Christmas countdown: keep your business connected wherever you're working
Christmas can mean different working patterns for your team. Here are four practical ways to keep customers and colleagues connected wherever people are working.
Zen InternetChristmas means different working patterns. People are at home, travelling, covering for colleagues or simply away from their usual desk.
So how do you make sure customers and colleagues can still reach the right people?
The truth is, it’s less about where people work and more about whether your business communications can move with them.
Here are four ways to stay better connected at Christmas – and any other time of year.
1. Take your business number with you
If someone works from home for a few days, they shouldn’t need to choose between being harder to reach or giving customers a personal mobile number.
The first thing to check is whether the people who need to stay contactable can make and receive business calls while they’re away from the office.
With CloudComms, they can make and take calls using their business number wherever they happen to be, and without needing their work phone. In fact, all it takes is a supported desktop or mobile app.
So customers can carry on using the number they already know, and outbound calls can still appear to come from your business rather than a personal number.
2. Decide where calls go when someone’s away
If you receive a call for a colleague who’s already enjoying their Christmas holiday, what happens?
It’s worth deciding that before they go.
You might forward unanswered calls to somebody else, send them to another number, or use an automated announcement to tell callers what to do next.
The important thing is that calls don’t just reach an empty desk.
CloudComms gives you options for forwarding and routing calls, so you can decide what happens when someone can’t answer.
That can make cover much easier to organise – and reduce the chances of a customer having to call back because nobody knew where their call should go.
3. Make handovers easy
The person who answers a call won’t always be the person who can help.
That’s especially true over Christmas, when people are covering different roles or working different hours.
A little preparation can help make things easier. Make sure you know who’s covering what, how to reach them, and what should happen if the first person isn’t available.
Your phone system should make that handover straightforward too. Being able to transfer calls easily means the customer doesn’t need to start again with another number or wait for someone to call them back.
It’s a small thing, but it makes the business feel much more joined up even when your team isn’t all sitting in the same place.
4. Keep things consistent for your customers
Your customers aren’t interested in who’s working from home, who’s travelling or who’s covering someone else’s Christmas leave.
They just want to know how to reach you.
And the easiest way to ensure that is to keep the numbers they already use working. Check your voicemail greetings, make sure opening hours are clear, and – if calls need to be redirected – make sure they end up somewhere useful.
CloudComms can help you keep that customer experience consistent even when the people behind it are working in different places.
So even if your team is spread far and wide, from the customer’s point of view, nothing needs to change.
Use Christmas as a test
Christmas might be the reason you’re thinking about flexible working, but these checks can be useful all year round.
Someone might need to work from home unexpectedly. Bad weather might make getting into the office difficult. You might add another location, or have people regularly working between sites. Or you might just want to give your team more flexibility.
If your business phone setup relies on everyone being in the same building, it can limit how flexibly your team can work.
Christmas gives you a great opportunity to discover what might work better.
Can your people answer business calls away from the office? Do calls reach a person when the usual contact is unavailable? Can calls be handed over easily? Do customers still get the same experience?
If the answer to all those questions is yes, you’ve got a setup that’ll work well beyond the festive period.
If not, think about this:
A phone system that isn’t tied to the office
That’s the idea behind CloudComms.
CloudComms gives businesses of any size a cloud-based phone service that can work across locations and devices, helping your team stay reachable wherever they’re working.
That can make Christmas cover easier. It can also give your business more flexibility for every other day of the year.
Keep your business reachable wherever your team works
See how CloudComms can help your team make, receive and route business calls across locations and devices.
