Auto Attendants

Auto Attendants

Auto Attendants allow your calls to be automatically answered for you 24/7, giving you time to focus on your business without having to manage incoming call routing. 

 


Professionalism & Consistency

Auto Attendants is a flexible and powerful feature that serves as a ‘virtual receptionist’ for incoming callers. Using our Auto Attendant enforces your businesses rules for handling incoming calls.  It also provides a higher level of consistency to your customer's experience when interacting with your business and delivers that same level of quality to all callers flawlessly, regardless of time, day or volume of calls.

How Auto Attendants Work:

  • When callers dial into your business, they’re presented with a custom main greeting. This greeting can be personally recorded by a member of your staff or professionally recorded by one of our voice-over partners.
  • The caller is then presented with options that allow them to reach the appropriate person, department, or extension based on their selections.
  • Once the caller makes their selections, they are placed on-hold. While waiting, callers are presented with on-hold music, product information or even answers to frequently asked questions.
  • While on hold, the system delivers the call to the employee or group of employees best suited to handle the caller's request.  

Time of Day Routing

MyOffice PBX Auto Attendants can manage the routing of your incoming calls differently based on the time of the day, holiday schedules or any other event that might impact your business operations. For example, you might have one auto attendant during business hours that provides options to reach customer service, billing or technical support, while, after business hours, you have another auto attendant that offers voicemail or recorded product information. You can even choose to route emergency calls to the cell phone or home phone of the employee responsible for handling after hours callers.

Custom Voice Prompts for Branding & Sales Promotions

The heart of any business marketing strategy is "branding".  As a business, you know that creating a solid and consistent marketing strategy is everything. An auto attendant is typically your first chance to deliver your company's "pitch" to prospective clients.  With custom greetings, on-hold music, and messages-only extensions, you can take the opportunity to explain your product or service to clients while you have their full, undivided attention.

Online talent resources, like fiverr.com, make it fast and inexpensive to hire professional voice talent to produce creative, quality custom voice prompts. Custom recordings can also be updated continuously to help drive sales and promote new products.

Features

  • Answer multiple phone lines, and transfer calls to the appropriate department or employee 
  • Present callers with a menu of options to choose from (including submenus, if needed)
  • Transfer callers directly into a voice mailbox
  • Play pre-recorded answers to frequently asked questions
  • Play different greetings and offer different sets of options based on time-of-day, day-of-week, or holidays
  • Route calls to mobile phones or cell phones of remote workers

FAQs:

Q. Can I use my own recordings for voice prompts?
A. Yes, you can upload your own voice prompts to customize your auto attendant for your business. 

Q. Can I schedule what time an auto attendant is active for a particular day?
A. Yes, you can define what time frames are active for each day. 

Q. Can I have more than one auto attendant?
A. Yes, you can create multiple auto attendants each with their own options.

What is BYOD?

What is BYOD?

Don't throw away those old SIP phones.

In the old days of digital PBX phone systems, most vendors utilized proprietary technology for both hardware and software. This meant that if you purchased a Nortel PBX, you could forget about using your old Lucent phones. So, the decision to change PBX hardware, almost always involved a 100% forklift of the old system, including wiring. This is why, prior to VoIP, most businesses kept their office phone system for life. (Now you know why those PBX closets were always so dusty).

 

Industry standards have allowed VoIP phones to be sold independently of the PBX system they'll be attached to. In fact, thanks to VoIP technology, the phones are actually not even attached to their controlling phone system. VoIP phones communicate with their host system through the magic of Internet Protocol (the IP in VoIP). Standards like SIP (session initiation protocol) allow for the mixing and matching of PBX systems with virtually any SIP service provider or VoIP phones with virtually any VoIP phone system or Cloud PBX. The same holds true for today's VoIP phones.There are hundreds of VoIP phone vendors. Some specialize in providing the latest in features and functionality, while others concentrate on offering the lowest prices for quality products. This leaves us with options to choose the phones that best suit our particular needs, regardless of what brand PBX they'll be connecting to. Moreover, once we buy these phones, we have the option of taking them with us, if and whenever we choose to switch service providers. This is where BYOD comes in.

In the social world, you might have seen the acronym BYOB on an invitation to let you (the guest) know that the host will not be providing "spirits" at their event and that guests are welcome to bring their own. Well, the technology world, BYOD isn't much different. BYOD stands for Bring Your Own Device and simply means that a service provider is welcoming its customers to bring their own hardware to work with their service.

For example, let's say your previous service provider required that you purchase SIP phones made by Grandstream, and your new service provider offers a BYOD VoIP service. You can take the Grandstream phones with you to your new service provider and connect them to their network (as long as they are compatible with their service). This can save your business a lot of time and money, which makes it a win-win for both the customer and service provider.

