Are you making the most of your VoIP telephone systems? If you’re not taking advantage of the 13 VoIP features we’ve listed here, then you’re definitely missing out.
VoIP solutions can help you make your business run smoothly in a wide variety of ways. Getting technology to do some of the work for you is a great way to make your business more efficient. Less time dealing with phone headaches means your team members can use their time doing more productive tasks. And after all, time is our most valuable asset, so getting a few minutes back here and there can add up to profitable pockets of opportunity.
We’ll go over all the ways you can do that with advanced VoIP features. But first, we need to lay a little groundwork.
Basic VoIP Features
Before we get into all the really cool stuff VoIP telephone systems can do for you, let’s briefly cover the basic things you’ll get out of this kind of office telecom solution. VoIP phone systems are quite common these days, and they offer all the normal features you expect from any telephone system. In fact, if you’re not using any of the advanced VoIP capabilities we’ll detail later, you will probably never notice a difference between a traditional phone and VoIP telephone systems.
Organizations have the ability to transfer calls between different lines, set up speed dial, put people on hold, and all the other things a traditional telephone system can do.
Caller ID is fairly essential today, and it comes standard with most VoIP telephone systems. As we keep emphasizing, all the capabilities you would regularly expect of a phone service, including call waiting and forwarding, are standard VoIP features.
What we’re going to focus on in the rest of this post are all the features that go beyond the basics and make different VoIP options truly stand out from the pack.
Ad-Hoc Conferencing
In this day and age when remote work is more popular than ever, conferencing is a vital function. Ad-hoc conferencing is easy on a VoIP telephone system. This allows you to make conference calls efficiently and on the fly. When you need to get the whole team on the phone to sort something out, this feature is vital.
The big benefit of ad-hoc conferencing is that you can turn a regular, two-person call into a conference call at any time through your VoIP telephone systems. Simply press the right buttons, and you can add other people to the call as you see fit, at any time during an active call.
Texting
Among the younger generations, phone calls are getting less and less popular. That holds true even for contacting businesses. Many Gen Zers would rather do anything other than make an actual phone call to a real-life human being.
So, it benefits organizations to add other ways for them to get in contact with you. Texting VoIP features are one method of doing that.
You can get an app that will allow you to text just like the standard app on your phone, and the customers or team members who receive the texts won’t have any idea that you’re using VoIP features to communicate with them. These texts will come from a separate number than your cell number, so you can retain some privacy and separation between work and home life.
VoIP texting can also be super useful for sales, recruiting, and customer service purposes. Sending reminders, getting feedback, and troubleshooting concerns can all take place through VoIP texting, and it can make your operation more convenient and efficient.
Call Parking
In a perfect world, the right person would pick up the phone at the right time, and everybody would have the answers they need. Obviously this is not always the case. When you need to check about something with a colleague or otherwise take a moment away from a call, holding is always an option.
Call parking is similar but ultimately a little bit more sophisticated. It allows you to put someone on a line that anyone can pick up.
The caller is essentially holding, and once the right person can come to the phone, they simply take the call off of park, no transferring from the original recipient required. On a traditional hold, only the phone that put the call on hold can pick it back up. The flexibility call parking provides is a huge benefit for lots of VoIP telephone systems.
VoIP Features for Call Screening
If VoIP features are truly going to save you some time and effort, the different call screening measures you can access are definitely some of the most important ones.
On the most basic level, incoming calls from anonymous numbers can be rejected, and that basic caller ID we mentioned earlier could count as a screening tool. However, there are also more sophisticated screening tools included in more advanced VoIP features.
Another form of call screening that you can often get with VoIP telephone systems is selective call rejection. With this feature, you can set numbers that you want your phone to automatically reject. If that number continues to try to reach you, they will be told their call has been rejected.
Custom Sounds
While these VoIP features aren’t as practical as most of the others on our list, they do help add a little bit of your organization’s personality to your phone system. You can customize the hold music and the ringtone to something that aligns with your taste. Nobody likes to be put on hold, but with the right audio to keep them company, it can get a lot more bearable. Plus, it’s an extra branding opportunity.
Voicemail to Email
As we’ll discuss in later sections, VoIP telephone systems have lots of solutions for people who aren’t at their desks all day. We’ll get into the more comprehensive ones in a bit, but let’s cover voicemail to email first.
With this VoIP feature, you can get your voicemail messages in your email inbox as audio files. That email will also typically include who left the message and the time and date of their call. Alternatively, you can also simply be notified via email that you have a new voicemail message to listen to.
