Time's A Wastin': How Your Phone System Can Save You Time in Daily Operations

Ever feel like you spend a huge chunk of your work day sifting through your e-mails? Responding to voice mail messages? Confirming that you received someone’s message? And on…and on…

It turns out there may be a reason you feel that way. A recent study conducted by Webtorials on behalf of Fonality, entitled the “2011 Report on UC and Cloud-based Services for SMBs,” indicated that knowledge workers at small and mid-size businesses (SMBs) spend 50 percent of each work day on necessary, yet unproductive, tasks.

The report found that these employees spend about 36 percent of their time on a collaboration of three tasks: contacting customers, partners or colleagues; finding information; and scheduling meetings.  Another 14 percent of their time was used on managing unwanted communications, like spam e-mails or unsolicited phone calls, and duplicating information – such as forwarding e-mails to other team member to ensure that all parties were in the know, or making follow-up calls to confirm the receipt of information. When duplicating information for any reason, redundancy can occur resulting in an even larger waste of work time.

According to the study, unified communications can help increase productivity, citing that “efficiencies created by Unified Communications on a typical firm with 50 Knowledge Workers with salaries ranging from $40,000 to $110,000 can recover two-hours a day in productivity.” It went on to associate an estimated value of $950,000 annually based on the time saved by employees. 

You can overcome these issues and increase operations efficiency by investing in the right VoIP phone system for your business.

Depending on which communications system fits your business model, there could be many tools at your fingertips (literally) to help improve your daily productivity, including:

• Storing the contact information for top customers and/or vendors directly in your phone system software for quick and easy access.
• Receiving voice mail messages as e-mails and implementing electronic faxing, so that all forms of communication can be checked in one convenient location.
• Creating call rules and routing lists to send unwanted calls directly to voice mail, and in some cases to a specific folder within your voice mail.
• Using your desktop PC or laptop to initiate all forms of outgoing communications, including phone calls, e-mails, faxes, internal instant messages and text messages.
• Pressing one button on the keyboard to dial the last number that called you.
• Accessing a log of all inbound calls to quickly search for and locate contact information.
• Sharing voice mail boxes between teammates so that calls can be returned quickly even if one team member is out of the office.
• Forwarding or routing calls so that no call is ever missed.
• Authenticating your cell phone so that phone system functionality is always available.

These examples are just a few of the ways unified communications can help you and your employees increase productivity – and, with one of our phone systems, they could be at your fingertips.

If you feel like you or your staff is bogged down by day-to-day communications and an efficiency overhaul is in order, give our team of experts a call at (919) 831-1860 today.