As the world is taking steps out of the COVID-19 pandemic, many employees are beginning to use their vacation days to visit friends and family – some of whom they haven’t seen in more than a year.
Your own company vacation policy may allow for employee time off this summer, so you will want to be prepared for the eventuality that individuals will be leaving their desks for extended periods in the coming months.
Here are a few ways your VirtualPBX Phone Plan can keep your business steady while your available staff fluctuates in number.
Inbound Call Routing
All VirtualPBX Plans, at their core, function as ways for you to easily accept and complete calls. Our Auto Attendant feature lets you configure your system to route callers in a way that’s consistent with your business structure. This is heard in the form of “Press one for Sales; Press two for Customer Services” and similar phrases that you have probably listened to as a customer yourself.
Behind the scenes, you choose which individual extensions and group extensions a customer’s choices will lead them to. Therefore you can change those easily, if necessary, to adjust to changes in staffing when people are taking time off.
As a small business, your Customer Service department might point to a single person, but in the event of their absence, you may want to switch the routing in your Auto Attendant to reach a different individual. Larger businesses may have the option to leave their Auto Attendant static because they handle more calls through ACD Queues, which is discussed later in this article.
You may also encourage your employees who have direct phone numbers tied to an auto attendant through our Multiple Auto Attendant feature to adjust their messages when going on vacation. This feature allows individuals to use a Direct Inward Dial (DID) number in conjunction with their own attendant, so for example, a sales person can have customers call their dedicated line and listen to a message and use call routing similar to how it’s done with your main business number Auto Attendant.
A change in greeting for a Multiple Auto Attendant attendant can let callers know that the sales person is on vacation and will return in a week, possibly selecting a touch-tone option to reach a voicemail box.
Queue Management
Like we alluded to earlier, the adjustment of a main business Auto Attendant might be unnecessary for large business. We see a lot of larger VirtualPBX customers use ACD Queues to handle their inbound calls. ACD Queues is great for managing large volumes of calls because it makes use of intelligent call routing (like using Round Robin load distribution strategy) and can place customers into hold treatments that contain helpful information like greetings about store hours and special offers.
All the call routing strategies available in ACD Queues make sure to send calls only to active agents. This means that when an agent isn’t logged in – perhaps finished for the day or has taken vacation time – calls will be sent to the next available person. This never needs to be adjusted manually because the login status of any agent tells the system how to perform.
ACD Queues keeps business with large call volumes running smoothly, no matter the structure of their company vacation policy, by automatically handling the flow of calls. You can set it up, forget about the background processes, and concentrate on providing excellent customer service.
Multiple Phones
Your VirtualPBX Phone Plan also offers a number of ways in which individuals can choose to handle their calls.
One of the most popular phones our customers choose is the VirtualPBX Mobile Softphone because it turns any mobile device into a full-featured VoIP phone. Our softphone can handle voice calls, video calls, and SMS text messages. It separates your work calls from your personal calls, and it can function within other phone plan features like Ring Groups and your Auto Attendant.
Use of the VirtualPBX Softphone or of our Call Forwarding feature can help you keep work with you when you’ve taken days off. Some people want or need to turn their vacation into a “working vacation,” and it might be part of your company vacation policy for specific team members to be on call throughout some time away. If that’s what you want to achieve, our choice of mobile phone options can help make it easier.
Your Company Vacation Policy Aided by VirtualPBX
We can’t form your company vacation policy for you, but we can pass along your experiences and our tools. We are seeing many employees begin to take time off as the summer of 2021 approaches. We also use our own phone system to handle calls, so we know how it will function in their absence.
Some employees will take work with them; others will make a clean break for a few days. Either way, our phone system will handle it well, which is how we know it will work well for you too. Check out our extensive list of features to see everything we offer for your business in the downtime of summer through the peak seasons of sales.
