December 13, 2024
Even in today's tech-savvy world, voice-based communication isn’t going away any time soon. Having a reliable phone system that allows you to function at your highest level ensures that your business can be professional, productive, and successful.
Unfortunately, that’s clearly not what a lot of businesses have. Perhaps you’ve noticed? Constant busy signals, slow responsiveness, inaccurate or insufficient answers to questions, getting lost in a phone maze — these issues are a major turnoff for customers. But old phone systems can also disrupt internal work between team members and exacerbate inefficiency organization-wide. Bottom line, if your phone system is clearly outdated, it’s costing you time and money, whether you know it or not. So in this blog, I’ll explore the obvious and not-so-obvious costs of an outdated phone system.
How Old Phone Systems Can Create Inefficiencies Organization-Wide
Outdated phone systems tend to fly under the radar, but for being fairly invisible, they tend to cause a lot of problems.
Continual Need for Servicing
At times, a seemingly low-cost phone system can require more time and attention in the long run. Skimping on quality to save dollars can lead to increased costs and time associated with repairs and maintenance.
Missed Opportunities
An inefficient phone system can easily lead to missed calls, voice message build-up, and inaccurate call routing. That makes perfect sense to an internal employee, but to an outsider, those things can make you look unprofessional or even uncaring.
A phone system is often a business's lifeline. If your phone isn’t working correctly, you risk losing long-term profits, important business relationships, and clients.
Limited Capabilities
Most older phone systems don’t offer much in terms of functionality. Even if yours does, I’m guessing those features are often underutilized because they’re not very user-friendly. But it’s easy to underestimate the importance of advanced features when you’ve gone without them for so long.
Here’s an analogy I often use: Would you ever go back to not using a smartphone? Can you imagine how much more time it would take to find information every single day? Well, that’s roughly the equivalent of what it’s like to work with an outdated, business communication system.
Advanced features like auto-attendant, call transfer, night mode, twinning, and voicemail to email make a huge impact on your day. And once you have them, it’s hard to imagine how you ever got along without them.
Staff Turnover
Inefficient communication tools make it harder for your staff to do their job effectively. Dropped calls and poor audio quality are frustrating enough for customers. If your staff experiences these issues on a regular basis, it can be a significant source of frustration that can lead to burnout and high turnover.
Basically, the saying “you get what you pay for” holds true. It's up to you to decide how important quality, reliability, and functionality are to your business operations.
Advantages of a More Efficient Business Phone System
New phone systems often take some getting used to, but thanks to big leaps forward in communication technology over the past few years, you could start seeing clear ROI very quickly once you make the switch. Depending on the solution you choose, here’s what’s on the table.
Enhanced Flexibility
Both cloud voice and unified communications technology make it much easier to collaborate from anywhere.
But even if your organization isn’t a good use case for remote or hybrid work, offering employees more flexibility can enable them to stay home with a sick child or keep projects moving when they’re on the road.
Improved Customer Experience
It’s often taken for granted that as companies grow, it becomes more difficult to provide responsive and attentive customer service. But with the communication technology available today, it really doesn’t need to be that way. And while no one has ever liked being the recipient of poor customer service, consumers are starting to indicate that it’s no longer something they’ll accept.
Here’s what the stats are saying:
- Over 50% of consumers will switch to a competitor after only one bad customer service experience
- 3 out of 4 consumers will spend more with businesses that provide good customer service
- Investing in a customer-first operation can yield up to a 700% ROI over 12 years
Your phone system can be a significant competitive advantage. It can also save you quite a bit of time and money.
Cost Efficiency
Phone systems are a significant investment, but an updated phone system can bring you value organization-wide in some surprising and not-so-surprising ways.
Depending on the solution you choose, here’s where you’ll save quite a bit of money over time:
- There’s less on-premises hardware to purchase and maintain
- Software updates become automatic
- Long-distance and international calls are less costly
- Integrations with other business software can dramatically improve productivity
- You may be able to consolidate multiple communication tools
Advanced Features
There are a lot of new features that make it easier to schedule meetings, see who’s available to field a quick question, or respond to voicemail much faster.
There are, of course, plenty more — and while many of these new tools sound like bells and whistles, they can also be game-changing. So before you invest in a new solution, it’s a good idea to talk to a phone expert who can help you determine where your dollars will go the furthest.
Business Collaboration Tools That Offer Incredible ROI
If you’ve been trying to research new business phone systems online, you’re probably seeing some conflicting information, too many acronyms, and outdated advice. That’s a symptom of just how quickly communication technology has evolved over the past few years, but it can make online research difficult.
What You Should Know About Top Unified Communications Platforms
Not that long ago, most business communication specialists would have said that only larger companies or organizations with special collaboration needs should consider unified communications (UC), and most everyone should probably just upgrade to a cloud voice solution as long as their network was capable of handling the load.
But UC users have started to churn out some significant stats, and the productivity increases they’ve seen are remarkable. Then again, maybe they shouldn’t be. I think most office workers understand that little productivity drains spent searching for files, trying to find important conversations, and toggling between different communication tools really add up over the course of a week.
Having one tool that makes all of those little things faster and easier may not sound like a big deal. But in real life, it tends to save employees over 70 minutes a day. Multiply that across your organization, and, well, if you’re hoping to increase productivity, you should take a good look at UC and UCaaS (unified communications as a service) solutions.
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