The global coronavirus pandemic has changed life as we knew it.
As the world enters lockdown, businesses everywhere are scrambling around trying to find new ways to work. With global workforces forced to stay at home, many companies have to fight to find a way of staying in business.
Working from home has become the new norm for many employees. Businesses everywhere are now trying to work through new strategies to carry out their work.
This means finding new ways to communicate with their teams, and keeping their phone lines open for their customers.
How will your customers keep in touch with your business when your employees are no longer in the building?
In this article, we’ll discuss how a multi-line phone system can help with your customer service during the coronavirus pandemic.
What Is A Multi-Line Phone System?
A multi-line phone system is where users have a single phone with multiple phone numbers.
A user can make outgoing calls on the line of their choice, or accept incoming calls. This type of technology is useful as a small business phone system.
With the birth of cloud technology, the modern multi-line system refers to cloud-based systems. These systems can have several different phone numbers in a private branch exchange (PBX). The PBX will answer any incoming calls and route them to a virtual phone system.
What Are The Benefits Of A Multi-Line Phone System?
Having a cloud-based office phone system that you can run from anywhere means that you don’t need to be at your company premises to connect with your colleagues and customers.
Mult-phone systems have several key benefits; these include:
- No expensive, bulky hardware
- Quick and easy setup and Installation
- Easily upgraded using software updates
- You can manage the system using a smartphone
- You can add, remove, or repurpose lines as you need
This type of system is useful to any business under normal circumstances; however, during these unprecedented times, they offer much greater value.
Keep Your Customers During The Pandemic
The global pandemic has put the brakes on a lot of things in our daily lives. Yet, with the potentially huge economic problems that look set to occur due to COVID-19, no business can afford to completely stop right now.
Your customers may need your support or services too. If they can’t use your services when they need you, then you might find them gone after the pandemic has passed.
Keep hold of your customers by keeping all the lines of communication open.
Using a cloud-based multi-line system, it will be possible for your employees to make and receive essential customer calls from their smartphones.
Because you have full control over the entire mobile business phone system, you can route calls to specific employees.
Even though they’re working from home, if an employee needs to take a day off, you can always assign their line to another member of the team.
Put Your Customers At Ease
With so many businesses unable to operate during the coronavirus outbreak, your customers may have uncertainty. Will you be able to deliver on whatever service you offer to them?
People are trying to live their lives with as little disruption as possible. That means that they need to contact the companies that they use for any of their services.
By implementing multi-line systems, your customers can get through with the same level of ease that they normally would.
If you are expecting a higher volume of calls than average, using a phone answering service will help to take the pressure off the phone lines. On this service, you could play recorded messages with relevant information, or take customer details to arrange callbacks.
A Multi-Line Phone System Offers Flexibility
There may be an ebb and flow when it comes to customers contacting your business during the pandemic.
If there is a sudden influx of callers, having the cloud-based multi-line system in place will mean that you can open new lines up quickly.
Because you can route lines through to employees’ mobile phones, the lines will become operational very quickly. Once set up, you can assign a line to an existing employee.
If customers are not phoning, then you can always remove the lines if they are not needed, just keep open the smallest amount required.
You can determine your business opening hours and set the lines up so that they are only operational during these set periods. The last thing that you want is for your employees personal time to be ruined by customer calls.
Use Your Virtual Phone System For Outgoing Calls
If you need your employees to make outgoing calls while they work from home, you should not expect them to make these calls from their personal line.
By expecting employees to use their own personal line to make business calls to customers, you are not only using the phone service that they have paid for out of their own money, but you are also creating the risk of customers finding out employees’ personal phone numbers.
Because you can add a virtual phone line to your employee’s smartphone using the right software, they will be able to make all of the necessary calls to your customers without having to worry about the cost or privacy issues.
Being Ready For Anything
During the pandemic, your business needs to be ready for anything. Expect the worst to happen, but ensure you do everything in your power to deliver the best customer service possible.
You may need to brace yourselves for harder times to come, and you cannot afford to lose valuable customers now due to a lack of available technology in your employee’s homes.
Using a virtual multi-line phone system through your employees, existing smartphone technology will be a cost-effective and flexible way of keeping your customers close to you when they need certainty from your the most.
For more great articles about making the best of your phone technology, check out the other articles from the blog.