5 Phone System Mistakes That Cost Businesses and How To Avoid Them

The phone system is up and running, the phones are ringing. Sounds good, right? Sadly, that’s not always true.

For many businesses, there is little thought put into business telephony, and it’s impact on the business as a whole. In other words, they just assume that their business phone system will function. Calls come in, employees answer them, and the customers get the support they need and so on. However, while your phone system might seem like a small part of your business, but it plays a huge role in how customers experience your company. Beneath the surface, there are a number of common telephony challenges that can quietly impact productivity, customer satisfaction, and ultimately revenue and the bottom line.

The good news is that modern cloud phone systems, are designed to eliminate many of these everyday problems. Here are five costly phone system mistakes that businesses often make and how modern business communication solutions, like the PASCOM cloud phone system, help solve them.

Missed calls go unnoticed
Customer calls get passed around the houses
Remote working employees are unreachable
After hours calls go unmanaged
Nobody takes ownership of what’s going on with calls

1. Missed calls go unnoticed

Every call is an opportunity for your business: whether it’s a new customer with a sales enquiry, an existing customer looking for support, or even an important business partner trying to make contact. As such, every missed call represents a potential missed opportunity and unanswered calls can quickly lead to lost business.

In fact, the business cost of missed calls can be quite astronomical, for example IntroducerTODAY reports that missed calls cost the 5.6 billion UK businesses roughly £30bn per year. The same report also states that the cost of missed calls to the real estate industry alone is estimated at £119 million annually.

That said, the real issue is often not the fact that the call has been missed, it’s that businesses have no clear idea on how to handle missed calls, meaning nobody follows up afterwards.

How Modern Cloud Phone Systems Help

Modern cloud telephony solutions such as PASCOM are designed to ensure that missed calls are reduced to an absolute minimum. To achieve this, it’s important to understand how and why incoming calls are missed in the first place, i.e. busy employees, remote working, and many other potential reasons. However, it is inevitable that some calls will be missed. As such, identifying the missed calls must be easy and understanding their context and deciding what action to take must be simple. That’s why PASCOM provides intelligent call management features to help businesses stay on top on their inbound telephony, including:

Missed call notifications
Just like you would expect from your smartphone, as a PASCOM user you will also receive a missed call notification when you miss a call. However, unlike on your smartphone, business telephony involves different types of phone calls – those directly to your office number and those to a team in which you are a member of. So the difficulty is differentiating between the two. That’s why calls to a call queue (team) are marked differently to calls to your office extension. Not only can you see at a glance that it was a team call, but you can also see to which team the call was made.

Detailed call histories
Detail call histories provide an instant overview off all your calls. With PASCOM, calls to a call queue answered by colleagues are marked differently to missed calls and missed calls to a queue are marked as read as soon as you or a colleague views the missed call details within the call history. Furthermore, employees can add notes to calls to let colleagues know what action has been taken and needs to be taken.

Voicemail with AI-powered transcription
Voicemails are another useful tool for managing missed calls – so long as you follow up on them. To help you decide and prioritise the most important calls to follow up on, PASCOM Intelligence’s smart voicemail box tool provides near instant transcriptions and summaries your voicemail messages so that you do not have to listen to them all to decide which calls require immediate follow up. And the best bit, PASCOM’s Smart Voicemail box is available for both calls to your team and direct to your extension.

With a clear overview over all your calls, teams can respond quickly and effectively to missed calls and voicemail messages, reducing the potential impact and ensuring valuable enquiries don’t go unanswered.

2. Customer calls get passed around the houses

Few experiences frustrate customers more than being transferred multiple times before reaching the right person, each time having to explain their enquiry before finally having to repeat it again once they have reached an employee who can actually help them. That’s the first problem – frustrated customers are more difficult to manage and care for. The employee who eventually can help them will first have to appease the customer before they actually help them. This represents lost time and productivity.

The second problem is that when employees spend their time redirecting calls rather than resolving them, your business is losing efficiency. Furthermore, your business will appear unprofessional and disorganised from the customer’s perspective, meaning they will have less trust in your company and your products and services. If they are a potential new customer, this could be a dealbreaker and for existing customers, they may be so fed up with the situation that they start looking at your competition.

