An
automated attendant phone system will enable your callers to pick from an audio menu of departmental choices and hopefully deliver them to the right place for their individual need. The problem is that it can be misconstrued as you being an organisation that hasnt bothered hiring sufficient personnel to deal with peak traffic volumes.
Being greeted by a
phone system with auto attendant is commonplace when dealing with large corporates. It is simply a point of economics that drives PLCs to address their inbound enquiries in this style. It is because wages are the single largest overhead to most companies. Indeed there are plenty of other telephony technologies that are employed to route in a financially efficient way. A typical example is the deployment of skills based routing in call centre environments. This means that if you have an enquiry of a particular nature, a phone with auto attendant may offer your call to a group of operators and will err to the staff member with the best skill set where they are multi-skilled.
But the majority of British firms are micro businesses of less than 20 employees. These tend to differentiate themselves by delivering a far more flexible and personal service. A phone system with auto attendant doesnt even enter their thoughts. It smacks of corporatism and they try to avoid it where possible.
In other countries, having an auto attendant phone system is more prevalent. The States particularly favours using a phone system with auto attendant. UK doesnt follow suit. This is largely due to the stateside dominance of analogue lines which emanates from the flaky electrical supply. If electricity was more of a constant there would be a move towards utilising DID (direct inward dialling) which is an optional extra for those with an ISDN line. In the United Kingdom these are heavily utilised but we know them as DDIs.
Many modern day PBXs come standard as phone system with auto attendant. Where this isnt the case it is frequently a part of the voice processing addition. On the Samsung OfficeServ range you gain 5 attributes if you choose to add this; (1) Voicemail boasts features such as cascading so that older messages can be forwarded to your mobile or boss, (2) sequencing will play a comfort message to those queuing before presenting in order of arrival, (3) call-recording allows you to capture conversations for later reference, (4) email gateway transforms recordings or any voicemails into a WAV file and sends it to your inbox and (5) turns your apparatus into an automated attendant phone system.
So youll probably have a telephone auto attendant. The question is more appropriately, should you activate your phone with auto attendant? Phones4Less.co.uk would like to think that it has the answers as it has written much on the subject.
