For any recruitment company, communication with both clients and candidates is essential in offering the best possible service. This means that the choice of phone system is key to their success.
With their work driven around having conversations, the importance of an effective, efficient solution can be the difference in the race for talent.
With lots of choice and advice as to what system to go for, we’ve put a simple guide together to highlight the key features that recruitment agencies should expect and consider when choosing the right phone system for their needs.
Contingency Solutions
When working flexibly or on the move, it’s important that calls with clients and candidates can always be made or answered. When reviewing your phone system it’s important to ensure that if you can’t take a call for whatever reason there’s a contingency in place so that it can be answered, whether that’s Call Twinning, where specific phones (e.g. office landline & mobile) will ring simultaneously, Call Forwarding or Sequential Ringing (forwards inbound calls to another number after so many rings). These features help ensure that all calls are dealt with in a timely manner and reduce the risk of missing receiving important calls and potentially missing out on talent.
Recording & Training
When undertaking a large amount of customer interactions over the phone, it’s important to make a good first impression. Call recording allows teams to monitor the quality of these interactions and support new team members while training on the phones, whether that’s managing clients or even conducting telephone interviews.
Most modern VoIP systems should have Call Recording as either an out of the box or bolt-on feature, allowing you to record calls whenever required. For example, with Connexin’s Call Recording bolt-on you’re able to start and pause recordings on a live call, set recording to be on by default or even mark a call for recording at the end of a conversation, saving a recording of the full phone call from start to finish. It’s also important to consider your retention period, so how long your recorded calls can be held on the system as well as ISO 9001 compliance should you want information collected on recorded calls to be permissible in a court of law.
Call Barging and Call Whispering are other features to look out for when considering employee training. These allow managers to barge into calls, listen in and even whisper to the trainee, providing advice and support where needed and allowing the training process to be more fluid.
Reporting
In an industry heavily driven by sales targets, having a grasp of how teams are performing is key. Ensuring that your phone system has the Call Reporting features you need can be a huge benefit to operational efficiency.
We recommend identifying the key information and reporting that you need, whether that’s calls made per day, response time, average call duration or similar metrics as this will help you when researching different phone systems. Some features may be out of the box and others might require bolt-ons or call centre solutions should you require more complex information, so understanding your requirements before engaging with partners will help you identify the right solution from the start.
Customer Experience
When you’re dealing with different types of clients, ensuring that everyone has a good experience can be difficult, ensuring they get routed to the right department/person and making sure they are attended too quickly is important to maintain good experience across the board.
Look out for features such as Auto Attendant, where you can set up call menus allowing clients to select the department/team they would like to speak too – routing clients and candidates to the right person in an organised and timely manner. Other features such as Hold Music and Comfort Messages mean that you can keep your callers from waiting in silence and listen to a message of your choice – whether that be a promotion, music or even a comfort message to ensure them that they will get an answer shortly.
CRM Integration
When dealing with large amounts of client and candidate data, it’s commonplace that recruitment companies rely on a CRM to help with their day-to-day operations. Having a phone system that seamlessly integrates into a CRM saves time and effort with features such as Click to Call and Automatic Call Logging allow you to seamlessly call customers with a click of a button without having to manually input the number into your phone and then log those calls against contacts and accounts within your CRM.
Unified Comms
With the increase in popularity of collaboration tools such as Microsoft Teams, Zoom and Slack – internal and external communication methods are constantly evolving. However even though these tools can be extremely useful, because they are all separate and don’t always work seamlessly with each other it can be less productive moving from product to product to communicate.
Some modern VoIP systems now have unified communication applications that sit alongside the system enabling teams to bring messaging, phone calls and video conferencing all into one-easy to use platform. If you’re an agency that is using multiple tools it might be worth considering a unified comms solution to bring everything into one place to save money, improve productivity and simplify your comms processes.
How can we help?
When it comes to telecommunications, there is a whole host of information available on what business should be doing going forward. At Connexin, we want to empower businesses to make decisions that have a positive impact on their customers and employees.
If you want to know more about how we are helping Recruitment agencies set up phone systems that work for them you can fill in the form below. We’re on hand to give you the help and advice you need to make the best decision for you and your team.
