This is a guest post by Sachin
Phone systems aren’t just phones any more. With e-commerce and phone sales, they’re now very much a part of doing real business, and real accounts work. Best practice small business accounting is now evolving a real need to mesh with phone sales and other accounts management work. This is a natural evolution, but the interesting thing is that phone accounts management is also easily matched to basic small business bookkeeping principles.
The other natural development is that telephone systems now require a good system design to fit the phone operations in line with business systems. Fortunately for businesses, a new, simple and streamlined approach to phone system management has been developed that solves all these problems.
The new business phone systems:
You may have wondered about the old phone systems and their apparent complexity and the obvious difficulties of engaging them with modern business systems. The story is pretty predictable- There are two basic problems in using the old style phone systems:
• The old phone systems are based, believe it or not, on pre-digital technology. Some of the “new” systems still carry the vestiges of the old analogue systems, and that’s one of the reasons they’re so useless for high speed, well-organized digital operations. • The other problem is that the old systems had a lot of hardware which included old types of hardwiring and other things no longer used by electronic systems. They’re therefore pretty inefficient when working with modern systems. Comparing the old systems to the new is like comparing a cow to a Ferrari. The new business phone systems are all about design for efficiency. Instead of the hardware and mysterious connections processes, the new systems use “private servers”, specifically designed to handle high volumes of calls. These servers are brilliant for setting up good, well-designed phone business operations. Because these are fully digital and fully scalable systems, they can be literally tailored to work with any possible configuration of phone system needs. There’s also some new “contact center” software which allows businesses to manage up to 1000 extensions with a few clicks. You can organize your information and data systems very effectively.
For example, if you have one of the new servers, you can:
• Design your phone system configuration to meet operational needs as they arise • Allocate groups of extensions for projects or other special functions • Configure your business and phone systems to match sales, customer service, and ecommerce separately • Get good, comprehensive phone system reporting • You can even manage sales lead generation Not bad for a single system, is it? This is bookkeeping, using your systems. As you can see, this is a bit of a departure from the old “We got a phone call, did something to the account, and now we don’t know what’s going on” situation all businesses appreciate so much. You can actually keep track of any process very efficiently using the new phone systems. The phone system works with the business system, creating a “same page” effect and simplifying all areas of operational management.
If you’ve had enough of playing “find the problem” every time an account record needs to be checked or a customer complains they called and something went wrong, the new phone systems are exactly what you need.
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