The Role of the Telephone in Today s Business Environment

The role of the telephone has changed over recent years nevertheless today it remains a vital instrument in any successful modern business. Whilst there may be alternative methods of communication available none has the reliability nor guaranteed response that the telephone provides. How would you choose to contact the emergency services for instance? The telephone provides an immediate connection with a essential lifetime response. It is due to the mounting pressure for immediate response that has driven everyone who may at any interval be away from their office to carry a mobile phone. The mobile telephone however has its downsides, for example how many times do you find yourself in an area with no coverage or call someone on their mobile and not get an answer? The telephone in the office is always reliable and inevitably your backup to your mobile phone "... for urgent enquires please call my office on... ". The telephone today is used for enquiries requiring an immedia
te answer therefore effective utilize of the phone is mission critical if you are not to lose your customers to a competitor. If you are selling a product and they cannot find absent if product X has feature Y they will find your competitor and solicit the same of them, the result being that a sale is lost. After sales control is just as valuable if you have a customer with one of your products that has a puzzle and they can not get an answer from you when they call, you can expect no repeat business from them remarkably if this is their first familiarity of your level of customer support. When a customer calls you for whatever basis they expect an immediate answer to their enquiry. It is therefore extremely essential that you handle the call efficiently. There are a number of problems that you demand to overcome to do this. The first is to know who is calling so you can have any relevant facts about the customer available. You may know this from their Caller ID however yo
u can not know what the enquiry is regarding and this presents another problem. You must answer the call quickly and find elsewhere what the caller needs from your organisation. However, statistically more than 70% of calls can not be handled at the first mark of contact and entail to be held for more than 45 seconds before being connected*, so the chances are that you are going to hold the caller while you find someone able to help. If you dump the call into a telephonic abyss of silence callers have been shown to hang up typically within 45 seconds so you will lose the call. With a competitive commercial market in today"s business environment losing calls is something which is vital to avoid. The solution to these logistical problems is to provide music on hold on your business telephone system as this will reassure the caller that they have not been cut off and to keep them on the borderline while you try to find someone to help. This may be a member of staff on their m
obile on the contrary due to the foibles of mobile phones this may not be successful, for example if they are in an area of poor coverage or have their phone switched off since they are with a client. For guaranteed availability and velocity of response it is preferable to transfer the call to someone in the office where at all possible. Until we have a technology as reliable and robust as the telephone it will remain a mission critical part of today"s successful modern business. For more material visit our website *Source: Network Magazine December 2006 Full text: http://computerandtechnologies.com/technology/news_2008-06-19-23-00-07-906.html