After all, every business wants to stay ahead of its competitors, and keeping up with relevant technological developments is a crucial part of that process.
The hallmarks of hosted telephony are flexibility, cost-effectiveness, and a range of additional features not supported by traditional telephony solutions. This means that not only should your efficiency improve, and your outgoings decrease, but you will also be able to offer a higher quality of service to your clients.
An Evolving Workforce
However, it’s not just about keeping up with the times. While it’s clear that embracing technological advances is key to staying ahead of the pack, the benefits to your business go beyond this.
Some of the key strengths of hosted telephony lie within its capacity to improve your understanding of the dynamics of your workforce, identifying where productivity is highest and where it can be improved. The facilitation of call logging and call reporting is at the core of this functionality. This data allows you to pinpoint the strengths and weaknesses of your organisation, allowing you to reinforce positive trends, and efficiently identify negative influences.
In addition, real-time information about each recruiting consultant’s performance enables you to initiate constructive dialogue about an individual’s professional development, and the steps that can be taken to improve the efficiency and quality of their work.
Enhanced Scalability
Furthermore, as hosted telephony removes your need for on-premises hardware, you do not need to worry about physical maintenance, or any of the challenges associated with the management of in-house infrastructure. All of this is handled by your hosting provider, allowing you to focus on recruitment, and the development of your business reputation.
For newer businesses this can be a significant advantage, as it removes the need for physical office-space, alleviating your initial funds to focus on early stage business development. Virtual phone services also mean calls can be easily routed to personal mobile devices, while still using a central business phone number.
The other benefit of no on-site hardware is that it becomes far easier to scale your enterprise at short notice. You can even add entirely new branches, and international premises, simply by purchasing additional licences, as services operated on a user-per-licence basis. Moreover, the ability to increase and decrease the size of your operations as needed means you can cater for large-scale recruitment drives, without needing to permanently increase your network capacity.
Cross-Platform Integration
Of course, the other key attraction of hosted telephony is the extent to which it opens up cross-platform communication and functionality. All of your data is stored on the Cloud, and your telephone consultants can work remotely, or in collaboration with team members at other branches. Meetings no longer require all parties to be in the same place, and your team will be able to provide a consistent, integrated service across all branches, boosting your brand image, and presenting a positive, unified experience to your clients.
More importantly, the ability to communicate via a range of media, including video conferencing and document-sharing, enables your employees to approach recruitment from a variety of angles, and build trust through face-to-face communication without the need for travel.
Record Keeping and Call Retrieval
The level of automation that can be built into a hosted system can also improve your business transparency by removing human error from the process of record keeping. In addition, logged calls can be easily retrieved, and made available to the necessary parties, at any time.
This can be especially useful for following up calls, handling queries, and providing training for new recruiters. Your hosted system can also monitor activity throughout the network, assigning calls to less active lines. This targeted call routing can reduce customer wait times, while promoting uniform division of labour throughout your workforce.
The Value of Future-Proofing
Ultimately, the extent of labour-saving functionality provided by a hosted telephony solution makes it a must for any recruitment agency that hopes to remain competitive. Fortunately, hosted packages can be extensively tailored to the needs of your business, making the integration of the new system a simple process. You can control how quickly you introduce new features to your workforce, ensuring that everyone can become comfortable with the increased functionality at their own pace.
Ultimately, this will allow your business to adapt to the needs of an increasingly tech-focused professional market, without falling foul of unexpected costs, or the need for emergency upgrades to your infrastructure.
Gemma Maroney is part of the team at Unified Communications experts, Solution IP.
