New Dash Updates for Usability and Business Caller ID
Posted on May 11, 2021 by Casey Houser
A number of updates have arrived for the Dash platform that runs our Business Phone Plans, including important changes to how users interact with the Dashboard and how their business Caller ID can be configured.
Each one of the updates listed below will make life easier for all Dash users. They are welcome additions to our platform that were created in direct response to customer feedback.
Choose Business Caller ID Per Device
Previous methods of selecting your Caller ID in your phone system were to set it according to a specific phone number or to rely on the default setting, which is your main business number.
Now we have added another option to that list: you can select Caller ID based on the device that is being used. This option is found by navigating the Devices menu, selecting the device you want to edit, and finding its Advanced settings, as shown in the image here.
This option could be helpful for a dedicated phone that multiple people use. You may find it more convenient than adjusting multiple users if there is a specific Caller ID you want adjusted for one or more of your business locations.
Invalid Entry Notification Suppression
One feature of our Auto Attendant, which comes with all our phone plans, is its audio notification that alerts users when they have entered an unavailable option.
For example, say your Auto Attendant is set to reach Sales when you dial “1”, Customer Service when you dial “2”, and an operator when you dial “3”. If a customer dials “4”, the default behavior of the attendant is to respond with the phrase “invalid entry.”
Now you can suppress that notification by selecting the toggle within your Auto Attendant. This option can be changed at any time and will work on your primary attendant as well as any of the Multiple Auto Attendants assigned to other phone numbers in your system.
Do Not Disturb Option for ACD Queue Users
Our customers have witnessed some confusion regarding the pairing of our Do Not Disturb (DND) feature and our ACD Queues feature. Notably, queue agents are sometimes marked with DND as active but have then been unable to receive calls.
This makes sense because the DND feature routes calls according to a prescribed flow, such as sending all calls to a voicemail box. It tries to keep you undisturbed while you are busy, but that can be a problem when you want to receive calls in a queue.
Dash now removes the toggle from the menu for any user who is also an ACD Queues agent. This will prevent them from activating DND when trying to work in a queue, saving a lot of headaches and reducing the amount of troubleshooting in your work day.
Warning for Large File Sizes
Last of note with this update is our changing of the way Dash alerts you when uploading large files as your Auto Attendant or Voicemail greeting.
The file size limit for those uploads is 1 MB, and in the past, files larger than that were allowed to be uploaded but would show an error when the upload was finished.
We have changed that order of operations to show you an error before you wait through the file upload process. Anything larger than 1 MB will be rejected immediately so you can try another greeting instead.
Help From Support
If you need help from our Support team in navigating the new Dash changes, selecting a business caller ID, or updating a user’s preferences, you can reach us any time through 24/7 web chat.
We’re happy to set these changes live, and we want you to make the most of them.
Take a Minute to Call Your Mom This Mother’s Day
Posted on May 6, 2021 by Casey Houser
We know everyone is busy with work tasks this week and, well, every week, but perhaps you can take a few minutes this Mother’s Day to call your mom and set work aside.
Most workplaces grant you a couple breaks throughout your day. In addition, if you’re on a VirtualPBX Unlimited Minutes Plan, then you have nothing to worry about with overages of any kind. Grab a work phone and wish your mom an early, exceptionally happy Mother’s Day before the official day arrives.
She will surely appreciate it. You only have to select which work phone you want to use.
VirtualPBX Softphone
We offer two versions of the VirtualPBX Softphone – one for mobile devices and one for desktop.
They are each available for use on our Unlimited Minutes Plans. So whether you’re in a large company on our Enterprise Plan or in a bootstrapping startup on our Flex Plan, you can take advantage of these phones to make this Mother’s Day extra special.
And yes, we know you can send SMS text messages through your softphone. We urge you to call your mother this spring, though, because sometimes a text just won’t do.
Web Phone
Whether you use the Web Phone in a web browser on your laptop or your smartphone, a quick call here is also easy.
Our Web Phone is accessible on all your devices, and you can use mobile data or WiFi to complete calls from anywhere. If this is your phone of choice, there’s no excuse for missing your mom. Fire up your browser, press those digits, and pop in your headphones for that call.
Desk Phone
Finally, there’s the desk phone, of which we offer many models, and if you’re lucky enough to have your own desk or your own office, then you should probably have had your mom in your contact list this whole time.
Close the door to your office, put up your feet for a minute or two, and look for “Mom” in your address book. She will appreciate the gesture and that she’s been called in such an official capacity.
Don’t Miss Mother’s Day This Year
We don’t want you to get caught using company time when you’re not supposed to, so yes we’re being a bit light-handed with a joke here. The point is that your mother is important – so important that she has one entire day dedicated in her honor.
