Does our business need a phone system in 2024?

Does your company still need a business phone system? Before you sell all your phone system let me show you the blind spots you might miss.

In this video, I explain why your company still needs a phone system for customer experience, user experience, and management.

Want my recommendations on the best business phone systems to quote? Click the button below and ask me today.

About Me

Mike Smith has been helping companies select the best telecom, WAN, security, and cloud services since 1999. He founded AeroCom in 2003, and has been the recipient of numerous business telecommunications industry awards, including being recognized as one of the top 40 business people in tech-heavy Orange County, CA. Follow Mike on YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit and SpiceWorks.

Transcript

Funny story. I had a car that I was leasing this. Maybe five years ago or so, and the lease was coming up due. And I thought to myself, You know what? I work really close to my house. Do I really need a car? My wife’s got a car. She’s taking our kids everywhere. Everything’s local. Seems like maybe when she’s not using the car, then I can use it. Do I really need a car? And when I do need a car in a pinch, should I just be using an Uber instead of paying a monthly fee on a car? All this all this good stuff. So I thought I’d do the experiment at the time. So for a week or two, I decided, Hey, let the lease expire, turn in the car and let’s go with no car for a week or two and see if this is what I should be doing long term. Maybe times have changed and things are different right now. I can just Uber when I’m in a pinch. Well, I did that for a couple of weeks.

Turns out I needed my car

Everything was working out great. I thought I had really found a great niche until my son had to go to baseball practice and I decided, You know what? This is kind of awkward taking an Uber with all my son’s baseball gear and all that stuff. This is just too cumbersome, too hard. I got to get a larger Uber and then I’m the coach, so I have all this gear with me. I have a wagon, I have two buckets of baseballs. I have a giant baseball bag and all this stuff. You’re like, This is just and everything’s dirty. I’m doing Uber. It’s like, You know what? I don’t think this is going to work. And then there are some conflicts. And when I needed a car, my wife in the car. And so I decided, you know what? Good experiment, but overall, not a good idea.

How does that relate to you? Well, there’s a lot of companies that will call me and say, does our company really need a phone system? You know, all of our users have a cell phone, you know, So and they like using their cell phones. I don’t even think we need a phone system. That, to me is very similar to the experiment I did. And I will tell you, your company does need a phone system. And I’m going to tell you why in this video.

Save some time and just reach out and contact me for my recommendations

But first, really quick, if you’d like, my recommendation on the best cloud business phone systems, service providers, your company should be quoting. Reach out send me an email or give me a call (714.593.0011). I will help you make a better decision in a fraction of the time. And I will tell you more about that at the end of the video.

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Also, if you’d like to get one of these cool aero com hats, it’s a new era hat. Nice quality. I will send you one for free. Just stay on to the end of the video and I’m going to tell you how to get yours. Also, as always, don’t forget to like the video. Subscribe to the channel. Ring the bell. All that good stuff. I’d really appreciate it. It helps our videos get seen by more people, which motivates me to make more videos.

Why does your company need a phone system?

I’m going to tell you. Okay. So before you go out and get rid of your phone system, like the dumb thing I did, just getting rid of my car and experiencing things the hard way. Let me tell you some of the pitfalls, some of the blind spots that you might not think of, that someone like me who works in phone systems every single day sees on a regular basis. Let me tell you some of those blind spots.

Blind Spots in Customer Experience: No Zero out & Sending calls out

The first thing is, let’s talk about customer experience. With customer experience. There’s several items you want to think about.

1. First is a zero out function without a phone system, you don’t have a zero out function. So if a customer calls in and get somebody voicemail on their cell phone, they can’t zero out. They’d have to hang up the phone and call back again. How would you like that if you were that customer? That would be a pain in the butt, right?

2. Another thing, once a call is transferred, it’s gone. Kind of similar thing is a zero out, but say you transfer that call to somebody and they’re on hold for a long time. The person says, you know what, let me get to you. Hold on one second and put you on hold. Or maybe it’s ringing and ring and ring and then they zero out the ring, ring, ring. Like if your company today has a policy where they can see somebody has been sitting on hold for too long, or maybe they’re going around waiting for, you know, maybe they’re sitting in a queue for a long time on hold. You’re able to stop that and say, say, hey, nobody picked up yet. Let me let me get you somebody. So you don’t have that option if you don’t have a phone system, if you’re just transferring them out, they’re gone. You don’t even see what’s going on anymore. So you have no visibility, no way to manage any of that.

Blind Spots in Customer Experience: No Ring Groups & Call Quality/Quantity

3. Another thing to do with customer experience is that your company no longer has ring groups. So let’s say, for instance, you do set up an auto attendant somehow and you your ring group, if somebody calls in and they ask for sales and it rings, you know, some cell phones. Well, as soon as somebody cell phone voicemail picks up, it grabs that call and they get somebody’s cell phone voicemail. So they’re looking for to talk to a salesperson and they’re getting someone’s cell phone voicemail, not exactly the customer experience you want to have. If somebody is looking for customer service or sales or needs to speak to somebody, not a good customer experience, they’re.

