6 features to improve business over Christmas

Maintain professionalism and improve flexibility over Christmas

For some businesses and business owners Christmas can pose a difficult choice: continue working as normal throughout so you aren’t completely cut off from business until January; or do just that and totally switch off until the New Year.

The two choices can represent two extremes and opposites of the spectrum, with neither option being ideal.

They say that a balance and moderation are key with most things in life. Using VoIP technology, striking a work-life balance this Christmas is made simple – allowing you to enjoy deserved holiday and valuable family time whilst maintaining a professional and flexible business when called upon on.

Many of the features you get inclusive access to make achieving this easy and hassle free.

Time of Day Routing

Ordinarily customers would use this as part of their standard Monday-Friday setup. For example, opens at 9am Monday-Friday and closes at 5.30pm, whilst if they’re closed on weekends the settings would be opens Saturday and Sunday at 00:01 and closes at 00:00.

Using these ‘opens at 00:01’ and ‘closes at 00:00’ times across a consecutive set period of days, you can configure a routing plan that will execute if your business shuts for a period over Christmas. Maybe between Boxing Day and the New Year you’ll only be working half days, in which case you could set these days to something like: opens at 9am and closed from 1pm. The system even automatically has Bank Holiday settings, so for the likes of Christmas Day you need do nothing!

Call Delivery Assurance

Call Delivery Assurance ensures that when a call is forwarded to a number of different destinations it will be answered by a real person before it is connected letting them confirm if they wish to accept the call, reducing the chance of it hitting voicemail and the customer potentially disconnecting.

This is ideal if over Christmas your business has on-call days or days where staff may be expected to take the odd call whilst out of office. You could set a routing plan that will forward calls to your staff/colleagues simultaneously or one after the other, turn on CDA and if the answering party fails to accept, the call is taken back and attempted in the next step of your routing.

Call Forwarding

Forwarding your Soho66 number is a flexible and effective system for automatically diverting incoming calls to just about any other location worldwide, including a Soho66 VoIP phone, another UK landline or mobile, or even another international landline or mobile.

This allows you and your staff to work completely independent of the office, either by allowing staff to take their VoIP phone with them and plug it into the internet connection at the alternate location or by simply diverting to a designated mobile number.

Call Transfer

Soho66 supports both attended and blind Call Transfer, letting you either consult with a colleague before you transfer a call to them or send it without warning which may also be suitable in some situations.

This is an essential capability in most business environments all-year-round, but is also handy to have over a period such as Christmas. Say you allow staff to work from home and you receive a call that is better suited for a colleague to deal with. Call Transfer lets you professionally transfer the call to them just as you would at the office, without your customers knowing the difference.

Multi Route

This is essentially a branch of Call Forwarding, but what’s unique about it is it lets you forward calls to multiple destinations at the same time, whether it be internal destinations (e.g. your desk VoIP phones) or external destinations (e.g. your home landline or mobile phone).

This is a great feature to have over Christmas if you don’t really know whether you’re going to be in the office or not and just want to play it by ear, as it means you can configure calls to ring together at the same time on your VoIP telephone in the office and your mobile phone – this way you can capture the call wherever you are without having to think too much about where you’re going to be.

Call Director

Also known as IVR, Call Director, is a feature typically associated with ‘big’ businesses that makes you appear larger and more professional, but ultimately helps you improve customer satisfaction by reducing time spent manually transferring calls to different departments by automating the process.

Customers will “Press 1 for Customer Services”, before automatically being connected to someone. Whilst this is a paid add-on, Christmas could be a perfect time to trial it for your business – if it isn’t needed after, simply cancel! If you have staff that are going to be working some of the festive period and deal with individual areas of the business or specialities, this will allow customers to quickly get connected to the person best suited to handle their enquiry.