Author: Adela Radu

Hosted PBX is an IP PBX hosted in a data centre, with only the terminals (extensions or phones) at the customer’s end, and which can be accessed via a friendly interface.

Choosing a cloud phone system is a good decision not only for new companies buying a phone system, but also for those who already own a PBX. A hosted PBX can bring significant savings in call management, maintenance and costs, so moving to a cloud IP system should be the obvious choice for any company.

Main advantages of Hosted PBX solutions:

1. No up-front costs: you can invest nothing in equipment, which translates into significant savings for the company; the switchboard is hosted in a data centre and you can use software on your PC or mobile phone for dialling.
2. No maintenance, upkeep, repairs: with the disappearance of the equipment, the related activities and costs disappear, as well as the downtime caused by breakdowns.
3. Go green: environmental care is a must for modern business; cloud technology means no wires and equipment at the customer’s location, so less waste and less energy consumed
4. Free 24/7 monitoring: you don’t need hired or contracted staff to monitor, configure and repair equipment, hosted pbx providers generally provide 24/7 monitoring and real-time intervention by qualified staff at no extra charge.
5. Scalability, changes, instant move: increasing or decreasing the number of interiors, changes in configuration, moving from one location to another are done almost instantaneously and do not require service interruption.
6. Mobility: mobile VoIP allows you to connect to the switchboard from anywhere in the world and from any internet-connected device (PC, mobile phone, tablet, IP phone); you can have your landline phone with you anywhere and anytime.
7. Integration and upgrade: most Hosted PBX solutions allow API (application programming interface) integration, which makes it possible to customize the phone system and integrate it with the company’s CRM (customer base); rapid technological evolution does not require the purchase of newer equipment or additional software because you will always have at your disposal the latest solutions on the market.

Hosted PBXs can be the optimal solution for both corporations and small and medium-sized businesses. See for yourself

I kept thinking about whether to write this article from the perspective of the customer or the service provider and realized that there are no major differences. The existence of a queue is obviously a source of stress for both. In fact, studies have been done on the psychological impact that time spent in the queue has on customers and the results can provide valuable information to companies trying to improve customer interaction.

The century of speed, the age of services, the consumer society are some of the phrases that describe the world we live in and make us understand that today everyone wants more and faster and the challenge for companies to serve the expectations of their customers has led to the creation of a discipline in itself: Customer Flow Management (Customer Flow Management) orQueue Management.

There are many researches and studies, many papers written on this topic and they aim both at understanding the process itself by dividing it into stages and types of queues, at understanding the customer perception and the psychological processes involved, as well as at finding the most efficient methods to address queues in order to reduce time and to make the employee-customer interaction more efficient. Queues differ in type (physical queues and telephone queues, queues for purchasing products/services/accessing information/problem solving, etc.) and dividing them into categories helps us to better understand the area of interest as queue “behaviour” differs according to many criteria.

I will continue to refer to telephone queue, and because we are all customers for various companies it is impossible not to have been asked at least once to wait in line either to be picked up or to be given an answer to the question or problem raised. I have yet to meet a single person who is happy to be in a queue but before we throw stones we need to understand what they are, how they work and why these queues exist.

What is a telephone queue?
Queuing is a feature of telephone exchanges that allows more calls to be taken than available operators and kept on the line until they can be picked up.

Reasons for the queue

1. Availability and consideration

Queuing allows callers to wait until they are picked up by an operator if everyone is busy at the time of the call; if the company you are calling does not have a queue and the person(s) answering the number are already engaged in other calls, you get a busy tone and have to call again and again until a line is free. Another big disadvantage of not having a queue is that you have no control over when you’ll get through to them, as a first-time caller may get a free line just as you’re getting ready to call for the nth time.

If the company’s phone system is integrated with the CRM (customer database), when you are picked up the operator already has your history (services/products accessed, past interactions) in front of them, so explanations are considerably reduced.

Reporting and evaluation

The existence of a queue allows companies to have detailed reports about callers: how many people call in a given time, which are the busiest hours, how long they wait on average until the call is answered, which makes it possible to optimize the timetable and the allocated workforce so that you, as a customer, are better and faster served. The reports also allow an evaluation of the employees: how many calls they take during the working hours, the average duration of the calls, allowing over time to increase the quality of the employees and thus a better service for you.

