One of the challenges of a startup business or an already bustling enterprise is maintaining its visibility and responsiveness to leads and prospective customers. This can be challenging for small businesses because they have limited staff to take and make calls for their business.
Yet this can also be challenging for large enterprises who need a cost-effective and cost-efficient way to take in all calls and inquiries for their products and services. After all, each inquiry is a potential buyer or customer. Virtual phone systems can plug this need. You may consider Call Cowboy and other similar systems to provide the hotline for your inbound operations. They can also provide the hub for any outbound telemarketing campaigns.
Continue reading for a brief business leader’s guide on the potential of call center technology to help scale up their business operations.
1. Be Reachable By Your Customers From Everywhere
One of the most important things that any business leader can learn from call center technology is that it can be deployed to make your business reachable by your customers from everywhere. This is crucial because every business should be both available and capable of engaging all its customers, especially with the continuing trends of digital transformation.
This is the response to everything you do as part of your intensive or aggressive marketing campaign. In other words, your marketing campaign will be useless if your customers don’t know how, or worse, don’t have a way of getting hold of you.
Without an intensive and effective marketing campaign, it’s doubtful whether your company or business would be able to generate new leads and prospective buyers. It’s unlikely that consumers and potential customers who have never heard of your business or products would ever think of buying your products even if they see them on the shelves of supermarkets and grocery stores. Maybe they’d pick them up and inspect them, but what is the chance they’d put them in the cart if they don’t know anything about them?
However, having an aggressive marketing campaign that bombards your target audience and market with your advertisements and marketing messages won’t be enough if they don’t know how to reach back to you in the first place. This is especially true if you’re in the business of providing services or of selling products that would require some face-to-face presentation and interaction. The advantage of deploying call center technology is that it would enable your business to be reachable by your leads and prospective customers wherever they may be.
2. Be Reachable Through Inbound Call Center Technology
One of the best ways to be reachable by leads and potential customers is to use call center technology. Here are some of the advantages of deploying call center technology:
Easily Reachable
The most important reason to consider getting/adopting call center technology is to make you reachable by any potential customer or lead.
Millions of users and potential customers now use their smartphones to do anything they prefer. They can easily look up something on any search engine if they need more information. Some things are best discussed on the phone, though, like when they have several questions about a product or service.
Call center technology will enable your business to be reachable by your potential customers and leads. You can also be reached 24 hours a day, several days a week. Of course, you’ll have to set up a team of a few or several frontliners who can take the inbound calls. This way, business goes on when you’re out of the office.
Connects Your Team From Anywhere
The other advantage of getting call center technology for your business is that it can help your teams stay connected or networked from anywhere. They can even stay connected with their smartphones without call center technology.
However, the missing link is that calls or contacts can’t be routed to them with efficiency, ease, and convenience if you don’t have call center technology. You can contact them through their phones and messaging apps, but they won’t be able to do remote work taking calls if you don’t have call center technology to route calls.
Keeping your teams networked and connected has become even more crucial in this era of remote work or hybrid work arrangements. If some of your people can’t work for some reason, you can reach out to those at home if the need arises if you have the call center technology.
Helps Maintain A Professional Image
Another reason business leaders should consider getting call center technology is because it will help their organization maintain a professional image. This is highly important for small and medium businesses with limited resources so you can start applying Call Center Technology.
There are times when everyone in your office is busy, so no one would be able to forward or route the calls of customers or leads to the right person. Often, the result is that the lead or customers wait on the phone while they overhear the person they spoke with asking other people in the office where they should route the call. It doesn’t conjure images of a highly organized business in the mind of the lead or customer waiting on the other end.
With call center technology, you can easily forward calls to any person in your organization. You can route certain types of calls to the right employees tasked to answer these calls or queries. You can even set up auto attendants to activate call notifications and a business voicemail service if you don’t have anyone to take the calls for those hours.
Other features you can have with call center technology include on-hold music and customized ring tones. You can also set up your system to flip calls from desk phones to mobile devices or transfer calls from a desk phone to other extensions. These great features and functionalities can help your business keep an organized and highly professional impression among current and prospective customers.
Call Center Technology Can Power Your Marketing Campaigns
Call center Technology can power your marketing campaigns, There are Two considerations to growing your business are productivity and efficiency. If you’re an outbound sales organization, having more agents spending more time talking on the phone with leads or prospects will significantly increase your opportunities to convert leads to customers and inquiries to sales or deals. If you’re a third-party business process outsourcing (BPO) sales campaign service provider, you can charge more feed from your clients who hired you for the sales and marketing campaigns.