Most reputable VoIP service providers have begun providing BYOD offerings. For example, IPComms' SIP Trunking service and Hosted PBX service (MyOffice PBX™) both offer BYOD capabilities, allowing customers to use the hardware they already own as a means to connect to their network and services without having to purchase new VoIP hardware. Needless to say that this drastically reduces your cost of service entry and, in most cases, gives you the ability to connect to your new service provider in minutes rather than days.

So for those of you thinking of making a change from your existing service provider to a new one, remember to ask if your new provider offers a BYOD service. It could save you a lot of time, and even better, a lot of money!

 

SIP Trunking or Hosted PBX?

What is SIP trunking?

SIP Trunking provides a business phone system access to the public phone system (PSTN). SIP Trunks allow business to use their existing business phone system rather than forklifting it for a completely VoIP based solution.  Rather than using traditional phone lines physically delivered by the local phone company, a device called a VoIP gateway is connected to the PBXs trunk port and to the public internet.  This allows the existing PBX to be connected to a SIP service provider (like IPComms) where phone services (long distance, direct dial numbers, toll free, etc.) are delivered at cost that is significantly less than traditional phone services.

  In addition, there are additional savings incurred as both voice and data are delivered on the same line.

 

Many businesses will, of course, already have PBX equipment in place. So, by simply adding SIP Trunking to this existing system, business communications are improved and costs are saved as both voice and data are carried on the same line. This, eliminates the need for any additional lines that may be used to send faxes or access the internet.

A major advantage of using SIP trunking is the ability to grow your capacity without limits and typically in real time.  However, SIP trunks typically lack the ability to deliver more advanced business phone features and relies solely on the existing PBX for most of the more advanced phone features.

What is a Cloud PBX?

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Most businesses would much rather dedicate their staff and resources to managing their customers and products rather than waste time maintaining an on-premise hardware-based PBX. A “Cloud” PBX (also known as a hosted PBX), eliminates the cost associated with the purchase of a business phone system hardware.  A Cloud solution delivers all of the advanced phone features and services to its businesses through the internet.  Typically, the only thing need by the business itself are IP enabled phones or PC based softphones.

Cloud PBXs doesn’t require investing in on-premise hardware, so PBX maintenance, software upgrades, power management, and license fees are the sole responsibility of the Cloud PBX service provider rather than the business itself.   requires frequent maintenance—and is constantly and quickly depreciating.  Service is typically activated in minutes rather than days, and the features are typically far more advanced than anything the average small to mid-sized business could afford or manage themselves.

SIP Trunking or Cloud PBX, which is right for my business?

In general, one of the main things to consider when choosing to deploy SIP trunking or a Cloud PBX is going to be whether a business has recently already invested in PBX hardware.  Businesses with no existing PBX solution will benefit far more with a Cloud PBX than with SIP trunking.  Smaller businesses, or businesses without live-in technical staff, typically do not want to bother with purchasing, installing and maintaining the hardware needed to deploy a new phone system.  In addition, businesses with existing phone systems that are severely outdated or require big-business phone features are usually much better off simply deploying a new Cloud based business phone system, rather than investing in upgrading their existing PBX hardware and software.

SIP Trunking, on the other hand, is more suited for organizations are not willing to abandon their existing hardware based PBX equipment for internal or investment reasons.  In some cases, existing PBX hardware might be integral to other business systems (e.g. accounting software, sales tools, marketing systems, etc.).  If a company is simply not in the position to scrap their existing phone system altogether, SIP trunking is better suited as a means to add the benefits and savings of VoIP to their existing PBX equipment and is typically a very quick and easy addition to make.

SIP Trunking & Cloud PBX – A Hybrid solution

Another very common and rather effective way to reap the benefits of VoIP rates and features, even if you have an existing PBX that you have no plans of getting rid of any time soon, is the deployment of both SIP trunking and Cloud based PBX services.  Cloud based systems are relatively inexpensive to deploy even at very small roll-outs.  So, adding a couple of phones with advanced Cloud features to a business that also currently also has a hardware PBX solution might be a great Segway into the Cloud.  Cloud systems can forward calls to your existing PBX, while also enabling advanced features like queuing, call recording, and automated attendants.  It could be the best of both worlds.

As you can see, SIP Trunking and Cloud PBXs have their advantages when properly paired with the right business.  Understanding their strengths and proper fit to one’s business is the best way to get the best solution.  If you need help making this decision, feel free to give us a call. We have years of experience helping businesses like yours through these decisions.