Before we dive right in, it is best to review your small business communication goals. You want to ensure the business VoIP provider you decide to use has what you need to meet them effectively.
Coming up with a good business voicemail greeting can be trickier than coming up with a personal voicemail greeting. Take some cues from the below to ensure callers leave a voicemail message after listening to your greeting. Additionally, consider writing a voicemail script to ensure you don’t leave out anything when recording.
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Softphones are perfect for the pandemic because using one means your employees can simply boot up their laptop or mobile device, install the softphone, strap on a headset, and they're good to go. Theoretically.
The above eight rules of engagement for voicemail greetings may sound easy enough, but they’ll require some practice to get just right. Let’s look at some examples to provide some context in how to apply the rules to various types of greetings and situations.
Your customers are increasingly diverse and it's more important than ever to ensure your business can communicate globally. As more business is done across international lines it's necessary to ensure you can make and receive calls from anywhere in the world. Your next critical business call may not come from where you expect, and Suddenlink Business Voice offers competitive per-minute rates to keep the conversation going for longer than ever.
During business hours, you may want calls to ring a central office phone or make their way through an automated attendant.
No one wants to listen to a two-minute voicemail greeting. Keep it short and upbeat and start with a simple “Hello! Thank you for calling
Consider these points while creating your business voicemail script: Every single call is a lead for you, so either there’s an opportunity to leave a great impression or an opportunity to sell something. Your business voicemail greeting should pass on the right message. Be apologetic about not receiving the customer call.
However, for many businesses, there's a need to route calls to the PSTN and other analog phones. This may mean a PSTN gateway, or even a hybrid PBX, where there's at least a small telephone switch located at your office. Your VoIP vendor will let you know if this is necessary at the planning stage. Note that these days, a PBX looks exactly like the other servers in your data center, except with an attached means of handling local and analog phones.
Vendors like VirtualPBX sell hosted systems to offer businesses a simple method of creating voice networks. Businesses purchase subscriptions from a vendor and connect their IP phones to that vendor’s voice network.
Voicemail is a voice message that a caller leaves when the person called is absent or is busy with another conversation.
Don’t leave customers and colleagues on edge. If you say you’re going to call them back, follow up. If you tend to fall behind in this area, encourage them to email you or reach out in another way. Better yet, learn how to forward voicemail to email so you can access the message anywhere.
Here’s another funny one for those times you really want to lighten the business mood:
You are living in 2020 and you do realize that your prospects can come to you anytime, which means you need to be catering to them whenever that happens, at 3 am in the morning or even at 11 pm in the night.
Kall8 is a little different from some others on this list of small business phone services because its primary focus is as a toll free number service. It touts itself as a way to direct and track online ad campaigns to toll free numbers. Along with it, Kall8 also offers basic phone service features such as voicemail and call forwarding. Prices start at $2.00/month per number. Vanity numbers and local numbers cost more. Add to that a per minute rate of roughly $.06 to .07 per minute. You could easily use this service to tie a Google Ad campaign to a phone number and allow you to track which ad performed best. Feature We Like: The online tools for tracking.
Workeasy is focused on being voicemail for growing businesses. They also offer a toll-free virtual phone number service. No free trial, starts at $19.95/month. Note that some features that are all-included in the price of other packages (such as auto attendant greeting) have an add-on fee. So compare prices carefully. Feature We Like: Voice talent service – they’ll provide a professional to record your voice message for you. [Note: service appears to be gone.]
Some research has shown that each time you leave a message, the chances of a callback go up about ten percent! Here’s how it works out: 1st voicemail = 11% callback rate. 2nd voicemail = 22% callback rate. 3rd voicemail = 33% callback rate. According to Zoominfo, the average callback rate after one call is just 4.8%.