One of the most concrete and practical examples of how a virtual phone system can grow your business is in the way they’re used in outbound telemarketing operations. Outbound telemarketing involves the strategy of cold-calling potential customers of your business. These leads may have shown some interest in your products by visiting your website or walking up to your product exhibit booth, but they’re not yet customers.
Outbound telemarketing has a crucial role in business sales and marketing campaigns. For one, it is indispensable in expanding the business customer base. This is done by creating and generating new leads and converting them into customers. The features and capabilities of a virtual phone system can power your outbound telemarketing operations because they were designed specifically for reaching out to as many people as possible in the least amount of time.
Some of the services covered by outbound telemarketing are as follows:
- Enhancing your lead generation and prospecting capabilities
- Providing updates to your customer database
- Doing outbound telemarketing surveys to promote your products
- Setting appointments for sales that require onsite presentations
- Disseminating information to your existing customer base
- Upselling and cross-selling to your existing customer base
- Handling customer inquiries, engagement, and service
The critical role of outbound telemarketing operations in growing a business has spawned an entire industry of call center technology and BPO operations. Many large enterprises have found it beneficial to outsource their outbound telemarketing campaigns to call center technology and BPOs because of the scale and extent of the outbound call operations required to generate the level of new business in a cost-effective way.
3. Key Platform Capabilities For Business Growth
All virtual phone systems have basic and advanced features and functionalities. Each of these specific features and functionalities corresponds to a particular operational capability, which can contribute to the dynamism and growth of a business enterprise. The following are some common to almost all virtual phone systems used as business dialing platforms:
Seamless Scalability and Flexibility
Most virtual phone systems’ business dialing platforms can easily be scaled up without much fanfare. This is one of the biggest advantages of using them for your business. Even small businesses can avail themselves of virtual phone systems because some providers offer a product package suitable and reasonably affordable for small businesses and even startups.
If all goes well, it would be easy to scale up your virtual phone system because many business dialing platforms are designed with scale and capabilities that can be expanded without much difficulty. This is a good strategy for business growth. You can install a virtual phone system without much investment, yet have room to scale up your capabilities as your business grows.
Suppose a virtual phone system positively impacts the goals of the telemarketing campaign operations, outbound sales efforts, or inbound customer service engagement. Then, it can be scaled up immediately without disrupting other business processes or existing clients.
Robust Analytics and KPIs
Another platform feature that’s highly useful in powering business growth for your enterprise is the capability of a virtual phone system to gather data and information about your target leads and business prospects.
Most analog phone systems don’t have that capability. Some systems may have limited capacity to store information, but often this isn’t in a format your computer can process.
Virtual phone systems with robust analytics and key performance indicators (KPIs) can help you enhance your customer engagement for inbound call operations. It can also help you apply business intelligence in your outbound telemarketing operations using your database of leads and prospects. Both enhancements will have a positive impact and contribute to growing your business.
Take Calls From Anywhere, Anytime
The capacity to take calls from leads and customers from anywhere and anytime is one of the platform features to help enterprises grow. This is highly useful for business growth and development, especially during today’s remote work from anywhere setup, virtual business environments, and commercial transactions.
Many businesses and their workers have wittingly or unwittingly decided to shift their workflow dynamics and interactions to the virtual realm through the so-called remote or hybrid working arrangements. People who have worked in the call center and BPO sectors are already familiar with this arrangement as they work with leads, clients, and customers who live and work in different time zones. They only had to adjust to the shifting from onsite to offsite work when people started working from home because the infrastructure and culture were already there.
Nowadays, it’s evident that remote work and virtual business teams will be here to stay. This means that more enterprises and business organizations will have to try using virtual phone systems to maintain their remote work arrangements and virtual teams and sustain their business operations. Businesses that give virtual phone systems at least a try would soon find out that their features and functionalities have a lot of potential to power the growth of their business enterprises.
Dedicated Customer Service
Lastly, installing a virtual phone system for your business is highly useful if you need to offer a dedicated customer service hotline to your existing and prospective customers. Some leads and customers would expect most, if not all, American companies to have a dedicated customer service number. If not, you’ll never hear from them again.
Conclusion
A virtual phone system is a powerful technological infrastructure that can power the growth of a business enterprise. Its multiple features and functionalities improve the capacity, productivity, and efficiency of business operations for almost all sectors and industries. The auto-dialer feature is a powerful functionality that can deploy business intelligence into how outbound telemarketing campaigns are done. Therefore, virtual phone systems play a significant role in building enterprise capability for both inbound and outbound call operations.
