Remote working, Teams and Messaging on Hold

As the shift to remote working becomes permanent for many businesses, the smartest are taking the opportunity to reimagine their entire customer journeys and find new ways to enhance the experiences.

But even now, many operations are still overlooking their callers and forgetting their user experience could have a significant impact on revenue and customer satisfaction scores. After all, 90% of callers will hang up after 40 seconds of silence, and 34% of those callers will not try a second time.

How did the pandemic changed the calling experience?

Staff may still be working from home, the office or on-the-go, taking longer to answer the phone from the moment it starts ringing, because they’re wrapping up existing calls, running for a train or trying to wrangle children out of their home office.

Plus, businesses with traditional on-site PBX equipment may have forgotten they were diverting calls without the typical on-hold experience for callers, meaning callers miss the on-site on-hold messaging and may only get a dialling tone to inform them they are still on the line. 

These delays and sub-standard experiences do have a knock-on effect on customer satisfaction scores. If a caller doesn’t even hear the ‘ring ring’ on the other end of the phone, they may think they’ve been disconnected and try a competitor instead.

Therefore, addressing these issues is vitally important for businesses that rely on telephone communication, whether it’s through the sales-cycle or after-sales support; otherwise, they risk losing new business and existing customers.

How did businesses manag to stay in touch with callers?

Unified Communication solutions and hosted telephony platforms have helped businesses throughout the country get over remote working communications issue. These systems provide a load of benefits, including being able to route calls directly to employee’s mobile phones, along with maintaining on the on-hold experience, which has been perfect for reacting to the outbreak.

However, businesses with older on-site PBX solutions or plain-old landline phones will have been forced to mask their network providers to manually re-direct calls, which means callers wouldn’t get the typical on-hold messaging when they call. The call would simply be routed to an employee’s phone number with a typical dial tone.

Especially since Teams became the new darling of the IT & Telecoms world, we’ve noticed a barrage of questions around whether our Messaging on Hold recordings are compatible with hosted systems, as well as the likes of Microsoft Teams with its Direct Calling functions.

Does Microsoft Teams work with my hosted telephony service?

The answer is yes. In fact, they’ve been compatible since June 2019!

However, you’ll need to create a ‘Cloud call queue’ and upload the recording there. While this is a perfectly adequate option, we’d recommend speaking to your communications provider to organise the switchover.

For direct calling, the typical process isn’t much different to how it used to be with a traditional PBX, but instead of saving the audio files to your on-site equipment, it’s a matter of simply uploading it to the hosted platform or forwarding on the new recording to your UC provider to incorporate into their system.

No matter what system your businesses uses; on-site, hosted, UC or PSTN, your callers’ on-hold experience is a vital aspect of their entire customer journey. Considering that 70% of calls are placed on hold or transferred at some point, enriching that experience as much as possible means you’re giving your teams the best chance of a win.

If your business could do with some updated Messaging on Hold messaging – whether you want to answer FAQs or upsell your products – give us a call on 0161 483 4668 and one of our team will put you in touch with the most appropriate provider for your needs.

If you’re a reseller looking to figure out how to integrate Messaging on Hold with Teams or another communications platform, get in touch and we’ll figure out how we can make the process super-straightforward for you and your customers!