A Day in the Life of an Office Manager

A Day in the Life of an Office Manager

How My IP-PBX Helps Me Stay Organized

No matter what position you hold in a company, it’s a “given” that you spend a good portion of your day on the phone.  Whether you are the receptionist or the CEO, chances are you get a lot of phone calls during the course of the day.  Wouldn’t it be wonderful if there was a way to make your “phone time” more efficient?

As the Office Manger for my company, I am responsible for everything from daily office operations to long- term projects (and everything in between).  There is a lot to accomplish during the day, but even being a consummate multi-tasker I am sometimes frazzled by the end of the day. My phone system helps me ensure that the office is running smoothly, our customers are served, and I can find the proverbial “extra hour” in a day.

First, I use the a GUI desktop interface [GUI] that allows me to see the status all of all my co-workers.  With the phone system’s built in presence management, I can tell if they are in a meeting, out of the office or if they are on vacation.  If they are in the office and available, I can easily see if they are on the phone.  This allows me to quickly alert the caller to their party’s status.  I can say “Yes, I see he/she is in the office but on their phone, would you like his voicemail?”. 

Being able to visually “see” whether or not a person is on the phone is an incredible time saver.  Now the caller’s expectation is set; they can either go directly to voicemail or call back later instead of wasting 5 minutes while waiting through 5 rings only to get voicemail and then zero out to the main switch board just to start the process over again. 

In our office, we use the Personal Status feature that is built into our phone systemAlong with using the Presence Management feature called “Personal Status, .  That is how I can visually tell who is here and who is not.  Wwe also have a corporate policy about what the statuses mean so I know if someone is “out of the office” I can still route a call to them and it will get transferred directly to their cell phone.  This allows me to get the caller to the person they need to speak to quickly and efficiently.  I don’t have to give out a cell phone numbers, they don’t have to hang up and call another number and the person they are calling will not have to check voicemail on their cell phone and in the office. 

When a call is routed through the system, it stays “in the system”; the caller leaves a message in the office.  This allows the recipient to check in a single place for voicemails.  And better yet, depending on how they set up their inbox, the voicemail can be emailed to them as well.

Not only that but, the built in internal instant messaging feature allows me to quickly communicate with my co-workers regarding callers, visitors or even just general work questions.  Instead of roaming the office and waiting for them to get off the phone, I can instantly connect with them from my desk and continue to work as I await a response.  I can also apprise the caller or visitor of the situation real-time.

In addition to seeing the status of my co-workers “at a glance” and communicating in real time, I can quickly determine the priority of my incoming calls.  By using the GUI interface, I can see who is calling.  If I don’t have the GUI interface up, I can usebenefit from the call announce feature to that plays voice titles or have has callers state their name, in addition to using the Caller ID on my phone. 

This feature helps me to know who is calling and why.  It helps me prepare for the call ahead.  If someone is calling me back with information, I can be ready or have theirhis or her information ready when I answer the call. 

It’s not only these features that help me in my daily activitiesBeyond the taking, making and transferring call duties, our VoIP phone system helps me with other projects.  We use the built in call recording to record conference calls and detailed information for transcription or future reference.  As soon as the call concludes, I can listen and re-listen to the conversation to ensure all details and action items are documented.  In some cases, at the end of a conference call, we will request each participant to state their action items and just record this part of the call.  This includes voicemails too. Then, we can email the recorded  Being able to send an email with a .wav file as an attachedment and makes it easy to share the meeting action items with everyone on the call.  I can also archive these notes to share laterinformation with co-workers or file important e-docs together for future reference.

I could go on and on about all of the features I use

Need a summary –couple of sentences to wind it up.