Most businesses leverage VoIP for its cost savings, but achieving ROI with VoIP isn't about cost savings alone. Return on investment for VoIP should be evaluated through both hard dollar savings (traditional cost savings) and soft dollar savings. Soft dollar savings are intangible benefits for your company that cannot be qualitatively measured like cost savings can be.
There are various benefits from VoIP soft dollar savings:
When you install VoIP calling extension-to-extension becomes easier and cheaper, and company-wide as it works across several locations. This leads to increased communication between your employees, which in turn leads to greater employee effectiveness, higher morale and lower employee turnover (studies show that employees who have friends in the workplace are much likelier to stick around). In terms of increasing employee morale, workers can also have the opportunity to telecommute on days that coming into the office would be difficult, for example during bad weather or with a sick child.
By using VoIP systems your teams can begin to collaborate more on projects than ever before. Doubly so when using videoconferencing. There is nary a boss in the world who wouldn't love more teamwork and collaboration on important company projects. Collaboration however is incredibly hard to put a dollar value on, hence why it is a soft-dollar savings.
Customer experience improvements are another VoIP benefit that is hard to measure. It is extremely difficult to know measure how much improvement leads to what increase in customer purchases.
Features That Lead to Soft Dollar Savings
Having a voicemail system that allows for exporting files to users' desktops gives your users a visual interface for their voicemails. With a service like this they can prioritize their voicemail box, save messages for later use and annotate the messages. They can also send voicemails to other users on or off the system. This increases productivity, effectiveness and saves time.
The ability for call and voicemail notifications to be sent to your employees' cellphones, or the calls themselves with call forwarding, is priceless. Whether your customers need after-hours service or you have a mobile workforce, this helps contribute to employee productivity and the overall customer experience.
This feature allows calls to be routed either to individual users, groups, or departments; ensuring that customers are served regardless of staff attendance and availability.
Being able to integrate your VoIP calling system with a CRM or customer database is another hard-to-measure element of soft dollar savings, but having these abilities improves your customer-relationships. Detailing each customer call will also help with accounts when employees transition or leave the company.
Before it became a necessity during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, many companies had already begun realizing the benefits inherent in embracing remote work. These benefits are substantial and signal that (even when the pandemic is but a memory) remote work will continue to flourish and become a mainstay in the redefined workplace - particularly when it comes to VoIP. This guide will demonstrate how the workforce is changing and leaning toward remote work as a permanent business choice, explain the critical role VoIP will continue to play in supporting remote work, and highlight some of the new trends and innovations coming in 2021 for VoIP. more