If you’re running a car dealership and using a traditional phone system, you could be missing out on plenty of opportunities. Seeing as effective communication is key to success in this industry, a hosted phone system cuts costs and opens doors for your business to grow and expand beyond what your old system would allow.
Here are 6 ways hosted phone can add to the success of your car dealership.
1. Low barrier to entry
A cloud phone system is different to a traditional, physical phone system. With a physical phone system, a large amount of setup is required. Phones, cords, and more devices all cost a lot of money – not to mention the cost of having technicians set everything up.
A hosted phone system is “hosted” on our own data centers, so all you need to worry about is having devices that can connect to the internet. There’s no complex system setup – everything’s plug-and-play.
2. Remote work options for employees
With a cloud phone system, nobody is tethered to a specific location or forced to stay in one area.
As a hosted-based system complete with mobile integration features, employees can use any device from any location. This opens up plenty of opportunities – staff can be hired as remote workers, giving you access to a larger hiring pool and saving physical space in your dealership.
3. Automated Call Management
Our Auto-Attendant feature automatically receives calls and directs them to their desired extension – all without any need for human input. The system is fully customizable, with a multi-layered menu that you can edit freely. And the system can handle an unlimited number of calls at once!
Rather than having a staff member handle and direct incoming calls, why not automate the task entirely? Save your business plenty of time and money.
4. Easy expansion
Many car dealerships will expand to a second or third location within their lifetime – and with that massive change comes a number of hurdles. A new location usually means new staff, new advertising, new systems, and more.
As mentioned previously, a hosted phone system is not attached to one physical location. You can use the same system for any number of locations – no need to purchase a separate system for each.
Getting new employees set up is also incredibly simple – nothing needs to be hooked up. New staff members can even use their personal devices if need be.
A hosted phone solution is incredibly flexible and lightweight. The possibilities are virtually endless – and with such a versatile system, making those possibilities into realities is a breeze.
5. Custom Availability Hours
One feature of our hosted phone system that really makes things easier for businesses is Time Frames. Time Frames are customizable, set hours that allow users to control what happens with incoming calls.
For example, a common Time Frame is 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM. With some customization, you can set all incoming calls outside of those 8 hours to skip the ringer and immediately go to voicemail or play a message.
Rather than having customers waste their time waiting for a response, Time Frames allow you to meet them right away with an after hours message.
There’s a variety of options for you to use with the Time Frames feature – from split hours to answering rules.
6. Customizable Call Flow – Never Miss a Call!
Call paths can be customized depending on the current time frame.
Our cloud phone system includes customizable call queues, which dictate the way calls are directed. For example, in a type of queue known as a static call park, calls are placed into a virtual “parking lot” where they can be seen and retrieved by an agent. There are a variety of options, and each is unique.
The call queue options that we offer include:
- Round-robin: Route callers to the agent that has been idle for the longest period of time. Good for dividing work equally among your team.
- Ring All: Route callers to all available agents at the same time.
- Linear Hunt: Route callers to the available agents in a predefined (customizable) order, one after the other.
- Linear Cascade: Routes callers to groups of available agents in a predefined (customizable) order, adding each group to the next ring group where they all can ring simultaneously. For example, the phone will ring for group 1, and after a certain amount of time, it will add group 2 and ring both groups together – and so on.
- Call Park: Places callers on hold until a user retrieves them.
These different call queue options can each be set to a specific time frame – for example, you can set Round-Robin to be the active rule from 9:00 to 11:00, and Ring All as the active rule from 11:00 to 5:00. There’s no real limit to what you can do with these rules, so you can customize it to your liking.
A Powerful Solution for Car Dealerships
With easy setup and plenty of labor-saving features, a hosted phone solution is ideal for any dealership that wants to take things to the next level.
Speak to us about our powerful integrations with DealerSocket and VINSolutions and our included powerful contact center features and reporting.
Get in touch with us today if you want to learn more!