You can either have it delete from your voicemail box or have it save so you can access it from there later, if you need to. You can also sometimes have your voicemail messages transcribed. Customizing your VoIP telephone systems to work the best for your specific needs is always a great idea, and your voicemail is no exception.
Call Recording
Taking notes is great, but actually recording important calls is one step better. When you want to have a word-for-word account of what was said, call recording is the most efficient way to go.
There are lots of situations where call recordings are essential VoIP features. Like we said above, important meetings are prime candidates for recording.
This kind of functionality is also important for VoIP telephone systems in companies with customer service representatives speaking to clients. You need to ensure that everyone is getting the same level of service across the board, and call monitoring can help you do that. With a recording, you’ll have all the facts in case of any customer complaints, and you can also share good calls with your team to help them grow.
Faxing over Internet Protocol
Fax machines have more or less gone the way of the dinosaurs — extinct. What isn’t dead and gone and buried, though, is the need to send documents back and forth. VoIP telephone systems can actually be helpful in that department.
We’ll spare you the intricate explanation of how traditional, analog fax machines work. All you need to know is that they use telephone networks to send digitized versions of physical files. So, taking this sort of functionality and translating it to VoIP telephone systems makes sense as the next logical step. Businesses who are stuck in the past and want to fax things to your company can do so like they always would, but you’ll receive it as an email.
Analytics
Having the right data is super important to making any decision. Having accurate analytics for your telephone system is no different. When it comes to VoIP features, call statistics can track the amount of calls dialed, received, missed, and rejected. This information can help you figure out who is doing the heavy lifting on your team and how well you’re meeting the needs of clients who call in.
If you’re trying to determine what kinds of capabilities to add to your phone system, these kinds of statistics can be vital. You’ll have hard numbers to back up your decisions.
Call Queuing
For those of you with large volumes of calls and not enough agents to speak to them, call queueing is an absolutely vital functionality. Basically, what happens is that all incoming calls over the threshold of available team members to speak with them get placed into a queue. While the system works to place them with the first available person who can speak with them, they’re updated about their progress in the queue.
This can help customers better understand what’s going on — if they know they’re making progress in a line, they can be less likely to simply hang up out of frustration before they get a hold of anyone. It’s also an efficient way to try to get the right people connected.
Auto Attendants
Even the most advanced VoIP features aren’t going to replace the capabilities of your team members. However, they can take some of the more menial tasks off of their plates. Auto attendants in VoIP telephone systems can handle some of the initial trouble of trying to get callers to the right person.
Find Me/Follow Me
These two VoIP features are intrinsically linked, and they’re two more good solutions for busy professionals who aren’t always near their office phone.
These VoIP features work together to make sure that you’re reachable for important calls anywhere you go. They can automatically forward a call from your work phone to your home phone after hours, for example, if you’re waiting on some vital information and don’t want to miss it even when you leave for the day.
An added benefit of these capabilities is the privacy element. You don’t have to give clients your cell number for calls to ring on it with find me/follow me. You can set multiple phones to ring simultaneously, and you can answer whichever one is most convenient.
Or, you can set them to ring one after the other until they reach the phone you have access to at that particular moment. The caller doesn’t have to dial any other numbers — they’ll never know the difference.
Softphone Capabilities
Your VoIP telephone systems don’t need to be tied to traditional phones. You can run phone software on desktops, laptops, tablets, and even smartphones. If you need flexibility in answering your calls, then the softphone option is definitely one that could sway you to choose VoIP telephone systems over their alternatives.
You can have full access to all of these VoIP features from your smartphone through the corresponding app. You’re only going to get that level of mobility from a VoIP provider — otherwise, you’ll need to be chained to your desk to answer the phone.
VoIP features can change the game for your business.
The bottom line is, VoIP telephone systems can be perfect solutions for small businesses, large companies, and everyone in between. We couldn’t possibly list every single VoIP feature out there — they’re pretty much endless. However, we do feel we hit on most of the major VoIP features that will sway you to choose these solutions over antiquated telephone technology.
As you’ve seen, there are some pretty cool ways VoIP can enhance phone call experiences, but it’s so much more than that — faxing, texting, and all the other services that can keep up with your busy office and beyond.
If you need a new communications system for your office and you’re interested in trying out these VoIP features for yourself, reach out to us here at Mastor. We’d be happy to answer any questions you might have and start a conversation about how our offerings might be a good fit for your company.