Featured Features – Week 1
Today marks the beginning of a new series on the Telonium Blog – Featured Features. Try saying that five times fast. Sorry, couldn’t help myself. Each week I plan on highlighting a couple of Telonium’s features. I will give detailed explanations, general guidelines for using the features and helpful tips for getting the most out of them. Oh, and the best part about our features? They are all included, no extra costs here and there.
I decided to start the series with the three features that your customers will deal with the most. Those are Auto Attendant, Custom Greetings, and Music on Hold. Let’s begin!
Auto Attendant – Have you ever called in to a company and heard something along these lines: “Thank you for calling Snacks for Cats, if you know your party’s extension, dial it at any time. Press 1 for Sales, 2 for Support…” That is what we like to call an auto attendant. Auto attendants allow automated systems to greet every inbound call and properly route them to the right person at your office. Therefore, it helps increase productivity in the office by not bothering the wrong team member. For example, engineers should not be answering sales calls and vice versa. An auto attendant is the easiest way for even the smallest of companies to have a large company presence. If you would like to learn more about auto attendants, I recommend checking out the guest post from last week, it’s full of information. There are many options for using the auto attendant, but a popular one is to have a custom greeting, so I will talk about that feature next.
TIPS: At the beginning of the auto attendant message make sure to give callers the option of entering their party’s extension, that way they won’t have to sit through the list of options if they already know who to contact.
Custom Greetings – As I mentioned before, one of the most popular uses of an auto attendant is to have a custom greeting. Custom greetings are an excellent way to build a good first impression, and great for getting across your company’s personality. You can create different greetings according to the time of day and day of the week. For example, you may have a different greeting for after hours or weekends. With Telonium, if you do not already have a greeting and would rather not record it yourself, then that is no problem at all. You can simply provide us with a script and we will record it for you.
TIPS: Keep the greetings short, but feel free to get creative too. Why not give a shout out to the local high school during football season? Also don’t forget about holidays too, something as simple as “We will be recovering from too much turkey and cheering on the Falcons today and tomorrow but will be back in action Monday.”
Music on Hold – The last feature I will be going over today is music on hold. From personal experience, whenever I am put on hold and it’s just silent, I keep wondering if I’ve been disconnected. Telonium has basic hold music that works great, but we also make it easy for you to change the music yourself through the customer portal.
TIPS: Running a promotion? This is a great time to remind your callers. Also, why not switch the hold music depending on the type of year? In December, how about changing it to a fun holiday tune. During the summer, you could play the soothing sound of ocean waves. Your customers may not even mind being on hold. Well, we won’t go that far, but at least it will be pleasant!
Well, that’s all for this week’s installment of Featured Features, come back next week for a new post! Until then, if you would like to learn more about Telonium’s features or anything else, feel free to give us a call, or you can contact me at <my first name>@telonium.com.