How the PASCOM Cloud Phone System Helps

Thanks to it’s advanced feature set, the PASCOM business phone system helps ensure that your callers reach the right contact person at the first time of asking, or at worst the second attempt by using a combination of features:

Pia – the PASCOM Intelligence Agent
Pia is an AI telephony assistant and much more. Not only can Pia understand requests, Pia can also participate in conversations, ask short follow-up questions and make decisions based on the caller input when forwarding the call to the relevant department/team/contact. Furthermore, Pia can be prompted to access both data stored in PASCOM and /or 3rd party applications to for example personally greet callers or make calendar appointments.
IVR Menus / Auto Attendants
Similar in role to Pia, just a touch more traditional, using an IVR (Interactive Voice Menu) to first greet callers and then allow them to select from predefine options is an excellent option for pre-qualifying callers and routing their calls to the required team/department according to the options that they select.
Automatic Call Distribution & Call Queues
Based on the data input from Pia or the IVR, ACD (Automatic Call Distribution) is the intelligent routing function that automates the call handling and routes the call to the required call queue. Within each queue, employees with the required skill set should be assigned as members and so that they receive the customer calls. Of course, whilst the caller waits for the call to be answered, music and relevant announcements can be played to make their wait time more enjoyable and informative.
Presence Information, Chat, Call Hold & Call Transfers
If, for example, an employee receives a call and cannot immediately answer the customer enquiry, it is always important for that employee to be honest and say so. However, the employee does have a number of options available to them to provide the customer with the answer, starting with Presence Information. Using presence information allows them to see who is available at a glance and then decide how the caller would best be served. For example, a simple chat may provide an answer, but if it is more complex maybe placing the caller on hold or transferring the call to another person is the answer – it may not be first point of contact resolution, but it is still first call resolution!

To wrap things up, by routing calls to the most appropriate person or team straight away, businesses can reduce wait times, improve first-call resolution rates, and therefore provide their callers with a more professional customer experience.

3. Remote working employees are unreachable

Since the pandemic and the necessity to work from home, hybrid and remote working have now become a standard part of everyday business life. There are a number of benefits to hybrid and remote working, such as promoting a more beneficial work-life balance and increasing a companies geographical reach in terms of talent and potentially also customer acquisition. However, the problem with many legacy phone systems is that they still tie employees to their desks due to their reliance on physical office desktop phones and the technical challenges posed by remote working without modern telephony and collaboration tools.

Without the right tools, calls may be missed when employees start working remotely. Firstly, there is the main challenge of how calls should reach employees in home office. With a traditional phone system this required complex VPN setups and call forwarding. This led to inconsistent call handling and lower employee availability, creating a challenge for both employees and customers.

How modern cloud phone systems differ

Although their designed purpose is just about identical, compared to a legacy system, modern cloud communications platforms such as PASCOM differ significantly. Firstly, being IP-based (Internet Protocol), cloud communications solutions communicate over the Internet making them accessible from anywhere with an Internet connection. Secondly, the feature set has evolved since the advent of IP telephony and now encompasses everything from telephony to instant messaging and video conferencing. Furthermore, all the essential features of a traditional business phone system, such as call queueing, haven’t been forgotten – they have just been given a massive technological upgrade and now include features as standard that used to cost a fortune or weren’t even developed yet.

Softphone functionality
The advent of the softphone has been a game changer in the world of remote working. A softphone is basically a software-based VoIP telephone, and it ensures that employees can make and receive phone calls using their Internet connection.
Mobile and desktop applications
Phone system apps on your desktop and mobile devices mean having access to essential business critical data and functionality directly at your fingertips. Mobile and desktop apps include softphones, instant messaging, video conferencing, WhatsApp and even in fax in a single app and make them securely available everywhere.
One Number Concept
Now your users have softphone apps on all their devices that automatically synchronise via the Internet to ensure that employees always have access to real-time and accurate information, the next step is to make sure they are available on their office number, no matter where they are working from – a.k.a. the One Number Concept.

While an VPN is still a recommended security measure when accessing critical corporate information, accessing your business phone system via VPN is no longer an essential requirement like it was just a few years ago. Accessing telephony and collaboration services via the cloud has made incorporating remote locations much simpler. Moreover, apps such as the PASCOM phone system desktop and mobile apps, give remote workers instant access to all your cloud communication channels in one place, eliminating employee availability as an issue when answering calls in home office.

4. After hours calls go unmanaged

Customer expectations have shifted significantly. Gone are the days of the 9-5 working day. Instead, customers are now increasingly expecting on-demand service. While this is of course not universal for all industries and verticals, it is true for many sectors. So what do you do with customers who call outside your normal operating hours? If there is no after-hours strategy in place, callers may encounter some of the biggest customer service issues out there when it comes to telephony: endless ringing, disconnected calls, or generic voicemail boxes.

The reason why these issues can damage your customer service and have a negative impact on your company is simple: when you call a company and the phone just rings endlessly, or simply disconnects, customer frustration builds as they start thinking that they are wasting their time and this then translates into you wasting their time.

Then there is the generic voicemail box. Many customers have become accustomed to voicemail messages not being answered which is why an estimated 80% of callers directed to voicemail don’t leave a message – according to a Forbes Magazine publication. So if you use voicemail, you’ve got to give your customers the confidence to leave voice messages; otherwise you could be losing out on opportunities.

How Cloud Telephony supports business after hours

Modern cloud telephony solutions like PASCOM offer enables businesses with a number of options to create a professional after-hours call handling strategy or indeed strategies.