How to make waiting bearable

When you are engaged in an unpleasant activity it seems to take forever but if you do what you like time passes very quickly. There is quite a big difference between real time and perceived time and serious companies use various techniques to make the time their customers spend waiting as efficient as possible. Many of the techniques can only be applied to physical queues (TV monitors or magazines placed in waiting areas, various activities that can be undertaken while waiting, etc) but there are solutions for telephone queues too:
-classically, music was used during the waiting time but recent studies show that music, used excessively, can increase the caller’s stress level
-you can be informed about new promotions or new events of the company you call
-there are also more creative solutions: a sports club runs, during the waiting period, the highlights of the previous week’s matches (in one memorable incident a customer shouted to the operator, when he was picked up, to put him back on hold because he was about to score the favourite team)
-it’s known that a wait with no time horizon is perceived as longer than one where you know from the beginning how long it will take and this can be solved very elegantly by queuing: you are told how many times you are in line and how long it will take; a time horizon is also necessary if you are asked to wait until you get an answer to a question or a solution to a problem: if the wait is prolonged it is mandatory that the operator takes you off hold and informs you of the reason for the prolonged wait.

Together with an IVR (interactive voice response), a queue can revolutionise the way a company’s customers are treated. The answering machine can take simple and repetitive calls (e.g. where and how to pay the bill, what are the opening hours and address, or any other repetitive question that has a simple answer) so that customers who really need to reach the operator can wait less. By having this IVR in place you can see the load at department level and you can supplement people exactly where they are needed. Calls can also be recorded for future reference.

On top of that, if you call a company where an answering machine answers and you end up waiting in a queue, be glad; the discomfort of the moment is, in the medium and long term, in your best interest and indicates that the company you are talking to is interested in offering you a quality service.

If you are an entrepreneur and do not yet have a queue
contact us
.

An increasingly popular concept in business circles, the cloud market is booming although still at the beginning of its journey. With such a large number of IT specialists in Romania, it is expected that the evolution will be rapid and the market will quickly understand and adopt such solutions that can help companies of any size enormously.

“In cloud adoption it’s all about business. You always have to look at the three performance indicators: growth, cost and efficiency. The problem is that companies in the region are looking at the cloud as a technology thing which is wrong, it should start from the business. In Western Europe it’s different because people start from the business, but it all depends on who runs the IT department. The IT director talks to the CEO, and some of them see the cloud as business and some as technology. If they still think of the cloud as a technology they won’t have arguments in front of management and everything gets stuck,” Ana Radosevic, Hewlett-Packard’s cloud segment manager for Southeast Europe, told Wall-Street.ro.

The term cloud covers a wide field, from cloud computing to a suite of applications accessible without owning equipment on the company’s premises, and is experiencing an exponential evolution of solutions that can be implemented in the day-to-day activity of a company; for large companies it can mean a significant reduction in costs and for small companies it allows access to services that previously could not be accessed, as their cost was prohibitive.

“Installing a business solution on a cloud platform has the following advantages: lower total investment, flexibility (you can choose the features you want), low cost (you pay for what and how much you use), fast deployment, security, mobility (it can be accessed from anywhere a Wi-Fi network is accessible, on any device that has a web browser installed). Compared to Romania, where cloud installations for SMEs are still few, the trend in the region is that business solutions, such as ERP, for example, are presented exclusively as requiring a cloud installation” said Liviu Buligan, Executive Manager SoftOne Romania for Wall-Street.ro.

The extremely rapid technological evolution of recent years is not easy to follow even for specialists, so it is no wonder that legislation is not keeping pace. Rapid alignment of legislation is a necessity if the adoption of cloud solutions is not to be blocked and SMEs’ access to such services is to be facilitated; ultimately this is to the benefit of the end consumer, leading to increased competition in the market.

