Features
Advanced VoIP Phone Options Can Save Precious Seconds
Posted on October 11, 2018 by Casey Houser
At VirtualPBX, we build our VoIP phone service to match the needs of both basic and advanced users.
Power users would tell you that adopting advanced features like ACD Queues can make communications within your organization much more efficient. They’d also tell you that saving even a few seconds with each customer interaction can lead to serious gains in sales and improved customer engagement.
Using Dash ACD Queues and Auto Attendant as examples, let’s dig deeper into the time savings you can expect to realize when utilizing the advanced features of our Dash Business Phone System.
What’s an ACD Queue Anyway?
Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) Queuing is an add-on for Dash that lets you route calls intelligently.
You set queues when you know that an inbound call will address an entire department. For instance, if a caller dials ‘5’ in your Automated Attendant to reach your Sales department, the ACD Queue would choose which individual in that department should receive the call.
The Dash ACD Queues feature can select individuals in a group either randomly or based on one of the following criteria:
- Who has had the least number of calls offered to them
- Who has answered the least number of calls
- Or who has been idle the longest
By using an intelligent queue to select the appropriate individual in a department, you can reduce a caller’s introduction to your business from minutes to seconds.
The Role of an Auto Attendant
Your Dash Automated Attendant could allow any caller the option to press ‘5’ to reach your Sales department.
This is standard fare for any medium or large business with a VoIP phone system, but neither the enterprise nor the individual caller probably considers how much time this single key press saves them.
Ask yourself as a business manager: What if callers had to always start at the same position with a live operator? Callers would speak to a central representative who would have to determine each person’s purpose and who they needed to speak to.
An individual who wants to reach your Sales department would then have to speak to – at minimum – a central operator and a sales representative. The caller would have to sit through more than 30 seconds of unnecessary conversation and wait for the operator to place them on hold before the caller would need to tell their story a second time to the sales rep.
That’s inefficient and unproductive.
The same caller who makes their way through a well-designed Automated Attendant can reach the Sales department in much less time. Furthermore, when they finally reach Sales, their patience will not be worn thin before having the conversation about which product to purchase.
What Role Does the ACD Queue Play?
An ACD Queue takes over for the Automated Attendant when the caller is first presented to a group of Sales representatives. When the call wants to reach the group, the Queue determines who should receive the call. Then it routes the caller appropriately.
The Queue does its work quickly and behind the scenes. It’s much faster than any human attendant could ever be.
How Much Time Can This Save Me?
In any case, your business will save time and reduce frustration by relying on the Auto Attendant and the Queue’s settings in its VoIP phone system options.
When compared to a live operator, the ACD Queue can potentially save minutes of a caller’s time because it allows the caller to decide for themselves which path (pressing ‘5’ for Sales) to take.
You can also shave precious seconds off an individual’s transfer time by assembling an Auto Attendant menu that’s intuitive. If you give callers a quick rundown of your five departments and then allow the Queue to make micro-decisions about routing, your setup should work well.
Adopting Advanced VoIP Phone Features
If you run a medium-size or larger business, ACD Queues might be a great Dash feature to pick up. And no matter the size of your operation, using your Automated Attendant wisely can make the customer journey much smoother.
When your VoIP phone system can save your customers time, you can save them from frustration with your staff and your product.
Remember that saving even a few seconds can make or break a potential sale. If you haven’t already, set up or optimize your Auto Attendant, and consider ACD Queues as the next investment in your company.
How to Record a Phone Call With Dash
Posted on September 11, 2018 by Casey Houser
Now that our Dash Business Phone System offers call recording for free, you may want some more detail about how to record a phone call that passes through your business.
Whether or not you’re new to Dash, you’ll be joining the legion of businesses that now seek call recording as a primary feature in their business phone configurations. The need for call recording, according to Software Advice, has even surpassed call routing as a desired feature, and rightly so, given the compliance regulations that now govern nearly all financial institutions and call centers.
The good news is that this process only takes a few minutes to set up. Before we’re done today, we’ll have covered the basics of Recording permissions that affect individuals and Ring Groups in Dash. If you need any more guidance, refer to the Dash Support Guide.
As an Individual: How to Record a Phone Call
In Dash, call recording is turned off by default. System administrators can activate recording for any user by editing the appropriate settings. From the Dash Dashboard:
- Click the Users tab (left-hand side of your screen)
- Locate the desired user whose calls you want recorded
- Click the User Features option (far-right column) in the user’s row
Now you’ll see a screen that looks like this:
Select the Customized Call Recording option to open a screen with inbound and outbound recording preferences. You can choose to turn on recording for internal and external calls. The following options, shown in the following screenshot, are available to all your users.
When you turn any of the options to On you will gain access to the Format: drop-down menu that allows you to select the format in which your recordings are saved. You can choose either .mp3 and .wav at this time.
