In the interconnected world we live in, every service that facilitates a task is welcome -and even more so by the small businesses that do not have the necessary resources. This is the case of telephone customer service which is still the most used despite the latest technological advances and the emergence of more modern communication systems.
The problem with offering a customer service via phone used to be that you needed to have a whole switchboard in a physical place to work with. That meant all the electronic devices, the necessary staff and everything that goes with it in order to be able to have customer service up and running. But this problem is now solved with a virtual pbx, which is a system in the cloud that allows you to have this type of services without the need of any devices or people in your office dedicated to this particular task.
What is a virtual PBX System?
A PBX is what companies or organizations use in their offices to route the calls that come from outside or are made from inside, which provides services such as telephone extensions, exclusively internal calls or answering machine. PBX stands for Private Branch Exchange, which is a private telephone network used within a company. Traditional PBXs would have their own proprietary phones, so there would be no way to use these phones with a different system. This means that whether we have a system-lock-in (we are limited to the same system since a system change also means changing phones, which makes it prohibitive and expensive) or a vendor-lock-in (we are limited to the same manufacturer because the phones can only be used with that manufacturer’s systems, sometimes only with a particular range of systems).
However, time and have changed the telephony consumption landscape, with IP PBX based on open standards at the forefront. The point of “IP” in this era is that telephone calls are delivered using the Internet Protocol as the transport technology. With a traditional PBX, you are typically limited to a certain maximum number of outgoing telephone lines (trunks or trunks) and a certain maximum number of internal telephone devices or extensions. Users of a virtual PBX share outgoing lines for making external phone calls.
An virtual PBX opens up the possibilities, allowing mostly unlimited growth in terms of extensions and trunks, and introducing more complex functions that are more expensive and difficult to implement than with a traditional PBX, such as:
- Dialing Groups
- Glues
- Digital Receptionist
- Voicemail
- Reports
How is a virtual pbx good for your business?
This service is perfect for all those companies that need a customer service but, because they are small, they do not have much budget to hire the staff and equipment necessary to do this work. The main advantage of having a virtual service is that it is cheaper, so it comes in handy for the already mentioned small businesses or even entrepreneurs. The acquisition of a PBX allows the company that gets it to do without the conventional telephone line (one less expense), as well as the cabling infrastructure (installation and maintenance costs) in its own office, since the voice communications will go through the same network cable that carries the LAN and Internet signal to the computers.
Plus, with virtual pbx all the technical problems that traditional switchboards with wiring and terminals used to have disappear because most of the companies that offer PBX virtual switchboard services work with systems hosted in the cloud, by which, with a single call to the supplier, it will not be necessary to move staff, as everything can be arranged from the same service provider.
Mobility is a growing need for anyone who uses new technology to assemble projects, and if jobs are no longer tied to a physical location, neither should be any of the services that they can provide. If your business is already benefiting from online banking, cloud databases, online boards and calendars and so on, it doesn’t make sense to be tied to a physical place for customer service. Many people focus on customer service using other methods such as email, chat and so on, but there are many users who prefer to talk to someone on the phone either because they like it better or they don’t have the knowledge to use some technologies. However, with a virtual pbx you can offer both options, since the switchboard can filter the important calls to the right agents, reducing the wait time.