“We’re living in a time when you’re going to see IT change radically. If until some time ago IT was less important and everything was based on on-premises infrastructure, […] now we are going to see an extremely strong change, everything is going to go to the cloud area.[…]By 2020, about 45% of IT companies’ budgets will be spent on cloud services. […] The cloud may sound fancy, and at a conceptual level I can agree with that. But the cloud is like a one-way street, and there is no turning back. Sooner or later this will happen. I think the Romanian market is a raw one, but one that understands this concept well. We are facing problems in the local market related to legal issues, […] risk management issues and issues related to national and European legislation that are not keeping pace with the speed at which technology is developing. It is clear that the big global companies will implement this cloud concept faster and then roll it out to all the branches in the countries where they operate. Once adopted at headquarters level, it is clear that they will eventually reach Eastern Europe and, including Romania”, said Dan Popa, Virtualization and Cloud Lead of Microsoft Romania, to Business Magazin.

learn more about Hosted PBX

 

Last year I was looking for a company in town to make me some custom shaped business cards, not rectangular, but cut in a certain shape. I search on the net for companies and then I pick up the phone and start calling. I was horrified by the way the first contact with a potential client was handled. I called about 10 companies and on the other end of the line I was greeted with “Hello”, “Yes” or even silence. In a few cases I was answered with the company name and hello and in one case I was answered with the company name, the name of the person on the phone and hello.

I relate below one of the interactions that stuck in my mind and unfortunately it was not the only one that made me understand that terms such as “customer satisfaction”, “quality of customer interaction”, etc. are still quite alien to a part of the local business environment, despite the fact that they are talked about everywhere.

Optimistic by nature, I tell myself that it may just be a cop-out, that maybe I didn’t hear it, so I make sure I’m calling the right place: “Company X?” A young lady replies, “Yes, go ahead,” obviously annoyed that I’m kidnapping them ahead of time and not getting straight to the point. I start to explain what I would be interested in, leaving pauses to confirm that she hears me and understands what I am saying; unfortunately the young lady was not too keen to fill these pauses so I have to ask “Hello, can you hear me?”. “Yes, I’m listening,” she tells me dryly, as music blares loudly in the background (a mix of popular music and manele, not very good for business, I think). I finish explaining and quickly get a “Yes, we do”.

I had already called four firms who had turned me down so you can understand my surprise at hearing her response and the need to make sure we were on the same page: me, glad: “Are you sure? Don’t get me wrong but I’ve already been turned down by a few firms and I’m glad to finally find someone who can help me. “The young lady doesn’t seem to share my joy, so I say: “How do you do it? How much does it cost?” The answer came as fast and dry as the previous ones: “Send us the model you want by email and the prices are on the website”. Disappointed, I realise that he didn’t understand anything and start again with the slower explanations and how clearly I understood, thinking that maybe I wasn’t coherent enough the first time. I can hear her screaming at someone: “Hey, can we make business cards in a shape other than rectangular?”. I don’t hear what she’s being told but she informs me: “Send by email and we will reply”.
You can imagine how eager I was to continue the conversation so I say a thank you, she says goodbye without any other closing words and hangs up.

I make a few more calls still no success, I had one offer and no comparison. I’m thinking that it doesn’t take me long to send the request by email, who knows, maybe I’ve come across a very new or weaker employee, after all, I don’t judge the whole company by one employee so I’m writing. The response I get within minutes politely informs me that they only make classic business card designs. I was totally surprised by the wording: “As we spoke on the phone… “considering that the email was signed by a man and I had clearly spoken to a woman, just to put the icing on the cake.

Fortunately, I also have examples of pleasant experiences as a customer of some companies and it is always the people, the employees you come into contact with, who make the difference. I have yet to meet a contractor or company director who doesn’t want happy customers, but what they do to make sure that happens…that’s another story altogether.

When you run a company, you can’t leave it to chance or luck the quality with which your clients or potential clients are treated. You need to make sure that each employee is clear about the standard you want them to perform to and consistently measure that this standard is maintained. There are plenty of tools and firms offering advice in the market and some are within the reach of any firm, regardless of size and budget.

