available at the desk to receive the call, this feature forwards the call to the next available employee or smartphone number.
- Call History: It tells you the number of calls you received and missed. You can track your missed calls to follow up later.
Sign #2: You Experience Dropped Calls
Dropped calls are the calls disconnected in the middle of the conversation.
It is frustrating for both businesses and customers.
Maybe, you are about to close a big deal. Or your customer is looking for an immediate solution to a problem only your business can solve.
Either way, you end up leaving a wrong impression and losing a potential client.
If you are routinely facing dropped calls, it’s a sign of phone systems being unable to keep up with the demand. Network issues and call connection errors often occur during peak hours.
Time to upgrade to a modern virtual phone system
Transitioning from traditional to modern virtual phone systems makes more room for unlimited calls.
Since the virtual phone system works on the cloud, your team can stay connected with clients on the Internet without worrying about network failure.
Sign #3: Your Team Can’t Go Remote
88% of the companies globally encouraged their employees to work from home.
While the idea sounds more productive for employees, staying connected via an outdated phone system is challenging.
It’s not easy for you and your customers to connect with employees when living across town. Meetings turn into a troublesome task, and conversations via email take an eternity to complete. All the while, miscommunication lingers in the air if you can’t connect with the person directly on call.
Enter the digital age
A virtual phone system is an internet-based phone system, and it works similar to WhatsApp.
Virtual phone systems like VoIP use the Internet to transmit data. It means your remote can connect with you from anywhere at any time. They can even share files at the speed of a click. Conference meetings take place within seconds.
Long story short, virtual phone systems let your business run 24/7, no matter where your employees and customers are.
Sign #4: Bad Weather Gives You Creeps
Do you start sweating when the lightning strikes across the sky or the storm rolls in?
Traditional phone systems rely on copper wires, antennas, and other electrical equipment. Heavy rainstorms can directly damage this physical equipment, making you lose connectivity.
And guess what?
If your phone lines go down, you can’t even call emergency services for help.
Plus, it takes days or weeks to repair those copper wires and get back to business.
Till then, you risk losing business.
Of course, you can’t control the weather conditions, but you can prepare for it.
Build a disaster recovery phone system
Cloud-based phone systems diminish all your natural-disaster worries.
Since the system doesn’t rely on physical equipment, the weather has little to zero chance of damaging the virtual phone system.
If something still happens to your phone system, you can always reroute calls to alternate numbers. And you can also relocate your employees or send them home.
Suffice to say; you can relocate your business or run it from anywhere you want without worrying about the phone system set up.
Sign #5: You Can’t Scale Your Phone System In A Snap
Old phone systems work fine as long as you don’t need new phone lines.
But what about the time when your business starts achieving new milestones. You start hiring more salespersons who will need more phones to attend more calls.
And what if you don’t use some phone lines during the offseason?
This is where old infrastructure turns into a major problem.
Adding or subtracting a single phone line can be costly, time-consuming, and complicated to set up.
Virtual phone system grows along with your business
With a virtual phone system, you don’t need to buy expensive phone lines and hardware to meet the spike in demand. It requires a few software updates and extra bandwidth to scale up in minimal time.
Scaling back is equally easy if you are hitting the off-season or squeezing your resources. Again, software updates and bandwidth adjustments take care of it all without disrupting your business.
Life after virtual phone system
This time when you walk into your office, you will see your employees calmly managing your customers.
No more dropped calls in the middle of the conversation.
If one employee is not there to receive the call, the call automatically transfers to an alternate number or the next available salesperson.
You have a history of missed calls that your team is reaching out to and making new clients.
It peacefully walks to your office to see revenue numbers growing, and your phone system bills are scaling as per the requirement.
Your phone system is awaiting upgrades and more potential.