She misses you, even if she saw you yesterday. Don’t miss her day, and if you can, make it more exciting with a call that’s early to add some surprise to the mix.
Generating an Automatic Weekly Sales Report
Posted on May 4, 2021 by Casey Houser
Today we want to lead you, step by step, through our Advanced Call Reports tool as you create a weekly sales report that can be automatically generated and delivered to your email inbox.
We are continuously updating and refining our reporting tool – listening to the feedback from our customers to make it better. The following steps will show you how to create a report, filter its output to your liking, and send that report to your inbox every week. Along the way, you will learn how the Advanced Call Reports platform works, so you can create your own reports without the aid of our blog.
Know How You’re Performing
If you’re asking yourself why you would need Advanced Call Reports in the first place, it’s because our tool can distill the large volume of calls you receive every week into an actionable collection of data points.
Large businesses don’t need to fumble in the dark when it comes to analyzing their call traffic. Creating a weekly sales report, among other reports, gives you visibility into a system that can otherwise seem opaque or unapproachable.
Creating the Sales Report
Advanced and Enterprise have access to Advanced Call Reports. Administrators of those plans can log in to reports.virtualpbx.com and access the Reports tab from their workspace.
The Reports tab opens a new screen that shows the reports you have created, and in the top-right corner, you can click the “+Create Report” button to access report templates. In today’s example, we have selected the “Calls By Week” report that will provide data points like the number of inbound calls, number of outbound calls, average talk time, and average ring time.
You can select a number of output options for your report, including the Default Date Range which is shown here as “This Month” but can be set to a single week, quarters, or a custom date range of your choosing. You can modify all these options after your report has been created.
The output of our report looks like the following screenshot. You can see a number of metrics here that give you an overview of your company’s performance over the time period.
Filtering for Your Sales Team
You’re probably thinking that, at this point, the weekly sales report we’ve created doesn’t only address the Sales team. You’re right. A similar report made for your own company will show all calls associated with your business. You can pare this down with a Filter.
Filters can be accessed from your workspace dashboard and from the left-hand side menu under the Filter tab. You begin the process by clicking the “+Create Filter” button.
The example here shows a couple choices you can make for your filter. We have selected four extensions for users on our phone system (1111, 1112, 1113, and 1114) with the User Number filter and are about to input a Direct Inward Dial filter for any phone number that contains the digits 3828. With both those selections applied to a report, it will only show calls that have reached those users, have been sent from those users, or have been made through a phone number with those digits.
You can create a similar selection for the phone number(s) you assign to your Sales team and to the extensions of the users on your system. These selections can be edited at any time, and you can apply the filter to reports as you create them or afterward in a report’s settings.
Send Reports Automatically to Your Inbox
The Schedules section of your Advanced Call Reports dashboard lets you also click a “+Create Schedule” button to create a cadence for delivering reports.
You select the recurrence (hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly), the time of day, and the days of the week you would prefer a report be sent. Then you attach one or more reports to your schedule. Finally, you choose the recipients by entering their email addresses.
This cadence can be modified at any time. In the case of your weekly sales report, it would start with a Weekly recurrence with your preferred day of the week and delivery time. You will need to create your report and filters before the schedule can be finalized.
Keep in mind also that any reports created in Advanced Call Reports can be accessed within the dashboard. Sending the reports to your inbox never prevents you from using the dashboard to your advantage.
Create Your Own Weekly Sales Reports
The example here only touches the surface of what our Advanced Call Reports tool is capable of. You can generate as many reports as you need about a wide range of data types, including queue-based reports that source information from our ACD Queues Pro feature.
Get started today with your first report. You soon see how helpful the instant feedback will be when looking at your Sales team’s progress throughout the weeks and months to come.
5 Call Metrics and KPI Reports Your Business Should Track
Posted on April 30, 2021 by Charlie Galaviz
To reach the highest levels of customer satisfaction and loyalty in your call center, you need to monitor and measure metrics and KPIs designed for your business goals.
Today, we’re going to discuss five call metrics and KPI reports available for tracking within the VirtualPBX Advanced Call Reports tool that will improve your call operations and offer fine-grained control of your data.
Agent Summary
The Agent Summary report is the most popular report for call center management. It’s packed with essential KPIs and metrics that outlines an agent’s day at a glance. You can see when an agent logged on, entered the queue, began their time on duty, spent time away from their desks, and much more. Plus, you get all the quality assurance data points you need to evaluate agent performance. It’s a must-have report in every tool bag.
