Did you know that 64% of customers have switched to another company after a bad experience? This shows how important it is to make customers happy.
For global businesses, maintaining high levels of customer satisfaction is even more critical. And when your customers are spread across different time zones and regions, a robust communication infrastructure is essential for building trust and loyalty. And all this depends on having a reliable global phone system.
Let’s look at:
- Business Benefits of a Global Phone System
- What to Keep in Mind When Choosing a Provider
- How to Set up a Global Phone System
How Can Your Business Benefit from a Global Phone System?
In a nutshell, global telephony providers facilitate communication over the internet using VoIP technology. They offer a range of cloud-based services from virtual numbers to softphones and web dialers, that you need to establish a global phone system. Let’s look at the top benefits of using global telephony services:
1. Establish a Global Presence and Wide Network
Virtual numbers have brought the world closer. You can operate your business across borders without a physical presence. Simply purchase a phone number for your target region and then place calls virtually.
For hard-to-reach regions, United World Telecom offers Toll-Free FlexDial, a solution that makes your business accessible even in countries where toll-free numbers are hard to purchase.
Also, expanding to new markets is easier with virtual local phone numbers. This is because it showcases a localized approach, which is important for gaining trust and building credibility among locals. Paired with outbound calling, these numbers let you display a local number as the outgoing caller ID. This can improve the chances of customer engagement, as they perceive calls to be from a familiar source.
2. Offer 24/7 Global Customer Support
Providing round-the-clock customer support is a must for businesses with customers worldwide. To that effect, call management features like call forwarding, time of day routing, and follow the sun support strategies can help you stay available for all customers anytime and anywhere.
For instance, say a customer from Japan reaches out to inquire about a product at 2 AM Japan Standard Time. This would be outside your US business’ regular hours. With a feature like time of day routing, you can preset where calls are directed depending on the time of the day. This means that the call from Japan will automatically route to a support team in a closer time zone, such as Australia. In this manner, you can effectively provide all your global customers with timely assistance.
3. Work with Global Workforce
The internet and cloud telephony have made it possible for businesses to work with a global talent pool. Through features like conference and in-network calling, distributed teams can meet virtually, brainstorm ideas, and coordinate projects in real time.
Say the marketing team of a business in New York needs to discuss a new campaign with the design team in London and the production team in Tokyo. Using your business’s global phone system, they can initiate a conference call, allowing all team members to participate in real-time discussions. Global phone system typically comprises telephony features that facilitate communication across different regions.
4. Use Advanced Business Communication Features
Are you looking for new ways to stay ahead in a competitive market environment? Here’s what you can do.
From interactive voice response and call analytics to voicemail transcription and call recording, there’s a plethora of sophisticated global phone services available today. You can streamline communication, gain customer call insights, and more. Moreover, the option to integrate these features with business applications and platforms could further improve efficiency and workflow.
Take for instance the call masking feature. Besides offering privacy, it helps with building a brand and trust from local customers. How? By displaying specific local or a business phone number when making outgoing calls. So, if you work with a remote sales team, each salesperson can display the business caller ID when making calls. This helps in increasing response rates as they are more likely to answer calls from a known number.
Global telephony providers like United World Telecom offer a range of advanced business communication features with their virtual number plans. With these, you can review and handle calls more successfully.
What to Keep in Mind When Upgrading Your Business Phone System?
Here we’ll go over a couple of important pointers to consider when setting up a global phone system. To skip over, jump to the How to Set Up section.
When building a global phone system for your business, there are several key factors to keep in mind to ensure optimal use of resources and effectiveness. Here are some of the top considerations to take into account:
1. Business Needs
Before rounding up the global phone services for your phone system, consider your business needs carefully. Identify your communication challenges and coverage gaps. Find out how many phone lines you need and how many users (local, remote, and global) need to be connected.
As a global business, you have clients and staff across the world, so figure out if you need features for multi-language support. For instance, a voicemail translation feature makes communication easy by translating transcriptions, allowing your agents to assist customers from anywhere and in any language. Similarly, call routing strategies and rules can ensure your global and remote teams are comfortably connected to your phone network.
If this process seems daunting, you can always reach out to your service provider and get help in shortlisting your communication needs. United World Telecom has been helping global businesses upgrade their business phone systems since 1996. We can help you scale up with our top-rated services like call routing, call forwarding, voicemail transcription, and more.
2. Types of Global Phone Services Offered
There are several factors, such as budget, existing infrastructure, desired features, and specific communication needs, if any, that need to be considered before getting global phone services. For instance, both voice over internet protocol (VoIP) and unified communications as a service (aka UCaaS or UC) utilize the internet for communication. You’ll notice that they also offer similar benefits. However, UCaaS combines various communication technologies into a single platform, while VoIP mainly focuses on making calls over the internet.
