While digital marketing channels have been gaining momentum over the past few years, phone calls remain your sales team’s most powerful weapon. They provide greater personalization and add human touch to each interaction, guiding a lead down the pipeline faster.

Fortunately, the tech advancements have improved the way salespeople make calls to close deals. Modern business phone systems will allow you to automate many repetitive tasks, integrate with your CRM, and provide real-time customer experiences.

Here are five call features that may benefit your sales team the most.

1. Call Recording

For companies, understanding customer experiences, needs, and frustrations is critical. And, that is where your call center shines. When talking to your salespeople, customers ask direct questions and tell them about their problems. However, for your call agents, it is impossible to focus on providing actionable feedback and, at the same time, take notes. 

Precisely because of that, you should choose a phone system with call recording features. These technologies will facilitate your sales representatives’ lives a lot, as they can play the recording back, objectively review the conversation, and rate customer satisfaction. This feature also helps managers assess the quality of service offered by customer support and sales teams.

Of course, before the conversation even begins, you will need to inform a customer that the call will be recorded.

2. Call Transcription

Skimming through audio recordings can be time-consuming and complicated. That is where call transcription steps in. With the rise of AI and natural language processing, the use of transcription services has also grown. 

Once you start recoding the call, a call transcription tool will start converting the conversation into the textual format. 

When the phone conversation is transcribed, it will be easier for your employees to focus on the context of the conversation. Artificial intelligence technologies will even identify keywords that will help you analyze customers’ emotions.

3. Call Routing and Forwarding

Customers do not want to wait when contacting your sales representatives. Putting them on hold, you would only frustrate them and make them hang up. That is why you need to invest in a phone system that will improve user experiences and help them reach the right person faster.

That is why you should look for business phone providers that offer features like:

• Call forwarding: When your employee needs to leave the office, they could set up call forwarding so they can take customers’ calls via their mobile devices.
• Auto attendants allow you to set up automated greetings to help customers choose the person or department they want to connect with.
• Call queuing - your teams and departments will be organized into queues so that callers can be routed to the next available sales agent.

Consider switching from traditional analog phone services to VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol). As VoIP services are delivered over the internet, they allow your employees to make and answer phone calls from various devices, as long as they have a fast internet connection. Moreover, reliable VoIP services usually provide dedicated mobile applications that allow your employees to talk to customers and colleagues directly from their mobile devices, no matter where they are.

4. CRM Integrations

Investing in reliable CRM software will help you understand your customers and adapt your marketing and sales tactics to their specific needs. However, did you know that you can get the most out of your phone system by integrating it with your CRM tool? 

CRM integrations may help your sales team in multiple ways.

First, by integrating your phone system with CRM software, you will be able to map customer journeys from beginning to end. You will be able to create customer profiles and get granular, 360-degree insights into customer touchpoints with your brand. By knowing who you are connecting with, where they are in your pipeline, and what problems they faced in the past, you will adapt your sales efforts to your target audiences’ specific needs and personalities.

Second, CRM integrations with your phone system can also assist your sales agents in real-time. Many online business phone systems offer on-screen popups that appear on your agent’s screen when a customer calls them. They will show the customer’s profile – their name, location, age, previous customer service inquiries, order history, and so forth. Knowing who they are talking to, your agents will answer the phone call more confidently and upsell customers faster. 

5. Auto Dialers for Call Campaigns

Sorting through customers’ phone numbers and manually filtering them can be a daunting task. That is where investing in a phone system with auto dialers can help you. With the help of an auto dialer tool that integrates with your CRM software, you can streamline your sales process. 

It allows you to cherry-pick the right contacts using a wide range of filters. For example, you may want to connect with the customers that have registered on your platform, but have not made a purchase or your most loyal customers. Once you create a list, you will not need to dial customers’ phone numbers manually. The automated auto dialer will find the contact’s phone number and dial them automatically.

Over to You

Today, phone services are getting smarter. Based on sophisticated technologies, they go far beyond making and answering phone calls. They provide customers with faster feedback, automate a plethora of manual tasks, and even offer a wide range of call analytics features. Above all, with the rise of cloud technologies, phone systems have become mobile, allowing your teams to communicate effortlessly, across multiple channels and devices, regardless of their location.