UCaaS – FlexTek Global

Why You Should Choose a Hosted Phone System for Your Business

When choosing a phone system for your business, the toss-up between an on-premise solution or a hosted phone system (PBX – private branch exchange) can be somewhat confusing. A hosted phone system, also known as Unified Communications as a Service (or UCaaS) is a virtual phone system hosted for you by a service provider. With a hosted PBX, introducing a whole new phone system to your company isn’t as scary as it sounds. It’s quick and easy to set up, so there’s no downtime for your business or expensive installation costs. Moreover, you can be safe in the knowledge that you’ll receive the best service and support and that your business’ communications are in safe hands. More and more companies are opting hosted phone solutions and with good reason, so what are some of the benefits of hosted business VoIP?

Lower setup costs – as the PBX is virtual, the initial investment is minimal as there is no need for the costly hardware and installation that a traditional PBX requires.

Elimination of maintenance costs – your PBX is hosted by us, so there is no need to hire someone in-house to manage and maintain it.

A scalable solution – a hosted PBX is easy to scale up or down with minimal work and costs.

User-friendly – For end-users, a virtual PBX is conveniently simple to use and manage. There’s no need for any training or specialized skills so you can start using your new phone system right away.

Unbeatable mobility & global potential – with a hosted PBX, employees can work from anywhere. All they need is internet access. Additionally, multiple offices can be connected by the same system eliminating inter-office call charges.

Questions to ask yourself:

Are you looking for a cost-effective way to manage your communications?
Are you looking for a dependable cloud UC vendor with advanced features?
Are you looking for the flexibility to communicate and work from anywhere securely?
Do you have a disaster avoidance plan in place today?
Would it be beneficial to have a system where any employee can easily and securely
self-manage its features without needing management or IT support?
Do you have multiple locations or looking to add locations in the future?
Are you looking to add call center solutions in the future?
Do you need your communications platform to integrate with your CRM?
What type of collaboration tools do you use?

5 Ways Unified Communications Can Improve Your Customer Services

5 Ways Unified Communications Can Improve Your Customer Service

Contacting your customer service department doesn’t have to be an experience your customers dread. When you install a unified communications (UC) platform, you can provide high level of customer service in an efficient manner. UC tools like instant messaging, email, and phone can be used to communicate not only with your customer but also with the other people in your organization, a manufacturer, or tech support simultaneously. The system can allow your rep access to your customer database, further enhancing the customer experience.

UC provides more efficient, faster collaboration between customer service employees and experts throughout your company by integrating telephone features, like click to dial with desktop-based communications, such as instant messaging, Web conferencing, and video conferencing.

Here are five ways UC can help your small business serve customers better:

Answer customers’ questions more quickly

That’s the basic premise of UC: better, faster, and more efficient collaboration among colleagues, including instant messaging, conferencing, and telephone-based tools. When it comes to customer service, this means allowing your employees to see who else in the company is available at that moment to help and to bring that person into the conversation without asking the customer to wait.

Give customers better information

UC can also help you give customers better, more complete information straight from the experts, whether they’re within your own company or a partner’s. Internal conferencing features give customer service reps access to experts; and, in some cases, they can even transfer the customer directly to the expert without having to put the customer on hold for more than a few seconds.

Be available to customers any time, any place

UC is great for companies that conduct business globally. It lets international customers contact you with whichever communications method they prefer. On your end, a UC solution will gather voicemails, emails, and other messages into one inbox, which you can use to respond to customers in any time zone.

Help customers find the right product

UC can let you connect customers who are researching possible purchases to in-house experts who can help guide them to the right product and even suggest other products to buy. If you’re already using a customer relationship management (CRM) solution, you can integrate it with a UC solution to provide employees instant access to customer order histories. Improving customer service can also benefit your bottom line. In the Forrester survey, 67% of small business respondents said that they could generate as much as 20% more revenue from the Web if they could connect customers to experts online.

Strengthen customer relationships

Using UC’s conferencing features, you can have a web- based meeting complete with audio, video, and collaboration tools with customers any time. Good customer service is critical to the success of any small business.