4. And lastly, with customer experience, there’s no visibility of call quality. You have no idea what kind of call quality is going on. Cell phones are notorious for having bad call quality. So have no control over that. Right? So somebody calls in to your organization and they want somebody reputable to trust and they’re talking to somebody whose calls going in and out and drops. So they obviously know that your company is being cheap on the phone system. And that’s not exactly the customer experience they’re looking for.

Blind Spots in User Experience: No visibility

So now let’s talk about the user experience from your employees. So the people working inside your organization, what’s it going to be like without a phone system?

1. So the first thing, the first blind spot they’re going to have is that they have no visibility of anyone in the company. A big feature nowadays with phone systems is you can see everybody’s availability. You can see if they’re on the phone, you can see if they’re out of the office. It’s called presence. Well, without a phone system, you have no visibility. All you have is your cell phone. So you don’t know who’s on the phone. You don’t know who’s out of the office today. You don’t know who’s in a meeting. You have no visibility. You don’t know who’s on lunch. So it’s trial and error, right? You’re having to call people. You get voicemail. You’re like, well, are they in the office or are they just sending me to voicemail? Are they in a meeting? So maybe I should call them five times in a row. You think that other employee wants to be called five times in a row by everybody trying to get that person, trying to just birddog them, to get them to answer the phone when they’re in a meeting? No. So the user experience is going to suffer. They’re tremendously.

Blind Spots in User Experience: No Consultative Transfer

2. Second is there’s no consultative transfer. So if you’re transferring calls to somebody, voicemail or sorry, transferring your call to somebody within the organization, you can’t before you transfer, go, Hey, this is so-and-so on the phone from ABC Software. Is this somebody that you’d like to speak with? They don’t even have that option. It’s just everything is a blind transfer. So all calls are going to get transferred to employees blindly so that employee has no heads up of who’s coming in on the call. And I know your executive team is not going to like that.

Blind Spots in User Experience: Personal & Work Life Balance

3. Lastly, when it comes to user experience, there’s very little separation. Without a phone system, there’s very little separation between work life and personal life. So everybody just has their cell phone, you know? Are you just going to give everybody a business cell phone? So now they have two cell phones? Well, that’s not going to work. So maybe you’re just using the one cell phone for work and personal, but there’s no real separation because it’s their cell phone number. So their friends and family are calling their cell phone number and business is calling their cell phone number and businesses texting in personal or texting them, leaving voicemails. How do you have any separation there of like, hey, this is my personal cell phone number and you’re texting me at all hours of the day or calling me all hours of the day. It just it’s not a healthy environment for your employees. You want to give your employees some time off, some some escape from work or they don’t have to, you know, be on their best behavior. Okay. Let me answer the phone a certain way and let me make sure I text back in a certain amount of time. We’re on to lose business and things like that. So we all know that giving employees some separation between work life and personal life is just healthy.

Blind Spots for Companies

Okay. Lastly, I want to talk about company problems that are going to rise up

1. So without a phone system, you’re giving out all your employees are giving out their personal cell phones, cell phone numbers to customers. Well, for salespeople within your organization, what happens if that salesperson goes to a competitor? And that customer has gotten used to placing orders by calling that cell phone number all the time. Well, now they’re going to be calling your old employee who’s. Now working at your competitor. So it’s very easy for salespeople to take customers with them. If they move from company to company. Definitely not something that your company wants to do.

2. Secondly, from a management perspective, from your company, there’s no way of tracking calls, so there’s no way of from an H.R. standpoint, being able to record calls, being able to see a call history. When is this person made a call? How often have they made a call? Who did they receive a call from? There’s no tracking of any of that. There’s no tracking of your marketing. So if you do some marketing, you don’t know how many people are calling in off of that marketing campaign. There’s no way of managing your salespeople of outbound calls. So there’s no tracking from an H.R. standpoint, from a sales standpoint, from a marketing standpoint, management, any of that. There’s no way of tracking any of it.

3. Lastly, kind of what I touched on earlier, there’s just an overall lack of communication within the organization because without a phone system, it’s so difficult to communicate with one another that employees will just stop communicating.

Still Confused? Reach out and contact me

So that’s it. Those are the pitfalls that I see right out of the gate from not having a phone system. So when you ask yourself, should we even do we even need a phone system? That’s what I would say right out of the gate. Don’t be like me and decide to get rid of something and have to learn the hard way. Listen to those items and see if those apply to you. Hey, if I missed any. Leave them in the comments down below. I’d love to hear it.

All right. So as I mentioned earlier, if you’d like my recommendation on the best cloud business phone system service providers that your company should be quoting. Reach out. Send me an email. Give me a call (714.593.0011). I’d love to give you my advice. I’ve been a broker in this industry for over 20 years, so I work with all the major cloud phone system vendors out there. And based on your companies requirements, I can tell you there’s a specific handful that I’d recommend that are going to be a particularly good fit for your organization. Reach out and contact me I’d love to ask you a few questions and give you that advice. And I will tell you which companies have a good reputation, which have a bad reputation. I will introduce you to the right salespeople to work with at those organizations. I will also oversee the quoting process to make sure you get the best pricing.

And oh, by the way, my service for my broker service, I don’t charge you or your company anything. So the company, the service providers pay me my broker fees. There’s absolutely no excuse not to at least reach out and see what I have to say.

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