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The 3 main goals of today’s business are

effective client service;

higher employee productivity;

lower costs for telecommunications, network maintenance, etc.

Here you can learn 5 savvy ways to achieve these goals by integrating IP telephony in your enterprise IT infrastructure.

1. Process Your Client Requests Timely With Maximum Effectiveness

A) Would you like to receive messages from all possible sources (emails, faxes, voice messages, instant messages etc.) in a single inbox available 24×7 from both your e-mail client and by phone?

A unified messaging and voice mail service, integrated with your e-mail client and fax-server, is a solution that you need to:

reduce your time wasted checking multiple sources;

process client requests timely regardless of a chosen way to send them.

B) If you have to answer too many calls a day, and some client calls even stay unanswered, then you can improve your customer servicing with queuing/skill-based routing (SBR) software or a software-based attendant console, integrated of with your CRM and ERP solutions.

This approach will permit you to:

put calls in a queue and route them automatically to an appropriate employee when he/she becomes available (an operator, who processed a caller’s requests last time, a manager, who usually works with a calling client etc.);

provide your staff with information about a calling client from your CRM database and thus speed up a conversation.

You can also automate up to 80% of your client request processing with a voice portal or an IVR service, integrated with CRM and ERP software. This way, you’ll

save your client time spend for getting the desired information/managing their personal accounts;

release your staff for more complicated tasks.

2. Reduce Your VoIP Network Maintenance Efforts And Expenses

Enterprise VoIP network chores are rather simple, but because of the standard user interface complicity, you have to entrust these tasks to highly skilled administrators. A VoIP network management solution, integrated in your IT infrastructure, will provide you with:

easy-to-use GUI to simplify and speed up daily network management tasks – you’ll need one, not necessarily experienced employee to fulfill them;

connectors to your inventory software – you’ll use it to manage phone inventory at all company sites from a single workplace, and thus both streamline phone inventory daily tasks and save your employee time wasted searching for a lost item;

connectors/plug-ins to the existing/purchased network components to overcome compatibility restrictions and save on network upgrade/extension/merging with purchasing inexpensive 3rd party software/hardware components.

3. Save Your Staff Time On Inner Communications

By integrating HRM software with your corporate address-book you can automate phone number management and address book update processes. Thus your address book will always contain actual contact data, and you’ll save your staff time wasted searching for it. You can also implement an address-book IP phone application to make contact data available right from employee IP phones.

Moreover, you can deploy a presence XML-service that will allow your staff to manage their own status and check the others availability before making a call. This way you’ll accelerate your employee daily communications too.

4. Speed Up Call-Accounting Daily Tasks And Cut Telecom Costs

With integration of a call-accounting solution with your accounting/billing software you can:

automate phone bill processing;

provide timely reports on user phone expenses/balances;

allocate telecom costs to appropriate budgets (departments/cost centers/clients).

So you’ll get a tool to improve productivity of your accounting staff and reduce employee telecom costs.

5. Improve The Quality Of Your Collaboration With Long-Distance Colleagues, Clients And Partners

Audio/video conferencing software is excellent to hold meetings with multiple local and remote employees. But if you want your clients, partners and remote employees, who don’t have this software, to participate in a conference session, then you need to integrate it with widespread 3rd party

VoIP software like Skype, PeerMe, iChat, etc.,

web-conferencing software like WebEx, Openmeetings, MS Live Meeting etc.

Note that, if your conferencing software is integrated with your e-mail client (IBM Lotus Notes, MS Outlook etc.), you can plan a conference call and gather the participants automatically, thus, saving your time and efforts.

Conclusion

By integrating IP telephony with your enterprise IT infrastructure, you can:

increase the effectiveness of client request processing;

reduce your VoIP network maintenance efforts and expenses;

save your staff time on daily communications and chores;

cut telecom costs;

improve collaboration with long-distance colleagues, clients and partners,

which will allow you to build your business quicker and easier.

Author’s Note: This article also published here.

…

You can learn how to empower your enterprise with VoIP in the book, “The Connected Enterprise”, here http://bcs-it.com/books/connected-enterprise/ The free e-book, just as the article, was written by Alexander Anoshin, the CEO of BCS-IT, who specializes in VoIP integration.

Read more articles written by Alexander Anoshin

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IT infrastructure, telecom, Alexander Anoshin, IP telephony