A very effective and affordable tool in increasing the quality of customer interaction is the company’s telephone system; modern systems include many features that you can use, properly configured the telephone system can be a goldmine in trying to have an interaction that generates trust and demonstrates professionalism:
– Greeting message: a customer often makes their first impression of a company by the way they are answered on the phone: affectionate or icy, polite or dry, with simplistic or elevated language; the greeting message achieves this first contact at the same quality standard on every call.
– Promotional messaging: a free and easy-to-implement method of making a promotion, event or important information known to anyone who calls a company, either immediately after greeting or while waiting to be picked up by an employee
– Call transfer: for customers who call and do not reach the person they are looking for, it is annoying to be asked to hang up and call again; it is totally unprofessional to shout for a colleague to come to the phone or to run with the phone to the next office; call transfer means for the customer a help, saving time and money, and for the company an image gain and the elimination of the risk of losing a potential customer who might not come back with a second call.
– Follow-me: if a customer needs to get in touch with a specific employee and the employee has field work, with the follow-me function the caller will follow him wherever he goes (he can have an extension set directly on his mobile phone); for the customer this means interest and availability from the company.
– Queueing: which removes the annoying busy tone; a potential customer is willing to call back a number that rings busy a maximum of 2-3 times, after which they usually give up, and an existing customer quickly turns into an unhappy customer if they can’t easily get in touch with someone to solve a potential problem
– IVR, hourly routing: interactive answering system, popular answering machine, which invites you to press a certain key either for the department or person you are looking for, or for a certain information; in addition, it can be set to play another message outside office hours
– Call recording, whisper&barge-in: calls can be recorded for further consultation or for employee training and evaluation, a call in progress can be listened to and support can be provided to the employee without hearing the caller,
see dedicated article
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– Voicemail to email: if a customer leaves a voicemail message it immediately arrives as a file to the desired email
– Callback: if you have a website you are interested in facilitating access to visitors and to turn them into customers as quickly as possible; the callback button asks the visitor to leave the phone number, and the switchboard instantly calls an employee, when he answers, the switchboard calls the customer and the connection is made practically in a few seconds, being a free call for the latter.
– Internal chat: by improving collaboration between employees you ensure that customer issues are dealt with more quickly and efficiently,
see dedicated article.

learn about Optivoice solutions

Optivoice has become a distributor of Polycom, the pioneering American company in the production of videoconferencing equipment for companies: distributor Polycom

The partnership with Polycom was aimed at completing the range of products offered by Optivoice with top solutions. Polycom is recognized for the quality of its IP products: HD phones, videophones, Microsoft Lync compatible equipment, audio and video conferencing equipment, and more.

At the moment our customers can choose between the products of four major manufacturers:

1. Polycom – the world’s leading manufacturer of conference equipment
2. Grandstream – best value for money
3. Tiptel – German technology
Yealink – performance accessible to all

More information about Polycom can be found on the official website www.polycom.com.ro

A few years ago, when we returned from maternity leave at the corporation where we worked, we found out that we had a new tool: an internal communicator. I looked with a dose of scepticism at first at this new tool that I didn’t find useful: we only worked in telecom, we had mobile and landline phones at our disposal and we could talk on them at any time, we had e-mail, we had a lot of applications that we had to open in the morning, to remember their passwords…why another headache?

I was soon to realize how wrong I was and how quickly this means of communication had become my favourite, with visible and rapid effects on the productivity of the team I was working with. I’ll tell you what I’m referring to in a moment, but first I’d like to explain a bit about it for those who are not familiar with it.

Instant messaging (IM) is a form of real-time text communication between two or more people in a digital network. The popular name is chat and most people who use a computer and more recently a smartphone have at least once used some form of communicator (chat), the most popular being Skype, Yahoo Messenger, WhatsApp and many others. According to factbrowser.com by 2016 almost 1.5 billion people will be using instant messaging on their mobiles.