Learn about their differences in our UCaaS vs VoIP guide or ask one of our cloud communication experts.
3. Global Coverage
This is the most basic telephony requirement for any global business. You need to peruse international coverage services that providers offer—such as toll-free or local virtual phone numbers. These features are necessary especially if your target markets include remote and hard-to-reach regions.
Check out our country coverage to see if we cover your target markets.
4. Tools and Tech Needed
Cloud communications, such as VoIP, session initiation protocol (SIP), and Unified Communications (UC), offer a wide array of features and functionality. Key tools that you will need to simplify and centralize global communication include international phone numbers, call routing, Interactive Voice Response (IVR), outbound calling, local caller IDs, call activity reports, and more. Assess these tools to determine which ones align with your business requirements.
5. Scalability of Features
A scalable system allows you to upgrade to accommodate the increased communication demands without disrupting service or requiring heavy investments. For example, if you initially start with a simple VoIP service, you can easily scale up by adding more phone lines, country phone numbers, or advanced features like call routing as your business expands. The idea is that your communication infrastructure should adapt to the business’s growing needs without breaking the bank.
6. Integrations
When thinking about global phone services, it is important to look at how well they integrate with your existing tools and system. VoIP integrations, for instance, help you multitask efficiently.
Let’s understand this with an example. Customer relationship management (CRM) systems are normally used to manage data, track interactions, etc. But this has to be done manually. VoIP integrations enable automatic tracking of customer interactions, access to customer information during calls, and so on. So when a customer calls a support line, the VoIP CRM integrated system displays the customer’s order history and previous inquiries when the call comes in. Plus, with click-to-call functionality, teams can quickly call from within their preferred business applications.
United World Telecom offers multiple CRM and help desk integrations to help you centralize business communications.
7. Operations
Decide how you want to organize your global communication setup. You can send all the send all global calls to one main office for easier and centralized control. On the other hand, you can give distributed teams in different regions their own numbers to offer tailored support in their regions. Align your operations model with your business goals and customer service strategy.
8. The Ideal Telephony Partner
When selecting a global telephony provider, prioritize factors like reliability, uptime, responsive customer support, customization options, etc. Also consider the provider’s track record, reputation, and ability to deliver tailored solutions that meet your specific requirements.
Next, research different providers to ensure they offer services for your target countries and regions, competitively priced plans, secure communication systems, integrations, licensed carrier status, and highly available networks with multiple connections. Consider factors such as pricing, activation times, available features, network reliability, and customer support.
Pay attention to other customer testimonials to gauge service quality, industry relevance, problem-solving capabilities, and customer support availability.
Finally, be wary of hidden fees and long-term commitments, and ensure you have a clear understanding of cancellation and refund policies before signing up.
How to Set Up a Global Phone System?
Setting up a global phone system for your business involves several steps to ensure smooth communication across borders. Let’s break it down into four simple steps.
1. Sign Up and Buy International Phone Numbers
Once you’ve researched your providers, decide on one that meets your needs and budget. Then, purchase international phone numbers for your target regions. Use call forwarding and advanced routing rules to forward incoming calls to your desired destinations.
2. Configure Devices and Install Software
Depending on your needs, you can use softphones (software-based phones), IP phones (hardware phones), or gateways to connect legacy phones to your VoIP system. Simply download the necessary software or connect your hardware devices to your internet router to get started.
3. Customize Your Phone System
Take time to familiarize yourself with features provided so you can set them up as needed. Call management features will ensure that your phone system operates efficiently and meets your specific requirements. Create call flows, set up IVR (interactive voice response) systems, implement routing strategies, enable call recording, and establish ring groups to manage call volumes effectively.
4. Verify Network Performance Through Testing
Thoroughly test your network for any issues before deploying your global phone system. Look into connection reliability and call quality. Check the latency and audio quality. Finally, test the network speed. Test your system for coverage, address any issues with your service provider, and get necessary adjustments made before going live.
Once live, continue to collect feedback to improve and maintain your global phone system.
How Can UWT Help?
As you know, success of global businesses hinges on effective communication strategies that transcend borders. From establishing a global presence with virtual numbers to working with a diverse workforce, there’s much that can be achieved with a global phone system.
For 28 years, United World Telecom has been helping businesses worldwide with global telephony features such as call routing, voicemail transcription, and integration capabilities. Using these, our customers have not only fostered stronger relationships with customers, but also improved operational efficiency.
Ready to upgrade your business phone system? Contact our experts today to find out how United World Telecom can help you drive business growth.