For business owners, there are plenty of reasons to love a hosted cloud phone system — and not surprisingly, the most important and compelling have to do with dramatic annual cost savings.
As we have highlighted previously, businesses that deploy a hosted cloud phone system typically save anywhere from 25-50% (and sometimes more) compared to a conventional landline phone system. Heck, it’s enough to make even the most stoic and hard-nosed CFO crack a smile — which is pretty hard to do.
However, if you ask employees what they love most about a hosted cloud phone system, you probably won’t get much feedback about cost saving, but will certainly hear the same advanced feature highlighted over and over: voicemail-to-email!
Why do so many employees rank voicemail-to-email as their #1 feature — i.e. the one that they absolutely refuse to function without, and can’t imagine how they survived before it arrived? There are three main reasons:
1. Employees can pick-up voicemails on their smartphone.
Employees dislike — and more than a few dread — heading back to their office to face a slew of voicemails; including some that may be from the same colleague or customer, and express an increasing degree of frustration (e.g. the first message is “please call me back when you get a chance” and the fifth message is “where the hell are you!?”).
Hosted cloud’s voicemail-to-email feature eliminates the shock and awe of an overloaded voicemail box — and keeps colleagues and customers from overheating. That’s because the moment a voicemail is left, it’s automatically converted into an audio file and sent to an employee’s email address. Additional caller information (name/number) is also sent in the email.
From there, the employee receives a push notification on their smartphone, listens to the voicemail as soon as possible — even if they’re waiting in line at the airport or having lunch — and prioritizes their response accordingly.
2. Employees can forward voicemails to colleagues.
Relaying a voicemail message — especially a long and complex one — is just tedious and time consuming, but it can lead to errors and misunderstandings.
Consider this scenario: a customer calls their sales rep and leaves a long message about a technical issue that they’re struggling with. Rather than calling the (already frustrated) customer back and asking them to call technical support, the sales rep calls their colleague in technical support and explains the issue.
Unfortunately, despite having good intentions and trying to deliver a positive customer experience, the sales rep neglects to mention a few details in the voicemail. As a result, the information they ultimately provide the customer is incorrect — which leads to apologies, re-work, and in some cases, losing the customer entirely. A study by American Express found that 33% of customers will head to a competitor after just a single instance of poor service.
How does voicemail-to-email l prevent this scary scenario from unfolding? It’s easy: instead of relaying the message manually, the sales rep simply forwards the original voicemail to their colleague in technical support, who listens to it (maybe a few times!) in order to provide the right response the first time. Everyone wins!
3. Employees can save voicemails for future reference.
The age-old problem of saving voicemails is that they start to pile up — and become almost impossible to keep organized.
For example, let’s say that an employee can save up to 30 voicemails, and to date they’ve saved 15. What happens if they need to reference the first or second voicemail on the list? Or what if they can’t even remember if a specific voicemail is in their inventory? For either scenario, the only solution is to listen to ALL voicemails one-by-one. This is beyond tedious. It’s punitive!
Fortunately, hosted cloud’s voicemail-to-email feature rescues employees from this pain and suffering. Because all voicemails are converted/saved as audio files, they can easily be moved into various folders and accessed (i.e. listened to) with a single click.
Not only is this massively more efficient, but it also supports quality assurance standards and compliance requirements. For example, a customer may leave a voicemail with specific shipping instructions, but then complain later on because a completely different set of instructions weren’t followed. Instead of going to battle and potentially losing the customer, the customer can simply be provided with the voicemail. Case closed, and battle avoided!