Leading up to the holidays, you and your team might find yourselves answering more calls than usual.  Why? For many businesses this is the busiest time of year: sales teams are finalizing deals, finance is wrapping up month-end reporting, and customer service appointments are booking up before the end of the year.

Couple this increased call volume with employees being out of office for other holiday related commitments (hello school concerts, trips to the airport, and shopping, lots of shopping.) All of this might make you feel a bit “bah humbug!” But with 8x8 business phone features at your fingertips, you can prevent Scrooge-like attitudes taking over your office by:

  1. Being proactive and check your call analytics to review what happened last year at this time with call volumes and answer rates
  2. Leveraging your auto attendant to help with high volume and most common requests and procedures to communicate your holiday hours, availability, and more
  3. Making sure your music on hold is up to date and giving your callers a better on-hold experience by adding music and information instead of beeps and dead air
  4. Staying on top of priority calls with visual voicemail to skim through voicemail transcriptions in email to identify which messages need immediate attention
  5. Creating different call forwarding rules for different situations, for example times of the day or when you are out of the office
  6. Setting up ring groups to allow incoming calls to be distributed among a group of users to help when when you need a little extra coverage
  7. Building call queues that place inbound callers into a queue, where the caller is on hold for the next available person, in the order received

With these tools from 8x8, you can make time to step away from the work, have some cheer and enjoy what is most important to you during the holiday season.

To learn more about improving your business communications in the cloud, contact us today.