First up, let’s counteract the endless ringing and the blind disconnects. As mentioned above, functionality such as Pia or the PASCOM IVR feature allows you to automatically greet callers, which is obviously an important first step, but thanks to time-based call routing it is possible to play back different greeting at different times to provide callers with additional information e.g. your business’ opening hours. Depending on the use case, it is even possible to play different greetings according to the time of day, day of the week or even on public holidays.

What’s more, time-based routing allows businesses to route after hours calls differently, for example, to a dedicated customer service team who are available outside of normal operating hours. Another option is to route after hours callers to PASCOM’s Smart Voicemail box which provides real-time AI transcriptions and summaries of the customer call, allowing employees to immediately identify and prioritise urgent, higher value enquiries on the next working day.

5. Nobody takes ownership of what’s going on with calls

In the call centre world, statistics and analytical data involving telephony and call volumes form the cornerstone of employee / team KPIs. However, most other businesses often overlook such information as they are unaware of the correlation between effective telephony and business success. As a result, simple questions are often left unanswered and this poses a challenge to business planning and decision-making.

The best example is actually the simplest – your live and historical call volumes. Without an overview of live call volumes, businesses are not in a position to proactively react to potential issues. Sudden spikes in inbound call volumes may be attributable to a new campaign launch or a sign that something is wrong. For example, you could have launched a new marketing campaign that has a strong resonance and is driving calls. On the other hand, something negative could be driving call volumes – either way, without live monitoring and reporting, the correlation between the two would be complete guess work as opposed to a decision made on data.

Moving beyond live monitoring, historical data helps answer questions regarding when a business is busiest, i.e. has the highest/peak call volumes, how many calls go unanswered, average wait times and more. Without this information, answering questions such as “our teams adequately staffed to cope with the busiest periods without negatively impacting customer service and satisfaction” will be pure guess work.

In essence, businesses that do utilise call data & analytics will lack valuable information making it extremely difficult to identify telephony communication bottlenecks and therefore will struggle to improve customer service.

How Cloud Communication solutions help

Simply by knowing how many calls a business historically makes and receives, businesses can streamline internal process and improve decision-making from HR to budget planning. But of course, a modern cloud communications platform like PASCOM offers far more in terms of monitoring and reporting. These days, functionality that was previously reserved for Call Centres is now available to SMBs, enabling businesses of all shapes and sizes to effectively monitor, track and report on a wide range of performance indicators including:

Total call volumes
Tracks all calls to and from a company and can be configured to include or exclude internal calls.
Total inbound & outbound call volumes
Detailed break down into the total number of inbound and outbound calls. It can be used for multiple purposes included resource and budget planning (staffing, technology, AI adoption).
Total missed calls
The total number of missed calls over a given period of time. An essential figure to know given that 80-85% of callers will not call back if their initial call to a business is not answered and that missed calls are often perceived by callers as poor customer service.
Average call duration
A key performance monitoring and customer service indicator, the average length of time a call lasts from the moment the caller speaks with an employee, too short or too long and callers may not be receiving adequate customer care. The reasons why vary, but this is one KPI that’s can shed light on training requirements, bottlenecks and even automation / self-service opportunities.
Average wait time
The average length of time a caller waits in the call queue before the call is answered. Typically, the longer the wait time, the lower the customer satisfaction.
Peak traffic periods
Track calls over a longer period of time (weeks, months, years etc) to identify call volume patterns that shed valuable insight into peak and low call volumes. Peaks and lows could be per day, per week, per month or even per year and can be used to optimise staffing, identify automation options or even influencing sales and marketing decision-making.

All this information can be broken down even further to provided detailed insights at a company level, or at the team or individual levels. These are the insights that can be used by managers and team leaders to make data-driven decisions to continually improve customer service whether through optimised staffing, helping to identify and resolve any technical issues or potential employee training requirements.

PASCOM Simply Better Connected

More often than not, the most expensive business phone system mistakes or problems are not technical failures. In fact, the most costly mistakes tend to be everyday operational issues. When allowed to accumulate over time start, these inefficiencies start to affect the customer experience and employee productivity and, as a result, start to blunt business growth.

No matter what challenge your business is facing; missed calls or inefficient call routing, remote working availability, limited insight to what is actually happening or a combination of issues, they can all have a significant impact on how your overall business performance. By switching to an all-in-one Cloud Communications solution such as the PASCOM cloud phone system, you and your business will gain immediate access to a plethora of features with which to overcome these challenges, from intelligent call and automatic routing options to workplace mobility, AI telephony agents and call analytics. All in one centrally managed, secure platform that keeps you, your colleagues, your customers and your business connected for a more professional, productive business communications experience.

If any of these phone system challenges seem familiar to you and your company, then PASCOM could help you turn them into opportunities where improved communication leads to better customer service.