We all know that first impressions are important, so as your business grows and you start to find it difficult to manage the volume of telephone calls, you may start to ask yourself; "how can I manage my incoming telephone calls more efficiently"?

Sticking an answer phone on the line or using a free voicemail service may prove to be a short term solution but statistics show that people don't often tend to leave their details, so you will still end up loosing customers.

There are now on the market a number of cost effective call management options that will provide you with a solution. These include using a third party company to receive your call overflow, computer software that will route your calls to different extensions or mobiles where the call can be collected and complete digital telephone systems.

Digital phone systems provide some great features and benefits for businesses who receive a high volume of incoming call traffic, for example they can enable you to:

• create call groups associated with particular clients, so that the right client goes to the right person
• create fallback routing, so if for example the phone is not answered within six rings it is diverted to another office handset, land line or mobile
• create unique voicemail messages for each different situation; such as out of office, at a meeting, on leave, on a break etc. Then activate them remotely from your mobile phone or another land line
• add features such as music on hold or intersperse the music with marketing messages about your products and services
• pull activity reports on individual extensions for client billing and more effective financial control.

Moving to digital may also save your business money. For many businesses, one of the major financial out goings each month will be the telephone bill. In the UK, despite the growth of competitors in the market, many businesses continue to rely on the main telecom provider, but there will come a point at which this will no longer be cost effective. If you use a conventional telephone system you will pay a business line rental for each of the phones in your office as well as an extra charge for your internet connection. At the point at which your line charges reach three figures it may be worth considering moving to digital.

Many businesses waste large sums of time and money by making the wrong investments in technology simply because they don't have the time or resources to fully consider all the options.

SMEO therefore provide a service that aims to take much of the time intensive ground work out this process, thereby helping businesses to make the wisest investment, we:

• spend some time gaining a full understanding of your business needs
• complete a full audit of the existing technology at your premises
• provide you with a comprehensive report on the potential benefits available from technology, software, systems and procedures that will meet these needs
• research suppliers for value, response time, reliability, efficiency, effectiveness, economy, flexibility, capacity, standards, satisfaction, accuracy, locality, security etc.
• negotiate the most competitive price for your requirements
• negotiate any contract and service level agreement to ensure a 'win win' relationship
  

We are looking at such technology on a daily basis so have the advantage that we already know a great deal about the various solutions available. We have also seen how businesses have integrated this technology and can advise how to avoid any of the pitfalls that they may have experienced.

If you would like to know more, why not give us a call and we can provide an outline proposal. Or if you prefer complete an online enquiry form.