Telephone Systems Service and Customer Experience

Telephone Systems Service and Customer Experience

The success of your business may hinge on offering a high quality customer service experience. Your telephone systems service company can have a direct impact on your ability to service your customers. The latest technology in phone systems, such as cloud/hosted VoIP, premise based VoIP systems and even today's digital systems offer an impressive collection of features that will offer the best customer service operations available. Without diligent staff training, though, even the most robust collection of phone systems features will not do you any good. Office Telesystems offers a thorough training experience after your systems installation to allow you to maximize the benefits available in your investment.

Training staff to operate telephone systems features, including customer service integration, are important training topics. While basic etiquette is a requirement for anyone operating phones, there are advanced training topics that can take customer service agents from good to excellent. Their performance will directly reflect the customer satisfaction your business needs to offer in order to stay competitive.

Because auto-attendants can do so much of the call answering for administrative staff, they are at risk of losing the best phone manners in their greeting. Customers can begin to feel quantity of calls is more important than quality. Training administrative staff for short but properly worded greetings with a friendly customer service voice will help retain a warm customer oriented phone experience.  

Basic phone etiquette topics might seem remedial for some staff members, but it is amazing how many basic manners are ignored in a busy office environment. Some rules that should be reviewed during your telephone system training should at least lightly assess those topics. Some of these rules would be to refrain from eating or chewing gum while on the phone. Another important topic is how to hang up the phone properly. When operators, administrators, or customer service agents set the phone into its cradle firmly, many customers feel as if they were rudely hung up on.

An effective exercise for telephone systems service customer experience training is to practice active listening skills. Staff that can respond effectively in a variety of customer service situations will create winning situations for your business. Make sure they know the proper procedure for always asking permission before they place someone on hold and show appreciation for customers that have had to hold during a phone call. You may also have specific questions that you want every customer service agent to ask callers or information they need to relay. Including those items in training and practicing, those items will assure that your staff is going to help your business reputation grow for great customer and client experiences.

Office Telesystems understands that you have the very latest and best in telephone system technology in your office, but if it is not properly utilized and your staff is not properly trained, your investment will provide a fraction of its worth. Contact one of our expert sales representatives today to learn more about our products and services. 844 544 4900 toll free, or call 972 484 4900 or 817 529 1700. You can also visit our website at www.officetelesystems.com.

QoS and VoIP, Why Is It So Important?

QoS and VoIP: Why Is It So Important?

Internet service has many functions in today's world. Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), in many cases, uses the same bandwidth you may be using for visiting websites, downloading files, email and more. When these functions happen simultaneously, it can slow down your internet speed, and you could even drop VoIP calls.

Quality of Service (QoS) is technology's answer to that issue. On data networks, QoS is a feature that allows certain types of traffic to take priority over others. With this, QoS is vital in today's VoIP-driven office environment, as some types of phone or video calls over your internet service require the need to take priority over others.
The type of behaviors that are given priority can vary greatly, depending on the organizations setting the rules. At Office Telesystems, all VoIP systems, including multi office VoIP solutions require QoS enabled networks to ensure the quality call and video traffic.

Data networks weren't originally built to handle voice traffic, due to the nature of packet transportation that takes place. As mentioned, QoS allows an organization to decide what traffic take highest priority.
For VoIP or video calling, you should have voice calls set as top priority to ensure calls are not dropped due to increased internet traffic in your office. Without QoS, offices can suffer from poor voice and video conferencing quality.

Which Factors Affect Call Quality?

There are three major factors affecting call quality over a VoIP system.

• Latency - This refers to the slight delay in packet delivery. Callers generally report round-trip voice delays of 250 milliseconds or more.
• Jitter - Because of unpredictable changes in a network, there can be a variation in the delay of packet receipt, which can lead to dropout.
• Packet Loss - Also known as Data Loss, packet loss can be caused by high congestion. The result is degradation in audio quality.

How to Improve Your QoS

There are some things your business can do to improve your VoIP phone systems call quality, starting with checking with your ISP (internet service provider) to make sure you have the best plan possible.
A high-quality Internet connection is essential to the quality of your VoIP calls. You may find it necessary to change to a new provider if your current one doesn't offer a plan that can handle the daily transfer load.

• Check Your Router - First, make sure you have a QoS-enabled router and, if not, get a new one right away. If you have an existing router that supports QoS and it's not enabled, you should enable it immediately.
• Improve Your Contention Ratio - The contention ratio refers to the number of users configured to use each unit of data capacity. You want this ratio to be as low as possible—a 5:1 ratio means only five users are sharing one unit of data capacity, while a 50:1 ratio creates a much greater strain.
• Limit Use During Important Calls - In larger organizations, this obviously isn't a possibility, but for smaller businesses and startups, it can be a great solution. When an important VoIP call or video conference is scheduled, ask everyone to refrain from high-bandwidth activities like streaming video or uploading large files.

Quality of Service is an important issue to businesses that rely on their networks for a VoIP system, whether cloud VoIP or a multi office premise based VoIP system. As VoIP continues to replace traditional telephony in businesses, a top-quality, QoS-enabled VoIP design is more important than ever. By ensuring you have a QoS enabled router, a business can ensure its VoIP system is optimized to handle its daily voice traffic.

If you are looking for a cloud VoIP system (hosted) or premise based VoIP system for your one office or more, see our Products page on our website and request a quote, or simply call (972) 484 4900 or (817) 529-1700. Toll free (844) 544 4900.

Managed PoE Network Switches and VLAN. VoIP Essentials!

Network Switches for VoIP, VLAN Tagging

When implementing a cloud or premise based VoIP system in a single or multi office environment, utilize managed PoE network switches with VLAN for VoIP network integration. These managed PoE network Switches are used for creating VLAN tagging with a VoIP phone system.With VLANs, you can separate network traffic (such as VoIP and standard network traffic) and users for specific reasons such as applying different security or policies to different VLANs or groups of users. For VoIP, there are specific benefits in separating data and voice traffic on the network. One benefit is that QoS can be applied to the voice traffic via VLAN tagging (also see our QoS blog). VLAN tags are used to provide high priority to voice packets. Using a VLAN for VoIP also prevents VoIP devices from competing with other traffic on the network, helping to avoid delays in delivering voice packets and providing maximum quality on VoIP calls. A VoIP VLAN also makes it easier to troubleshoot VoIP issues since the VoIP traffic is isolated. This practice should be implemented for both cloud VoIP and premise based VoIP phone systems.

We recommend that our customers consult their own IT staff or vendor about the best way to implement VoIP technology and how it will impact the existing network infrastructure. Contact Office Telesystems for more information at (972) 484-4900 in Dallas and (817) 529-1700 in Tarrant County. Toll Free (844) 544 4900.

www.officetelesystems.com