Service Level by Day
Service Level by Day allows you to set thresholds and monitor how quickly calls are being answered to achieve your service level goals. This report allows you to define up to six ring duration values that will be used as quality indicators for call answering performance. Additionally, you can view incoming calls, percentage of answered calls, and average ring time, among other data points.
Calls by DID
Direct Inward Dial (DID) numbers skip the menu or queue by ringing to a specific phone at a company. Typically, you use a DID report to monitor campaigns and products. These reports allow you to identify where your calls originated from based on the phone number digits dialed. This report is especially valuable for teams that leverage DID numbers for paid campaign sources like Google Ads.
Queue Performance
The Queue Performance report gives you an air traffic controller view of the number of calls handled by each queue. View the queue number dialed, name of queue, abandoned calls, overflowed out, ring time, and much more. Get actionable data that allows you to make queue adjustments on the fly based on the queue performance.
Abandoned Calls by Day
The Abandoned Calls by Day report is one of the most important key performance indicators for improving your queue experience. Track the number of calls disconnected from the queue based on wait time thresholds. In addition to abandonment rate within service levels, you can view the total abandoned calls, the percentage of abandoned calls, and other KPIs related to your queues.
Get Advanced Call Reports
Take command of your call center by viewing powerful call metrics that allow you to monitor, track, compare, and create benchmarks for your team’s success. Our Advanced Call Reports platform models and stores historical and real-time data insights that allow you to create reports, workspaces, filters, and schedules for data segmenting, downloading, and easy sharing. Best of all, you can find the reports shared today in one of our preconfigured templates, that way you can hit the ground running.
Want to demo Advanced Call Reports? We have friendly VoIP experts on standby that would be happy to demonstrate all that VirtualPBX has to offer.
5 Tips for Remote Workers in 2021
Posted on April 28, 2021 by Casey Houser
Today’s guest post was written by TechWarn, a digital safety advocate and news site.
COVID-19 may be slowing down, but there are still plenty of people working from home. If you’re new to remote working or if you’ve been struggling with working from home, here are a few tips to make the experience easier.
1. Use a VPN for Public Networks
Working remotely doesn’t mean being stuck at home.
Sometimes, you want to go out and experience a change of scenery while typing up your latest article. However, doing so may include using a public network. The problem with this is that public networks are infamous for their lack of security.
If you end up using a public network, think about using a VPN (Virtual Private Network). Downloading a VPN on your device will keep your device encrypted, meaning cybercriminals will have a rough time stealing your data.
2. Keep a To-Do List
It’s easy to get lost in your work when working from home. After all, it’s a massive change. If you need help staying organized, it’s recommended you keep a to-do list with you.
A to-do list gives you a clear overview of your day, preventing you from getting lost or overwhelmed.
Online tools like Airtable can be great for entire departments to organize their tasks as individuals and join group assignments with due dates, descriptions, and file attachments.
3. Clear Out Your Own Personal Space
To keep a clear mind, you must have a clear space. Many businesses are moving to a remote working basis, and if you expect to be working from home for a while (more than a day), you’ll want to clear out space in your home dedicated only to work.
Keeping a clean, work-dedicated space helps prevent you from being distracted and keeps your mind clear after the workday is over.
4. Organize Workload With Slack and Trello
Tools like VirtualPBX Video Conferencing help teams maintain communication during periods of separation, but what about managing workloads? Managing projects and assignments? For that, teams can use Slack or Trello, or even both!
Slack acts as a messaging board for teams, while Trello helps assign projects and apply deadlines. These two tools are key to teams who want to be efficient as possible.
Automation services like Zapier can also bring web platforms like Slack to life. They can listen for information relevant to your company, such as an inbound SMS message, and relay those events to individual and group channels to keep workers updated.
5. Stay Focused Using Forest
An issue many remote workers face is distractions. It’s easier to get distracted at home versus the office since many more distractions exist: your pets, your children, your loud neighbors, etc.
Fortunately, there are apps designed to keep you focused — Forest being a favorite of many remote workers. Forest tracks the time you spend focused on your work. The longer you’re focused, the more trees grow in the app.
It sounds childish, but it does work, as it acts as a reward system. Plus, each tree you grow grants you virtual coins. Spend those, and the company behind Forest grows a tree in your name! Not only do you get to focus, but you also get to help the environment.
Remote Workers Don’t Have to Stress
Working from home can be a stressful experience without the proper use of workplace tools. With these tips, you’ll be well on your way to making it a productive experience.
Take a look today at VirtualPBX Business Phone Plans that have a number of options for remote workers, including call routing through an Auto Attendant, Business SMS for text messaging co-workers and clients, and Video Conferencing that supports hundreds of callers in a single meeting.