8 mins read
There’s a good chance that you will roll your eyes if we say organizations active in the social service industry need just as rigorous tech support and streamlined communications systems as their counterparts in corporate sectors do.
A lot of us often imagine not-for-profit organizations functioning with threadbare operational systems in their offices. News flash: Institutions and companies within the social service sector in the modern-day work with the same go-getter professionalism and result-driven approach that you often associate with other fields. How else are they expected to reach a wider customer base and nudge prospective customers into turning clients?
Communicating well is vital to creating and expanding a consumer base across industries—more so for organizations that depend solely on funding and investors. The cloud telephony, a no-fuss system, helps those in the social service sector not only achieve this but also save on other potential costs.
Here’s how it simplifies operational issues and maximizes potential.
Helps spend way less money on outbound calls
In the social sector, organizations have to constantly be in touch with funders, prospective partners and charities. Without the solutions provided by cloud telephony, costs could go through the roof very quickly, especially in the work-from-home era.
Need we tell you that blown-up costs are, no matter what the situation, the absolute opposite of what a social service organization is looking to do?
Calling via the Internet is a lot cheaper than traditional communication systems. All cost concerns are eliminated—make all the calls that you have to. Moreover, cloud communication ensures that you don’t miss out on leads if you happen to miss any calls. The system sends out missed call notifications in real-time so that you can track and connect with such clients.
In fact, the technology allows you to give customers missed calls and create a whole campaign to track responses. Or simply deploy a click-to-call button on your website and maximize leads by offering potential clients the ease of not having to dial a number.
Scale up. Or down. Without hassle
Another important feature of cloud telephony systems is scalability, with the help of which organizations can spend in the right areas for better ROI and targeted amplification of features.
For instance, if you’re looking to ramp up the features suite based on a client’s requirements, cloud telephony has you covered. You could add or remove extensions, add an IVR (Interactive Voice Response) system, artificial intelligence-based support, voice or keyword analysis, and lots more.
Scaling their business as soon as possible helps social service organizations attract funding. You may need to expand or downsize operations as and when required, and cloud telephony can help you do it in a matter of a few hours.
Cloud telephony also makes internal communication a breeze
Honestly, great communication with clients and partners won’t mean much with chinks in your internal channels of collaboration, especially since the latter are critical for social service sector organizations. The cloud offers solutions precisely for these perennial pain points.
For instance, if you simply want to connect with a colleague, just dial an extension. Don’t want your team to undergo intensive training to familiarize themselves with some alien technological force? Don’t fret over it—just pick a service provider that offers an easy-to-use dashboard for real-time analytics and agent monitoring.
Tired of all the lags and stops causing constant delays and gaps in communication? Well, with the power of the Internet, you can put your worries to rest.
The pandemic has shown us the power of remote work, and the rather underappreciated feature of conference calling has really come into its own with cloud communications. Through this feature, not only can you have teams communicate without a hitch among themselves, but also enable collaboration between volunteers, clients and funders.
The system has great applicability for NGOs and NPOs also because of the group calling feature. For instance, if a team member needs to discuss a problem with not a colleague but an entire department, cloud telephony offers an innovative solution: just call the concerned group without setting up a conference call.
Improves time management, ergo higher productivity
With cloud telephony, you are optimizing time every step of the way, but let us throw more light on a feature that you will particularly love.
Often, administrative work like simply inputting information into a database eats into the larger part of employees’ valuable time. With cloud telephony, which has access to your CRM, you can stop devoting the majority of your time to this process by automating it and start putting it into responsibilities suited to your domain expertise.
This feature also eliminates the human errors (often omission of important details) that come with inputting information into the CRM manually.
Travelling staff? Not a worry
Being able to work in transit doesn’t make the desirable skills list on resumes anymore—it makes the essentials column. Even before the pandemic, telecommuting and flexibility with working hours on an as-needed basis had emerged as hot demands. Round-the-clock operations are imperative for organizations that service clients and stakeholders that are part of the global market.
If yours is a nonprofit, you will often have staff deputed to meet prospective and existing funders. They could also be at an event, networking; or might simply need access to important customer data while they’re on the move.
All of this is made possible by cloud telephony. The data, be it forms, documents, brochures or the like, is stored on a centralized repository which can be accessed from anywhere, anytime––all your staff needs is a smart device and a stable Internet connection.
Seamless collaboration on client servicing
Always wanted a way to easily manage and track your office phone system? Often, your cloud telephony service provider will give you the convenience of an online portal. Using this, you can not only manage call costs, but your employees can also store customer information that other authorized team members can access.
This helps iron out any gaps in customer servicing when accounts shift between employees, since in-depth information on client preferences, support and previous correspondence is available and accessible easily.
Summing it up
By tapping into cloud communication solutions, one can combine a digital-first approach with the much-required personal touch—a combination that is key to tailoring communications to local audiences and real contexts, as suggested by The Guardian.
The technology is of exceptional importance, especially for the work-from-home era when information-sharing might not be as regular or in as much detail. And if you, too, are looking at fine-tuning your communication and client servicing systems with a host of features, Acefone is here to help.
