Who's Answering the Phone?

New Technology, New Possibilities

Improvements in telephone system technology have given businesses more options. Voice over Internet protocol (VOIP) sends conversations over the same lines that carry Internet traffic, and has been gaining prominence in the last five or six years, says Joe Hines, CEO of Voice & Data Networks, Inc., a telecommunications company in Edina.

By connecting phones via data connections, VOIP lets a business with many branches—however scattered—have a single telephone system. Staff who work from home or in an office in another state can “act as if you’re in one virtual location, where a phone call can be answered by the best available person,” says Brett Shockley, CEO of Spanlink Communications, which provides VOIP technology services.

If no one is available at one location, someone at another office can pick up the call, with no need for the customer to leave a message or try another location. “The customer is dramatically happier, because they’re getting a consistent response, and it’s more efficient for companies, because they’re not spending a lot of time returning phone calls,” Shockley says.

VOIP also lets businesses employ a single automated system for answering calls. That system can be touch or voice activated, simple or sophisticated, able to give or gather information. The simplest automated system might answer the phone only when no employee is available, asking callers to leave a message, hold, or access a touch-tone company directory. Or it might perform basic call routing, asking a caller to press 1 to be connected with the sales department and 2 to speak with customer support.

A somewhat more complicated system might be set up to answer frequently asked questions, directing callers to press a number to hear about a particular topic. Such a system can be helpful to businesses or government offices that repeatedly answer the same queries.

Even more sophisticated automations don’t just give information—they actively gather it as well. The telephone system might ask the caller to enter a customer identification number, or it could access caller identification information. It then uses company data to route the call accordingly. “We make a guess about what they want,” says Mark Lawson, a sales manager in Minneapolis for Fargo-based Corporate Technologies, LLC, which designs telecommunications systems. “Maybe a customer buys a lot of one type of product, so you send them to someone who knows about that product.”