The lines between the office phone and your personal cell phone are getting more blurry every day. So many people use their personal cell phones for work that they don’t think they need a desk phone anymore. That’s where the Allworx Verge phones come in.
Getting Sales Leads From Your Cell Phone Into Your Desk Phone
Let’s say that as a small business person, you are out eating lunch at Bru Burger and you run into Mary, who wants to be your customer. You type in Mary’s phone number on your iPhone and tell her you’ll call her later. If you use Office 365, Mary’s info might sync with Outlook and you would have it on your desktop computer. More likely, when you go to call Mary you’ll be looking up the note on your phone, copying it down on a post-it note, then dialing the number from your desk phone.
Now, with the Allworx Verge 9312 phone and the Reach app, even more happens in the background to help you run your business better. When you get back to the office, your contacts on your iPhone can sync via Bluetooth with your desk phone. If you use the Reach app from Allworx, your contacts are already there. When you go to your desk to call Mary, her number is already on your desk phone. You can sit down, scroll to her name, press call, and be talking through specs in the time it would take to open your email. Imagine getting back to your desk after a networking event and everyone you met already has their phone number loaded on your desk phone address book!
Your Office Phone and Cell Phone Working Together in Real Time
Let’s say Mary calls your desk phone before you get back to work. Once upon a time, you would have missed that call and she would probably have left you a voice mail. It’s possible you would play a bit of phone tag with her before you were able to connect again.
With the Allworx Reach app, your smartphone and your desk phone work together to make you available to customers. Calls to your desk phone can ring on your cell phone when you are not in the office, and you can answer that call anywhere. You can talk with her on your cell phone just like you are in your office. When you get to your desk, you don’t have to hang up and call her back. Pick up your desk phone handset (or put on your headset), press the handoff button, and the call continues without interruption on your desk phone.
No more giving out your personal cell phone number and your office phone number. If you have a quality network, the call might even be clearer than the cell phone call. If you use a Bluetooth 3.0 headset on your smart phone, you can keep it on and continue talking on your Verge 9312 phone.
Instant handoff means you can keep the conversation going no matter where you have to go. If you have a client on your desk phone and you know Michael down the hall has the answer, you don’t have to put the caller on hold. Handoff the call to your Android phone or iPhone and take the call down to Michael’s office. Once you are there you have all the functions of your desk phone on your cell phone: transfer, conference call, and hold. Again, all of this is seamless between your desk phone and your cell phone.
If You Talk on the Phone at Work, Get Tools to Help You Do it Better
Small businesses with four seats have different phone system needs than companies with multiple locations and hundreds of employees. The rubber meets the road in our offices, though, where we use these same phones to do our own work. You’ll find a variety of different phone users at Lieberman Technologies. We have people who wear their headset all day long and talk through customer support calls while they heat up their lunch in the kitchen. We have people who use their cell phone all the time and rarely touch the phone on their desk. As part of our sales team, Rick and I use our cell phones and desk phones interchangeably. Our web design team uses their cell phones to field customer support and training calls when they work remotely. Our Allworx system allows us to be in contact with our customers no matter where the work day takes us.
The way people use phones at work is changing, and you have more options when you have the right tools. Give us a call today to learn more, and ask the person who answers what kind of phone they are using.