When it comes to using the communicator in the workplace, there are dedicated solutions other than those mentioned above for two reasons:
1. being an INTERNAL communicator, it excludes discussions with friends, relatives, acquaintances…which are not related to the performance of the activity and which rather contribute to the decrease of the employees’ productivity.
2. it integrates with the company’s existing telephone system and comes with some additional features (it can also allow you to initiate/receive internal calls or transfer files quickly for example)

A better customer experience

Returning to my story now, let me tell you in what situations we use the communicator and how it has helped us as a team. Have I already told you that we work in a corporation, with several workplaces in the country and abroad, with several departments and therefore thousands of employees? I used to work in a shop, in constant contact with customers. The staff was often insufficient compared to the influx of customers, so the main concern as a team was to streamline the “downtime”: with going to the back to bring a product, to check if something is still in stock, to ask a question you don’t know the answer to or to call the head office to ask for help, etc…These situations were drastically reduced, all people had to do was to quickly write on the communicator and in a few seconds they had the answer. Not to mention how elegantly customer requests were handled.

It has proven very useful for new people, who at first contact with customers had more questions than answers and it would have been unpleasant to call the customer face to face to ask for help or to talk to the customer several times in the same conversation to find the right answer.

Better collaboration between employees

Being integrated with the employee database, the moment you needed to contact a colleague in another department or location and you didn’t know their exact name anymore, it was very easy to reach them.

The attendance indicator was the gold mine. We knew at any time the status of the person we were looking for: in the office, out, in a meeting/conference, free, etc. so we saved a lot of time with the phones: “I’m not in the office, call me later”, “I’m in a meeting, call my office mate”, etc…sometimes you had to make 2-3 calls before you managed to solve something, but with the presence indicator we were on target.

If I had something urgent to communicate to the team, the communicator was the only way my message could reach them quickly and be read by everyone.

If I was engaged in a phone call, conference or meeting and people urgently needed an approval or a response, the communicator was the lifesaver; they no longer had to travel to see if I was available and/or wait for me to clear.

 

Advantages over email:

The idea is that, by its very nature, the communicator encourages people to be brief and to the point, unlike email, where the conversation is usually more formal and sending the email and waiting for a reply is more time consuming. A big advantage over email is that you can have multiple windows open with different people or groups that you can address simultaneously.

Advantages over the phone:

There are studies that show that people are much more relaxed in a chat conversation than in a phone call and so the communicator can become a very good tool to improve collaboration between employees, especially if they are in different locations. Employees also reported better concentration on tasks, since they can better control interruptions; when you have something urgent to finish and you get 2-3 calls in a row you can either answer (and risk not finishing on time), answer and rush the caller (which can damage working relationships), or not answer at all (which increases the chances of the same person calling n times in a few minutes); with the communicator you can set your status to “busy” and thus make sure you get rid of unwanted interruptions. In addition, conversations are confidential and you don’t risk reaching the wrong “ears”.

Of course, email and telephone retain their usefulness in many other situations and employees need to choose the best method of communication for the particular situation they face. But being integrated with the PBX, you can easily change the communication method (message, send file, call inside, email) using one tool: an app on your computer or smartphone.

Bottom line: instant messaging is yet another component of unified communications and cloud PBXs that can fuel increased productivity and collaboration among employees and provide the customers of the company you run/work for with a much improved experience. Communicator is by far the fastest and easiest way to communicate, and a study conducted by Ohio State University and California State University confirms that companies that have adopted internal chat solutions have reported productivity gains.

Optivoice solutions incorporate internal chat with presence indicator, instant messaging, file transfer and internal dialling.

 

