When clients or customers want to learn more about your business, oftentimes after checking out your website and social media, if they have further questions regarding your products or services, they’ll pick up the phone and call.
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Before we head towards the tips for you to get started on creating efficient voicemail messages, there is one thing you need to realize.
Greetings can make or break an interaction with current and future customers. Especially when they’re encountered after work hours, voicemail messages can define how an individual will speak to a customer in need.
You might not be the kind of person who wants customers to go through long voicemails. If that sounds like you, here are a couple of short and sweet voicemail greetings that you can use to get your message across!
Phone.com has received a lot of positive feedback for its affordability and optional features add-ons. This small business phone system company is perfect if you plan on dialing and receiving a lot of international calls.
We actually know a top insurance sales guy who did a sales motivational message every day just like this, and people used to call just to listen to his thoughts.
RingCentral is a full VOIP service aimed at small business. RingCentral started as a bootstrapped startup. After investment by Cisco it completed an IPO in 2013 and is a publicly traded company (NYSE:RNG). In addition to VOIP, RingCentral offers a virtual PBX, voicemail and more. You can get unlimited phone and fax using an app or via hardware you purchase from RingCentral. Currently it offers a 15-day free trial for new subscribers. Feature We Like: Flexible answering rules so you can specify hours and days that work for your company and employees.
VoIP security. As touched on above, the underlying protocol for VoIP is SIP and it wasn't built with security in mind. This means hackers are taking advantage of several new attack vectors. One example is a denial of service (DoS) attack specifically on a phone service rather than the network as a whole. This will garble or drop your service because it results in your connection quality degrading, heavy latency, and system crashes. Caller ID spoofing is also becoming more common. This amounts to a phishing attack using a phone rather than an email. By calling workers with a caller ID that looks like it's coming from inside the company, hackers are able to get employees to cough up all kinds of sensitive information because they think they can trust the person at the other end of the call.
Thank you for calling [LinkedPhone – The Work From Anywhere Business Phone System]. Our office is closed until [Monday, January 25th for the holiday weekend]. If your call is urgent, please contact [Anya at 212-555-1212 or [email protected]]. Otherwise, please leave a message and we’ll get back to you as soon as we return. We value your call. Thank you from everyone at [LinkedPhone].
4. Voicemail greetings for calls received after business hours. You don’t want to answer calls 24/7 (unless you’re serving clients globally and there’s an expectation of 24/7 support).
Remember, your message is a reflection of you. Keep it short, professional and ALWAYS return messages.
There are still other legacy protocols around, and some non-SIP standards, including H.232. Other protocols that are still around are the Media Gateway Control Protocol (MGCP) and the Skinny Client Control Protocol (SCCP). The former is known for being overly complex and also that it doesn't support some of the functions that people need in their phones, like caller IDs. Cisco is the primary proponent of SCCP since they developed it. But even so, Cisco is currently phasing SCCP out in favor of the much broader SIP standard.
Rollover Hunting is a feature that is managed by the Account Manager or Phone Manager. It allows incoming calls to your primary phone line to roll over to the next available line and, if al l lines are busy or not answered, the call can roll over to voicemail. It will hunt through all lines in the group once to find an idle line. You can configure multiple hunt groups and the number of rings before the call is routed to the next li ne. Each hunt group must have a minimum of two lines and a unique primary number. There are three hunt sequence options:
8x8, is a US-based VoIP provider with an excellent record for connectivity and plans starting at $25 per month per user. You'll find the majority of products a small business needs for success (instant messaging, unlimited calling and faxing, business SMS and a healthy amount of media storage) even with the base price plan.
Though the specific features you need will depend on the nature of your business, you should look for a small business phone system that offers:
On top of that, they're often expected to provide more advanced functionality through software, like shared meeting collaboration, voicemail to email transcription, and call recording. And lest we forget, many businesses still need a service that will connect to the public switched telephone network (PSTN).