Conferencing
The options presented here for individuals also impact their calls in conferences. In Dash, conferences are considered both outbound and internal calls since users dial out to reach a conference but the call never needs to route through the public telephone network.
Therefore, in order to record a conference call, the user would need to have their Outbound Internal option switched to On. This rule applies to both conference hosts and participants.
As a Ring Group: How to Record a Phone Call
The process for adding call recording to an entire ring group is similar to the Individual process described above.
From your Dashboard, follow these steps:
- Click the Groups tab
- Create or locate the Ring Group whose calls you want recorded
- Click the Group Features option in the group’s row
- In the menu that pops up, select Call Recording
Now you should see a menu that looks like one pictured here. When you enable the Recording setting for the group you can again choose the format in which you want the files saved.
Inbound Only
One limitation of this approach is that it only enables the recording of inbound calls for a group’s members. If you want Dash to record users’ outbound calls, you have to enable the Outbound settings in their individual User Features options as explained in the previous section of this article.
Accessing Your Recordings
No matter in which context your phone calls were recorded, you can find your personal recordings on our Dash Recording Manager. Use your Dash username and password to log in.
The Recording Manager Dashboard lets you sort recordings according to the phone number and date associated with the file. Then you can either listen to the recording in your browser or download individual files to your computer.
You could soon record some of your best conversations while using the Yealink CP960. Enter our giveaway by clicking the banner below.
Conference Call to Save Money and Work Efficiently
Posted on September 7, 2018 by Casey Houser
Conference call services have long been a staple of global business operations. Long before some of today’s largest companies came into existence, CEOs and stakeholders alike would routinely meet in group calls that traversed the public telephone service across states and countries. Those calls were also expensive and difficult to establish.
A lot has changed since the early days of multi-user calling. You no longer need your own private server to complete intra-office calls, and you no longer need to pay exorbitant fees to join three or more individuals separated by just as many time zones. Like many similar products, our Dash Business Phone System, which offers Conferencing as a primary feature, takes advantage of widespread high-speed internet access to facilitate calls cheaply and at a higher quality than ever before.
This means that more companies can reap the benefits that the (now) simple conference call has to offer. According to a study from Gos International, the audio conferencing market is expected to grow 4.9% from 2016-2020 to a total valuation of $6.2 billion. And this could all happen, Gartner reports, while individual customer spending drops due to the availability of low-cost SIP services.
With all that in mind, let’s break down two of conferencing’s greatest benefits: money savings and workplace efficiency.
Save Money By Saving Time
By replacing an in-person meeting with a conference call, you save your participants a lot of time.
Any attendees who work outside your office will need to walk, taxi, or take a metro to reach your location. Even for a small company, the aggregate time those individuals spend traveling could reach in the dozens of hours for a simple weekly get-together.
Those dozens of hours translate to lost opportunity costs because the attendees could have been working on other tasks during the time they were in transit. If those travelers are your employees, then you’re losing money every time you have a meeting.
This effect even reaches into meetings you might have with stakeholders or potential hires – people whose personal opportunity costs don’t necessarily affect your finances. Consider that, if you pay for someone’s travel, whether it’s by car or plane, that expense could be erased with a conference call.
With only these few examples, it’s straightforward to figure out that time can easily equate to money. When you save your participants time by calling them, you save them and your business money.
Become More Efficient
It won’t take long for you to develop an efficient routine when conducting conference calls. After a handful of virtual meetups, you’ll have a system in place that schedules a meeting time, notifies participants, starts the session, and hopefully runs through your bullet points in record time.
Your regular participants – again, likely your employees – should also have their own routines that move them quickly into and out of any meeting. Then they can get back to work and resume their to-do lists without having to leave their desks.
Such efficiency should lead to shorter, more effective interactisavingons which will become essential in emergency meetings – like ones that take place when a new product feature breaks.
Make a Conference Call in Dash
Our Dash Business Phone System, which now includes Conferencing for free, lets you save money and be more efficient from day one. You can easily provide multiple users with the ability to host a conference. From there, your users can invite participants with a phone number and PIN, which keeps the meeting private and allows for easy access.
If you aren’t using a virtual phone service for your conferencing, or if you haven’t taken advantage of conferences yet in your own office, there’s no better time than the present. Your time is valuable. Make the switch today.
Want to conference call with a new Yealink phone? It’s advanced features like Wi-Fi and touchscreen integration will have you conferencing in style. Click the banner below to enter our Conference Phone Giveaway.
Call Recording and Conferencing Now Included For Free in Dash
Posted on September 4, 2018 by Casey Houser
Our award-winning Dash Business Phone System has just received a prominent upgrade. All customers will now receive Call Recording and Conferencing at no extra charge.
This upgrade applies to all our plans. Whether you choose a Basic, Pro, or Unlimited package, you will find these premium features available to all your users.
Why the Change?