Companies and institutions in Romania are starting to realize the importance of having a contact center, a call center, for their clients; at the same time, worldwide there is a growing trend to outsource services of this kind and for them the Romanian market is increasingly attractive because it offers a well-trained workforce, very good foreign language speakers and at a low price.
Invited to an event organised by Business Magazin, Vladimir Sterescu, CGS Romania, said, “Romania is gradually becoming for many technology providers a market that they are starting to look more and more to in recent years. The market is developing, there are more and more companies, even state institutions, that have invested in recent years and are still investing in support centres. In our experience, a distinction needs to be made between the basic features of a support centre and the new ones that are coming onto the market.”
According to the same daily, Bucharest has started to overtake other central and eastern European capitals, such as Sofia and Budapest, but we are still far behind the Czech Republic and Poland. The state is starting to recognise the contact centre industry, and since the end of 2012 the authorities have been giving subsidies to those who create jobs in the support area.
Call center communication solutions can be deployed either on-premise or in the cloud. Studies show that in the US, 70% of activity is already in the cloud, and globally the percentage reaches 50%. In Romania, the cloud is still at the beginning of the road but it is good that there are already companies that come with cloud solutions to meet customers open to new technologies with all the advantages they bring.
Vital in choosing a communication system for a customer service is the reporting and monitoring part. In addition to the classic functions: IVR, queues, personalized messages, hourly routing, call transfer, etc. without which a call center cannot fulfill its mission, real-time user-level activity reports, call recording, whisper&barge-in functions make it possible to prepare and evaluate the sales force/customer relations and monitor the quality of the employee-customer interaction.
The major advantage of cloud solutions is that they are evolutionary systems, not static; they can incorporate the latest technologies, given the dizzying evolution of software and solutions worldwide. A cloud system grows with you and allows you to always be in the market without having to change your system every time a better solution comes along.

find together with Optivoice a suitable structure for your call-center

One of the major advantages of a modern communications system is evident in the case of companies with multiple workplaces. The fact that you can have a single telephone switchboard that unifies all these locations also contributes a lot to reducing costs and streamlining communication and collaboration between employees in different locations. If you opt for the cloud-based PBX option, the cost reduction and efficiency increase even more; Hosted PBX solutions often include instant messaging, fast file transfer, conferencing and more.

These points of work can all be linked to the same phone number or can be assigned individual numbers; this can be especially useful for points of work in other cities or even other countries (for which international numbers can be assigned), where it is important to have a local number when calling customers/collaborators in the area.

Example: In the case of a company based in Sibiu and working in Germany, communication between the two interiors will be free and unlimited, thus eliminating the costs of international calls. The German point of work can be assigned a German number on which to receive local calls (from customers or suppliers in Germany, so that they are charged normal national rates) and can call them by displaying that German number; at the same time it can also be assigned a Romanian number to call and/or receive calls from/on that number.

 

 

 

 

contact the Optivoice team for a Hosted PBX solution that suits your business

 

Even if it seems that this year Romania has lost 3 more places in the top of the countries with the fastest internet, according to a report published by Bloomberg, we are still on an honourable 6th place, being surpassed by Israel and some Asian countries, traditionally situated on the first places.

Good internet speed is not the only thing that puts us in the top, but also the number of specialists in the field. In Romania there are 64,000 certified IT specialists, placing us on the 1st place in the European Union and 6th in the world in the number of specialists per capita, says the American research company Gartner Inc. Many large IT companies are attracted to Romania by the quality of the workforce and the low cost, among them: IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Intel.

A top ranking that does us less credit is that of cyber attacks in which we rank 9th at the end of 2013, according to a study by Akamai Technologies Inc. But authorities are making efforts to lure hackers to the other side of the law.

The large number of software specialists and the good internet speeds offered in the country, the launch of 4G internet and the expansion of wi-fi hotspots are suitable ingredients for the proliferation of applications and software; practically, there are all the prerequisites for the rapid adoption of new technologies, the move to IP telephony with its major advantages being in the very near horizon the logical solution that companies of all sizes will adopt.

Learn more about Optivoice IP solutions

Whisper & barge-in are some of the lesser known features of PBXs, used until recently only by the customer services of large companies are now accessible to companies of any size, can be incorporated into Hosted PBX solutions and thus substantially reduce the cost of accessing them.

In translation, they mean “whisper” or “interrupt” and they do just that. A manager or supervisor can listen in on ongoing employee calls with customers and intervene during the call in different ways:
-to be heard only by the employee, the “whisper” function
-likes to be heard neither by the employee nor the customer, just to listen, “barge-in” function

The functions are very useful for customer service or sales teams, but not only. While the reports may be very good quantitative indicators, they do not say much about the quality of the work. These functions allow an evaluation of the quality of the employees’ interaction with the outside world (customers, suppliers, collaborators) and the real-time correction of any erroneous information transmitted to them. In the case of new employees they can be used as effective training tools and support in the first days of work.

Optivoce Hosted PBX solution offers whisper and barge-in features; learn more directly from us