Virtual PBX: A Phone System Can Push Your Profile (and Profits) Higher
By J.B. Malik, Editor-in-Chief 
How Does Virtual PBX Work for Your Business?
Long before there was Virtual PBX, a business employed a telephone operator to physically connect internal and external calls with cords. PBX came next, and it was a vast improvement. PBX meant that mechanical devices routed the huge telecommunications traffic flow of large businesses.
One problem with PBX was that businesses had to buy, maintain, and repair expensive telecommunications equipment. Not only that, but businesses had to allot precious office space for this equipment. NO MORE! Enter the Virtual PBX…
Virtual PBX does what PBX does but it does it virtually—no physical equipment needed—and the service allows businesses to craft exactly the type of phone service that they need.
Virtual Receptionist Eliminates Barriers
When a person calls a business, they are often greeted by a human receptionist. If the receptionist is well-trained and has been with the company for many years, hopefully the caller will receive accurate information and smooth access to employees. Let’s not forget that the receptionist must actually be there—on time, not sick, not on vacation—for this to happen. And preferably in a good mood.
Virtual Receptionist, a standard feature of Virtual PBX, is always there. Virtual Receptionist, also known as an auto-attendant, never calls in sick or takes vacations. Virtual Receptionist is the first voice that callers hear when they call your organization.
How many times have you heard receptionists give general information such as hours of operation and directions? It’s a waste of a company’s time and money to pay employees to constantly repeat the same information. Virtual Receptionist can be designed to give out general information—even time-sensitive info about sales promotions and discounts. If the caller knows who they want to speak to, Virtual Receptionist offers a company directory accessible by first or last names.
Have you ever been left hanging on the line as the human receptionist answers another line? This never happens with Virtual Receptionist. No calls are left hanging or unanswered, because Virtual Receptionist routes calls quickly and
accurately. No calls are ever left unanswered with Virtual PBX.
One Phone Number Connects Your Business to the World
Your business is complex. Whether five employees or five hundred, your business provides subtle gradations of service to better serve your customers. Sales isn’t just “sales”: it’s international or domestic, Northeast U.S. or Northwest, or any other number of differences. To make it simpler for your customers to connect, Virtual PBX provides a single access
point: one phone number. Think of this toll-free phone number as your company’s “business card.” It identifies and defines your company.
Get Virtual with Flexible Phone Extensions
Old-style phone systems never quite understood this: a department is not a desk. It’s not an office. It’s not defined by four walls and a floor. And it sure isn’t sedentary.
If you run a business, you know that departments are people, and that people are constantly in motion. Salespeople go out on calls, take lunch, and visit clients. Even office personnel hardly stay in one place, as they too move around
and take internal meetings and go out on breaks. Increasingly, businesses have no time limits. These same people who move about also conducts business outside of the usual nine to five.
Virtual PBX realizes this and it breaks down the barriers of time and place. Virtual PBX connects calls to people, regardless of time or location. Follow-Me-Calling can be set up to track employees to wherever they may be:
another internal office, a branch office, on the road with their cell phone, at home, or anywhere else—at any time or day or night.
How does one person keep track of all your employees’ movements—and keep Follow-Me-Calling updated? It’s not necessary because employees can configure their own Follow-Me-Calling locations and times by means of a simple Web-based management program.
Don’t worry about losing control, though. An administrator log-in is provided to view employee configurations. Should the need arise, the administrator can even override employee preferences.
The Heart of Virtual PBX: Automated Call Distribution (ACD) Queuing
Remember when we said that Virtual PBX understands that departments are not four walls and a floor? Let’s take this a bit further. Imagine that a caller is ready to buy and wants to speak to Jim Grant in the Northeast U.S. Sales Department. With Follow-Me-Calling, if the caller is dead-set on speaking to Jim Grant only, he may do this. But many callers might
be satisfied with the assistance of any capable salesperson in the Northeast U.S. Sales Department. That’s why ACD Queuing is so valuable.
ACD Queuing sends calls to departments, or areas of specialization, within your business. It means that callers don’t need to know names or extension numbers to get help. Callers can seek a particular department, at which point
the caller is seamlessly routed to any agent who is logged into that queue. So instead of another greeting announcing “Northeast U.S. Sales,” the caller is immediately connected to a real person who can assist them (though automated
sub-greetings are possible, too).
When a Queue Overflows, Virtual PBX Takes Over
It’s good to have a lot of business. But having too much business can backfire on you. Callers can’t reach agents; their questions go unanswered; bad word-of-mouth results.
While ACD Queues can accommodate a vast number of logged-in agents, the queues are limited by the number of agents on-duty. So if fifty calls come into a Tech Support queue which has 23 agents logged in, an overflow results.
But how do you know when an overflow is about to happen? Virtual PBX lets you set conditions that define an overflow: how long a caller has been waiting and/or the number of callers on hold. You can customize either variable to suit
the needs of your business at that time.
When an overflow results—again, defined by you, not the system—callers are diverted elsewhere. Where? As with all other aspects of Virtual PBX, you decide. You may decide to set up a special group of “overflow” employees who
typically perform functions other than telephone work. In the event of a queue overflow, these employees can quickly spring into action to receive calls. Another overflow method is to divert callers to an automated greeting that sends them into voicemail.
Because research shows that maximum profit arises when there is a slight backup of waiting calls (after all, you don’t want employee downtime), Virtual PBX deals with this reality by making the wait experience as productive as
possible. Callers can enjoy hold music; or even better, they can listen to recorded company information or promotional messages. To minimize caller wait times, another feature, Caller Waiting Signal, informs phone agents that other
callers are waiting. This lets the agents segue from one call to another remaining as professional as possible.
True ACD™ Means Smart Queuing
Old-style ACD systems queued calls by means hunt groups. What this meant is that a call was sent to
one extension. If that extension was busy, the system would automatically direct the call to another, pre-designated extension. If that was busy, the ACD blindly kept “hunting” for the next assigned extension.
Sounds pretty smart? Maybe at one time it was, but no longer. Virtual PBX has a function called True ACD™, which allows for a greater range of subtleties than mere hunt grouping can. For one thing, True ACD™ lets you automatically
adjust load balances across a set of phone agents.
Another smart feature is skills-based routing. Have you ever noticed that some phone agents are just better than other agents? With skills-based routing, True ACD™ automatically evaluates and ranks the skills of agents within a group.
Using that raw information, True ACD™ routes calls differently to agents based on their respective abilities.
A Complete Business Phone Package with No Hassles
Setting up and maintaining a business is tough. Administrative issues take away time and energy from the true task at hand: your company. Few businesspeople want to waste time dwelling on the complexities of phone systems. They just want the thing to work.
Virtual PBX is an entire, corporate-quality phone system in one package. From the professional greeting to laser-point targeting of calls to the right person or department, Virtual PBX offers everything you need in a business
phone system. Best of all, because this is a hosted service, you have no expensive equipment to buy, maintain, or repair.
Virtual PBX removes the hassles and limitations of conventional business phone service and gives you freedom to do business the way you want to do business.