We want to provide our customers with the best set of features available on any virtual phone system. Lon Baker, VirtualPBX COO, said it best:
“We’re in the business of making communications simple, professional, and technologically advanced. Many customers come to us with multiple bills and service providers — this solution streamlines their communications strategy so that they need only pay for and manage one service.”
Both Call Recording and Conferencing have become essential to the operations of many businesses. Whether you have five or 500 staff members, these features will likely play a prominent role in your business as you capture essential customer information and hold important company meetings.
This change — moving these features from paid add-ons to free included options — allows more businesses to take advantage of the best we have to offer.
Benefits of Call Recording and Conferencing
Call Recording
Customers that already use Dash Call Recording know it helps create a steel trap for the information that flows into their businesses.
Employees at all levels can harness its power. Call center representatives, who are often required to record all their interactions with customers, can rest assured that Dash will handle that requirement for every call. Similarly, C-suite executives can use saved recordings to replay pivotal conversation they’ve had with department heads and corporate partners.
Our software makes it easy to setup call recording for individuals and ring groups in all departments of your organization.
Conferencing
Dash Conference Calling is a mainstay for any company that wants to easily conduct virtual meetings. Using conference phones like the Yealink CP960, groups at a conference table can easily converse with dozens of remote attendees.
This sort of flexibility in handling calls can make its way into meetings of all types. Potential hires from anywhere in the world can simply call a single phone number, enter a PIN, and meet with the heads of the company. Multiple investors can also take part in discussions that will have an impact on their own companies.
With just a few clicks in our dashboard, you can allow any employee to hold their own conference. They can then invite conference participants to any future call with only a phone number and room number. It’s that easy.
Dash Configuration
All existing customers will now see the Conference Bridge and Customized Call Recording options available in the Dash dashboard — whether or not they previously paid for the features as add-ons. All new customers will have both features ready from day one.
You can follow the brief instructions below to quickly set up Recording and Conferencing options in your dashboard. For more detail, including information about our Call Recording Manager, check out the Dash Support documents.
Enable Conferencing
You can enable Conference Bridge for any user by first navigating to the Main Number tab in Dash. In that tab, add a Main Conference Number.
Then visit the Users tab and select the user who needs conferencing abilities. In that individual’s User Features menu, click Conference Bridge to enter their personal conference room number and their PIN.
Enable Call Recording
In any user’s User Features menu, click Customized Call Recording to set options for inbound and outbound recording. Individuals can have their internal and external calls automatically recorded and saved in Dash.
Boost Your Business Potential
Whether you’re a new or existing Dash user, the addition of Call Recording and Conferencing is sure to amplify the way in which you reach customers and conduct meetings.
Want to reach those customers with a new Yealink conference phone with Wi-Fi and touchscreen integration? Click the banner below to enter our Conference Phone Giveaway.
Call Center Technology Trends into 2019
Posted on August 21, 2018 by Charlie Galaviz
The success of your organization’s customer contact center can define your brand, campaign, or organization for better or worse in today’s digital world. In order to meet the stringent expectations of your audience, your organization must deploy call center technology that increases productivity, provides real-time insights, and presents a professional image of your brand.
Call Center Technology
When choosing the right call center solutions for your business, consider these call center technologies:
- Real-Time Monitor: Monitoring your business phone system in real-time with a dynamic, live view of all call activity is one of the most effective ways supervisors can achieve peak call center performance. View how many calls are taking place, which agents are busy, and which agents are available. If you need to know what’s happening with your phone system at all times, then you need a Real-Time Monitor.
- Web Phone: Cutting the cord on expensive PBX hardware is easier than ever thanks to the affordability and functionality of browser-based calling. Built on WebRTC technology – the Web Phone includes features like click-to-call, call transfers, self-muting, audio preference management, and more. The best part is it’s free! Simply pay for the minutes that are pooled from your Dash Plan. When you sign up with Dash Business Phone System your team can start making crystal-clear calls right from your web browser within minutes.
- Rent top call center phones: Looking to rent the latest Call Center Technology for your political campaign at the lowest cost around? VirtualPBX can help you equip your call center from the ground up. For less than $10/mo you can rent the Tom Brady of VoIP Phones (Yealink T21P E2) or you can purchase new VoIP Phones from our online store. With a limitless supply or phones and prices that will fit any budget, isn’t it time you upgrade to VirtualPBX Call Center Technology?
Explore the Full Range of Call Center Technology Features
One size doesn’t necessarily fit all – every call center has its own unique goals and expectations. To truly succeed in your endeavors, your call center must be built to reflect these ambitions. VirtualPBX provides plans to fit any budget with a huge variety of included features. We also provide Custom Voice Solutions which are a truly bespoke solution for call centers, including custom call routing and configuration. To get started, just give us a call at 888.825.0800. We have team members standing by 24/7 to assist!
