By Sky Connect on Small Business UK - Advice and Ideas for UK Small Businesses and SMEs
Around four in five of the UK’s 6m businesses are owned and managed by people working for themselves, while 4.6m have no employees at all. It’s a reality for under-resourced small business owners that they can’t be everywhere at once.
You might be out of the office meeting clients and suppliers, travelling between destinations, or otherwise occupied away from your phone. It’s easy to see how people fail to pick up, yet every missed conversation is a potential missed business opportunity.
Even businesses with ten or 20 employees don’t always have the people power they need. Desk phones ring off the hook if their owners aren’t in the building – it can be a major issue if no one is around to pass on a message.
In short, your customers, suppliers and contacts need to be able to reach you, whether you’re under the hood of a car or snipping a valued client’s hair. But you only have one pair of hands, so what is the solution?
The problem with old phones
Traditional phones work on analogue lines, while digital voice technology, known as voiceover-IP or VoIP, run via broadband internet. It’s like comparing a gramophone to streaming your favourite songs online.
Analogue phones constrain your business with limited options and functionality that covers only the bare essentials. Worse still, they are being phased out: Openreach plans to retire traditional phone lines as soon as 2025.
With VoIP, your voice is filed into packets, just like emails, and reassembled at the listener’s end. Analogue phones use a microphone and lay your voice onto tape, which connects directly to the recipient’s number.
Because VoIP phones are digital, you get more choice, more control and plenty of flexibility to field calls wherever you are in the world. No more being tethered to a desk waiting for that all-important customer to pick up the phone.
Unmissable calls
Sky Connect’s VoiceEdge phone system – included in all Sky Connect packages – delivers your calls over Sky’s digital network, giving you the chance to create efficiencies in your business communications.
It is designed with your customers in mind. Rich in features, created for small businesses, VoiceEdge lets you manage incoming and outgoing calls with ease.
With call forwarding, you can direct calls to any number, whether they are inside or outside your business, landline or mobile. When someone rings, you can elect to have it connect to all your office phones, and ring until someone answers.
It’s a brilliant way to reduce missed calls, whether you’re in the office, salon, garage or workshop. Three-way calling lets you add a third person to your conversation with the press of a button – a quick and easy way to begin a conference call.
The features come thick and fast: call waiting tells you when a new caller is trying to get through, giving you the option to either put the original conversation on hold or call them back. The simultaneous ring feature, meanwhile, not only lets anyone pick up a call, but you can set phones to ring in a certain order, if you want to prioritise a group of answerers first.
Finally, VoiceEdge helps your business grow by allowing you to add new voice lines over your existing internet connection whenever you’re ready to scale up. The new phones can be managed the same way as your existing network, or in a different way – the choice is yours.
VoIP phone systems are twenty-first century technology for businesses focused on the future. Just like smart TVs and streaming services replaced analogue services, now VoiceEdge can help you revolutionise your phone network.
Read more
When should you start thinking about installing a VoIP phone system?
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Sky Connect, Khareem Sudlow
