Breakups are hard.
In 2020, some of you went through rough patches with your phone system. The added pressure of working from home forced you to say goodbye to your old phone system and say hello to someone new. Which of these ten features in your new unified communications relationship told you it was love at first call?
Emojis & GIFs
Communication is so much better with that little extra emotion and human connection. That’s why Microsoft Teams lets you share emojis and GIFs. Even if you’re not face-to-face, you can still show you care.
Auto-Attendant
You never have to miss an important call with a virtual receptionist that acts as an automated attendant. Also, with contact centre features, you can follow an answer tree setup and help your customers reach you quickly or direct their calls when you are not available.
Collaboration
With real time document sharing, you no longer have to email a document between team members a billion times. Instead, the entire team can get together on it and edit it during a live call.
Also, you don’t have to miss your office whiteboard anymore. Unified communications platforms like Microsoft Teams offer you a whiteboard to use in calls, so you’ll never miss a good brainstorming session.
Phone Dashboard
The very best phone systems are equipped with a dashboard to make your ex-phone system jealous. These portals are the full package: brains, beauty, and personality.
No matter how large and complex your phone system becomes, a good dashboard means you’ll be able to monitor the whole thing from a browser window. What does that mean? You’ll be able to see a complete overview of your services and account status. You can see your invoices—all of them—and your account receivables on-demand. You can look at graphs and charts of your usage. You can download your call detail records, both current and historical. You can look at your calling rates, your phone usage, and any phone usage statistics you can think of.
Tagging
Need to know when someone is free for a chat? Waiting for just the right moment to connect with that special someone? Some unified communications platforms allow you to tag someone for a status alert so that you know when they become available. Of course, we’re not suggesting anything untoward. Avoiding interrupting others is just good business etiquette.
Chat
Don’t want to come on too strong with a serious email? Want to keep things light and breezy with an informal chat? That’s what makes chat so wonderful. Sometimes a meeting or even an email is overkill. If you just need 60 seconds to ask a quick question, chat is the perfect tool. Good thing it’s integrated with that shiny new phone system.
Call Recording
No more arguing over what was said. Call recording can save a relationship by making sure we have a clear view of the conversation. Whether you want to transcribe a recording to a written transcript or monitor sales calls to ensure best practices for client facing conversation, it’s best to keep the receipts, as the kids say. Plus, you can listen to old recordings or search the transcripts with a keyword, meaning you’ll never have to rely on vague or incomplete notes again.
Call Forward & Find Me Follow Me
You want to be easy to reach at all times. Virtual phone systems make features like find me, follow me accessible. These technologies enable incoming phone calls to be mapped at different locations, or even on different phones and in some cases the phone user is assigned a virtual phone number. When that number is dialled, your phone system directs that call to a pre-defined list of numbers for a given user.
Voicemail to Email
Voicemail doesn’t need to be annoying. Visual voicemail turns those incoming missed calls into email. It’s very practical to be able to track your requests and messages from one spot: your inbox. You’ll get the caller’s number and an audio file, too—in case you want everything in a single neat package, for your review.
User Status & Presence
Your status in your personal life may be set to It’s Complicated, but your online work presence can be very simple. Set your status to Do Not Disturb, Busy, or In a Call, and people will know that now is not the right time to talk. But if you need be, you can always mark yourself as Available.
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