What Are Softphones And Why Businesses Need Them?
Entrepreneurs and
companies of all sizes are always looking for a way to make their business
leaner and meaner. Investing in the right technology is the first step towards
increasing team efficiency and streamlining various work processes.
As VoIP technology is reaping enormous benefits for industries of all verticals, softphones are gaining massive popularity due to various reasons such as flexibility, portability, and security.
Softphones allow businesses to skip the hassles of buying expensive landlines and other equipments such as cabling wires. Additionally, companies don’t have to staff a technical team to set up the VoIP phone system for your business.
In this article, we will discuss what are softphones and how they help businesses in several ways by providing advanced features such as call recordings, easy contact management, host audio and video meetings, call forwarding, and so on.
Let’s first understand
what softphones are and how it works.
What Are Softphones?
A softphone is an
application or program which facilitates internet calling via a desktop or
laptop. To configure a softphone, you have to download the app and install it
in your system. After that, you can configure your softphone with the settings
provided by your VoIP provider. Once your softphone is set, you can start
making inbound and outbound calls.
In simpler terms, a
softphone is a piece of a program written for desktops and mobile phones to
support VoIP calls. Thus, allowing your agents to move around here and there
from their desk phones without worrying about missing any critical customer
calls.
To work with a
softphone, your agents require a personal device that can be either a desktop
or a laptop. Laptops offer more portability than desktops. If you want your
agents to travel for business purposes, then working on a laptop can have a
significant boost in their productivity.
Why does your business need softphones?
1. Flexibility
Softphones can be integrated with your existing VoIP phone system, and even if you switch to a different VoIP provider, it is only a matter of minutes to reconfigure your softphones.
2. Cost-effectiveness
Softphones eliminate the requirement of hard phones or landlines for calling purposes. Hence, you don’t need to buy expensive hardware such as PBX servers, phones, etc. to utilize cloud telephony services. With a good internet connection, you can use a softphone to dial out numbers and receive incoming calls without any issue.
3. Portability
Another great benefit
that softphone brings with it is that it allows agents to use business work
phones from their laptops or smartphones anywhere and anytime.
4. Audio Conferencing
With the help of
softphones, your agents can easily collaborate and host basic audio
conferencing meetings such as 3-way calling. The best part is that some
softphones let your agents or meeting hosts to pause specific participants, remove
someone from the call, and other necessary call conferencing settings.
5. Video Conferencing
Video conferencing has
reduced the requirements for company owners, entrepreneurs, etc. to travel from
one location to the other location for business purposes. As VoIP supports
video calling via the internet out of the box, you can have the same
functionality with a softphone. Do note that every softphone doesn’t allow you
to make video calls. Therefore, do check this feature while choosing a
softphone for your business.
6. Decluttered Office Environment
If you plan to use the
hard phones for your VoIP phone service, you have to go through the cumbersome
task of configuring each extension on your employee’s desk. The process
involves cabling each phone and connecting it to the local area network of your
company.
In the case of
softphones, all of these additional steps are eliminated. Your employees need
to install and configure softphones on their work desks or personal devices to
start using your company’s VoIP phone system.
7. Call Recording
Softphones also provide
you the handy option of recording conversations with your customers. Depending
on your VoIP provider, your softphone recordings can either be saved locally on
your PC or the cloud based on your requirements. Call recordings help you to
analyze customer requirements and plan a strategy to direct your agents for
faster query resolution.
Softphone Features To Look At
1. Call Forwarding
Quickly forward calls to
other extensions or phone numbers based on various conditions, such as if the
call is unanswered for X seconds or all incoming calls during a time group.
For instance, if you
want to forward incoming calls automatically to your cell phone when the call
is unanswered for 30 seconds. You can check your softphone, and if it provides
you the option to forward calls, you can set this rule quickly.
Different softphones
might offer different call forwarding rules, and in some cases, you might not
get this feature. For that, you can configure call forwarding settings of your
VoIP phone system.
2. Voicemail
With this feature, you
can configure your softphone to direct the incoming VoIP call to your
voicemail. As per your softphone provider, you can find the settings to
transfer calls to voicemail. You can access your voicemail from the admin
portal of your VoIP provider.
3. Personalized greeting
As softphone runs on the
VoIP technology, you can leverage its auto attendant phone system feature to
automatically greet your customers with a personalized message or custom music
on hold.
4. Echo cancellation
Call quality is an
essential factor to represent your business as a professional entity in front
of your customers. Just like some expensive VoIP phones, some softphones also
provide the essential echo cancellation feature. Thus, allowing you to enjoy HD
VoIP calls with your customers and clients.
5. Contact Management
Managing contacts with a
softphone is like a cakewalk.. Depending on your softphone, you can manually
enter contacts or import a CSV, Excel, or any other file format to add all
customer and team members’ contacts at once.
6. Set Do Not Disturb
Busy in an important
meeting? With softphones, you can enable its DND or do not disturb mode to
avoid getting sound notifications of incoming calls. Besides that, you can also
configure your softphone to forward inbound calls to any other extension,
cellphone, or even direct it to your voicemail when its DND mode is enabled.
Wrapping Up
In this article, we discussed all about softphones and how they are useful for businesses, especially startups. Softphones allow businesses to save money as there is no requirement of buying expensive hardware equipment such as landlines, cabling wires, etc. Additionally, softphones offer a much-needed ability to work remotely and allow your agents to take their desk phones wherever they go.