Business phone systems

Whether you are a small or a big company, it makes sense to have an enterprise phone system set-up across your office locations. Even if you have just a small location, it still makes sense to invest in business phone systems as they help you to get ready for eventualities in the future.

With that in mind, using an ERP that can be integrated with your business phone system is important as well. Hosted business phones are becoming increasingly important across companies and most companies have begun to invest in them along with ERP systems. In this article, let us take a look at why you need to integrate your ERP with existing or new business phones.

1. Boost your Customer Relationship Management
   Whether small or big, customers are bound to call you up seeking information. They may be potential leads, previous customers or existing ones. No matter who they are, if you use a business phone system that is integrated with your ERP, you will be able to retrieve details as and when you need. This helps you to manage your customers better and build positive relationships. After all, a happy customer is crucial for you to stay in business for a long time.
2. Keep track of phone records
   If your ERP or CRM is not integrated and if your business phones are again separately used, chances are that you will miss out on important calls that customers made to you or your customer support team. When you integrate your hosted business phones with your ERP, you will be able to make sure that you can track all the phone calls made to your company and thus be accountable. One can never predict when you would need to track a call back. Having access to phone records will always help you to be ready for the future.
3. Improved metric reports
   By now, it must be clear to you that measuring leads to amelioration of tasks. When is measurement happening in the background and regular metric reports are sent to you based on customer satisfaction, employee productivity and management, you will be able to use data from your business phone system and ERP together in order to oversee the functioning of your organization.
4. Integrate marketing and accounting tasks
   By using a hosted business phone system, you can mark all the phone numbers that need to be used for specific campaigns, Outbound and inbound calls help the accounting department to retain accurate records of entities involved. In other words, integrating ERP with business phones helps you to streamline you entire organizational workflow.
5. Improve training of employees
   It is common to here the refrain that goes something on the lines of recording and using a particular call for the purpose of training, when customers call up. Though you may be a small company, the importance of recording calls that customers make cannot be highlighted enough. Each and every call made by customers can be used to train your employees, and thus, help you to improve productivity.

Final thoughts
An ERP or CRM should not exist on its own. One must try and integrate business phone systems with ERP systems. Though it may prove to be an additional cost, the long term benefits of such an investment will always outweigh the costs. Moreover, recording calls has always been proved to be a great source of material for training future employees. It will also help you to understand how your customers behave and design marketing campaigns that are more in line with their psychographics.